Welcome to the earnings call regarding the first quarter figures for 2026 of the JDC Group Aktiengesellschaft. The company's CEO, Dr.

Sebastian Grabmaier; CFO, Ralph Konrad; and COO, Dr. Ramona Evens, will guide you through the figures in a moment, followed by a Q&A session via audio line and chat.

With that, I'm handing over to you, Sebastian.

Yes, thank you very much, Judith, for the charming welcome. A very warm welcome from our side, from the management board of JDC Group, and happy to present you Q1 figures 2026, another record time despite a very, very challenging times, as we will see in a moment.

My name is Sebastian, CEO, co-founder of JDC Group, together with my partner Ralph here on the line. We founded the company now 25 years ago, happy to be on the stock exchange for 20 years.

Also Ramona with us, and Ralph, maybe some words, what are you doing with JDC?

I'm still here, responsible for finance and IT and all our M&A activities. Happy to present you the figures today.

Ramona.

Thank you, Ralph. Hi, I'm Ramona.

I'm the COO of the group, and I always come into the picture when man and machine works together. I'm very happy to be here today to also talk about progress with FMK and our AI initiatives.

Yes, we may exclude or excuse our colleague Marcus, who is with some important clients today. Full board on board.

We look at our JDC figures at a glance. That we are more than 400 employees right now.

On the next page, we have more than 8 billion, right now it's almost €8.5 billion in fund and asset management volume on the platform, €1.5 billion in insurance premium, more than 16,000 intermediary brokers using our platform, more and more now also using AI tools, and now end customers stand at more than 2.5 million customers with basically every insurance product, fund product available on the platform. I think we should look at the macro environment right now in Germany and all of Europe, and you can see that all these errors on the right side, they point downward, meaning that the yeah, consumer confidence is as low as it has been during COVID times.

If you look at all these graphs, consumer climate of GfK, for us also enterprise climate, labor market figures, macroeconomy, all these errors point downward as the yeah, overall sentiment in the market is very, very bad. Especially in retail markets, you see yeah, downward anxiety-driven performance of clients and consumers.

We think this is temporary, but still it hinders our yeah, the new business figures especially. Then when you're German, have a German sentiment, you know the existence of German angst, yeah, due to Ukraine war and Iran war in the Middle East.

This is very present in German media, newspapers. There's a very high sentiment for not buying now.

Everybody or a lot of clients postpone their investment decisions both on investment and especially also on the insurance side. This has some yeah, major effects on our platform, which we see on the next page.

Firstly, obviously, even if our new business figures are still up 3%, the volume is down, especially the very big pension contracts do not come to the platform right now. Also in the health segment, where very front-loaded contracts are making the business, we see some postponing, and this is coupled with some higher cancellation rates.

Investment assets actually are doing fine. We'll see in a moment.

The new business definitely has a little weakness, which we can compensate by our strength in the recurring revenue side. Also for FMK, it's rather winter times, and we're very happy that FMK is performing that well in a world where also the search volume for financial products is down, sometimes even 20% with Google and others.

This means that also in a scarce market, advertising costs per contract are up, and this is not really favorable. Still, we see that FMK is performing as planned.

You also see less marketing appetite of financial institutions. We not only see that with FMK, but also for other online brokers that make quite some figures in our contract transfer segment.

We see maybe on the next page, if you look at the KPIs, we can see that yeah, the first time that we can remember, the number of contract transfer is down by almost 10%, and this is dependent on very big institutional clients and Finanzguru spending less in advertising, therefore these contract transfers is down a little bit. As I said, number of new orders still up, but the volume being a little bit down.

That was exactly reverse from last year where in Q4, the number of orders was down, but the volume was up. We're very happy that, and this is, I think, what shows the resilience of our platform business is that our assets under management figures are up nicely, from below 8 billion to almost €8.5 billion.

Also, and that's a very good figure, I think, for the future, is the annual net premium in insurance up 12%, stands now at more than €1.5 billion. This is basically, as the source of our future income because 82% of our income comes recurring from these figures, assets under management and annual net premium.

This is why we are very optimistic for the business of our future, but see that we have very temporary weakness in our new business. This also yeah, you will see in some of the figures we're presenting today.

Overall, we're very happy to present to you a strong growth company. You see that the turnover growth stands at more than 20%, from €62.2 million up to almost €75 million.

That's a record-high quarter, not only a record-high Q1, but a historic high figure. Also, if you look that our guidance is 300 to 320, 330 million, you see that we are right on track that a quarter of it is already in the books.

Then also you see that together with FMK, now the platform scaling up with an EBITDA growth of more than 60%. Ralph.

You're on mute, I think. I can't hear you.

I apologize. Now I'm no longer muted.

Let's go one step deeper. Revenues increased in the first quarter by 23% to €74.9 million.

As Sebastian mentioned, record high for our history. The advisory segment grew by 22.4% to €65.9 million, and the advisory segment by itself 6.6% to €14.5 million.

The gross profits increased by approximately 25%, more than 21 million to more than €21 million, and this is also record high for the first quarter. As Sebastian already said, the economic environment was difficult for our traditional platform.

People in Germany are postponing their investments in their own retirement planning, whether in insurance or in investment, and therefore, it's not really surprising that FMK drove the growth in the first quarter even though the environment was far from easy for FMK as well, with a 20% decline in the search volume for financial products in Germany. The increase in gross profits led to an EBITDA plus of more than 60% to €8.1 million.

Overall, I think really good number. For those who are interested in a little bit more in detail on FMK's contribution, the turnover of FMK was €12.1 million, EBITDA €3.9 million.

If you deduct this €3.9 million from the €8.1 million group EBITDA, you can see that the profitability of our platform ex-FMK was at €4.2 million EBITDA, and thus below the previous year. However, it's important to note and understand that people are postponing their investments, not cancel them.

You can do without a second watch, but you can't do without a solid retirement plan. That's why we expect a rebound once the indicators improve again.

We are very confident on that because we saw exactly the same situation during the COVID-19 crisis and the same situation at the start of the war in the Ukraine as well. As for our quarterly performance, suffice it to say that we were able to start the year 2026 with a typical cyclical pattern.

The first quarter was more or less on par with the fourth quarter of last year, and thus provides a solid foundation for the rest of the year. As mentioned, the broader platform saw a challenging environment.

The turnover of the investment business was flat. That's the reason why you don't see an investment bar here.

It was flat in the first quarter. The insurance turnover was up 2.6%, which is €1 million.

Others were down €0.2 million, and again, the main driver of the gross profit was our new lead business with FMK, which was up €12 million. When you look at the composition of the turnover and its development by channels, you can see that the IFA business is down in the first quarter by 4%, but this is more than compensated by a very good development of our major customers business, which is up 11%.

I think a remarkable figure in this environment. The advisory segment grew by 11% by 7%, and again, the lead business grew by €12 million.

The pie chart on the right hand of the chart shows that with the integration of FMK, our turnover split by channel is now a little bit better diversified, roughly 50% by IFA business, classical IFA business, 25% major clients, and 20% lead business. Then we go into the AdvisorTech numbers in detail.

The revenues were up 22.4% to €65.9 million. Gross profit rose by 30%, better than turnover because, again, lead business has higher margin than our classic platform business.

Depreciation and amortization is on previous year's level. Personnel expenses and other operating expenses are up 8.9% respectively 16.5%, first because of the FMK costs that are now consolidated, and second, because of the overall cost development of the platform.

As a result, EBITDA increased by 62% to €8.1 million, and thereof, as mentioned, €3.9 million FMK. The advisory segment performed well in the first quarter.

7% growth is not our target, but it's a very solid figure at this point. The gross profit rose by 6%, and with the total costs increasing by approximately €0.3 million, EBITDA was €1.2 million and stable compared to the first quarter in 2025.

Let's come to the cash flow statement. We started the year with a cash balance of €36 million.

Operating cash flow was a little bit smaller, decreased from 6.3 to €5.6 million, and this for two reasons. The first is FMK paid €1.5 million in taxes, and in the first quarter 2026, we had no tax payments because of our tax losses carried forward.

The second reason is please keep in mind that we as JDC Group have a negative working capital profile. That means we first receive the commissions and then pay them out to our agents.

If we now receive less money due to weaker new business, which was the case in the first quarter, we still have a higher payout for the previous year's period new business, which was higher than it's normal that this has a negative effect on operating cash flow. The cash flow from investing activities amounted at a very small negative number of €600,000, and cash flow from financing activities increased due to higher interest payments from 500,000 to 1.7 million negative.

The quarterly interest for the new Nordic bond is between 1.1 and €1.2 million, so that we ended up at a cash balance of the quarter of €39.4 million. Cash on hand last Friday was €41 million before the payment for our buyback program, which will be €5 million.

As always, some information about bonds and the share price. We have two bonds outstanding, the SME bond under German law for €20 million, and you know our Nordic bond with €70 million, which we issued to finance the FMK transaction.

Perhaps one more comment on the Nordic bond. We attended the first time the Pareto Securities Annual Nordic Corporate Conference, Nordic Bond Conference, last month, and we met many of our bond investors in person for the first time.

We had a very packed schedule and gave a group presentation to the very large audience. All in all, it was a successful event for us, and we received a lot of excellent feedback from existing and prospective bond investors.

That's good news for us. Maybe one more information that is important if you look at our liabilities, at our bond liabilities.

We have covenants regarding the issuance of new debt, but we don't have any maintenance covenants. The only risk that we face here as a company is that the interest rates on the Nordic bonds are floating and could rise.

We haven't hedged against this yet because we think the costs have been too high, but this decision could change within the next weeks or months. Coming to the share price.

Our share price shows a long upward trend even though we experienced, you remember, a significant setback to around €21 in 2026 due to investors' fear about AI and its influence on insurance brokers. The share price subsequently recovered to more than €26, but since then has fallen again over the past 3 months, most recently this morning to €21.60.

We still hold 147,000 treasury shares that we purchased at an average price of €19.89, and I will comment on the results of the share buyback program in some minutes. The submission period has ended, and the results of the share buyback program were finalized at 11:00 a.m.

this morning. After the release of our corporate news, and that's the reason why we were not able to comment on this topic with our corporate news this morning, we will do this in some minutes.

Shareholder base is stable. We have only changes in free float.

Let's come to the spotlights. We have four spotlights.

We want to give you some information about a peer transaction that happened in the last months. We will give you some information on the share buyback program, and then afterwards, Ramona will give you some update on FMK and AI at JDC.

The peer transaction. Most of you will have read that our competitor, Netfonds, has been acquired by a private equity firm.

It was Warburg Pincus, and it's not a secret, it's widely known in the market that this transaction was completed at an EBITDA multiple of 17.5. We would like to take this opportunity to compare this to the current valuation of JDC.

Before, let me say we are aware as management that it's not our role to explain you investors what the company is worth. It's our task delivers strong operational performance, but nevertheless, the difference in valuation is so striking that we at least want to bring it to your attention.

Let's go into the table. You see the JDC guidance, the lower end with €35 million and the upper end with €38 million.

If you multiply this by 17.5, this is the valuation of the peer transaction, then you end up at a 6 610 to €660 million enterprise value. If you then deduct the company's net debt, €60 million, the equity value would be €550 to €604 million.

With 13.7 million shares that we have, and we did not deduct the treasury shares, you would end up at a share price of €40 to €44 per share at JDC. The share price actual is €21.60 when we started the conference here.

You see there's a multiple discount between 45% and 50% if you compare this to the peer transaction. Again, it's not our role to explain you how to evaluate.

We just want to bring this to your attention. That brings me to my last chart about our share buyback program because this transaction, the Netfonds transaction, coupled with the fact that the stock performance in the last 24 months has not kept pace with the company's operational performance, prompted us as management and supervisory board of the JDC Group to carry out the share buyback that has just been completed this morning.

We think that based on a valuation of €22.50 per share that an investment in JDC is highly attractive for all shareholders, of course, for these shareholders who do not want to sell their shares. For this reason, we have decided for the first time to launch a public offer rather than a traditional ongoing share buyback program, which we did before, because it was our goal to fully invest the planned €5 million and not only parts.

In the previous buyback programs that we ran, we were only able to buy significantly fewer shares than the maximum allowed. We are very pleased and happy that we were able to fully exercise our public offering, and we were able to acquire 222,222 shares at a share price of 2 €22.50 per share.

We were not drunk when we came up with these numbers, right? It's just that the price divided by 5 million just resulted in these 222,000 shares.

Yeah. Who would have known that it's so complex to to tell this?

Then maybe the numbers would have been different. We now own 369,335 treasury shares representing 2.7% of the of the share capital.

Very correct, we will own these numbers of share shares because the transaction has to be done within the next days. We think that's a very good news for all shareholder.

For me as shareholder, I think this is a good news. Then I would like to hand over to Ramona to lead you through some further information.

Thank you, Ralph. Also warm welcome from my side.

I'm very happy to be here today to give you some insights on the business build-up with FMK. We have been working very diligent in the past months to bring the vision of a new shared FMK-JDC insurance sales engine to life, and I'm very happy to announce that the sales engine is now up and running.

As a short reminder of what FMK is doing in their core business, they target customers at the very end of the search funnel and primarily focus on the customer that are about to buy. They target those customers through paid marketing campaigns, wherever the customers are right now, currently that means search engines, social media, and AI tools, and from there, they lead the customers to their own landing pages, for example, Finanzfuchs, to get customer data here and to create a lead.

We have launched and went live with three new insurance products in the past months. It's disability, pension, and income protection, and we chose those products because they're very profitable.

You get a four-digit commission for each sale. What's different now in the insurance business than it used to be in the personal finance business that all those leads go now exclusively to us, to JDC Plus, that's our in-house broker.

We hired a new sales team that exclusively deals with those leads and converts them to sales. We built up a new in-lead infrastructure with them, and now this engine of FMK provides those leads to our sales team, and our sales team gives to each and every lead feedback back to FMK, how's the quality of the lead, so that FMK can optimize their campaigns and then further focus on more profitable clients.

Now this is now up and running, and every sale leads to the next sales, and this is a fully automated feedback loop. I put in a little chart here.

As you can see, in January and February, we started to build up the infrastructure, and in March, it started to scale so that the number of leads went up. In terms of sales, we already have a six-digit six six-digit potential with the leads we already created.

However, in the products that we have chosen in disability, you have a lead-to-sale conversion time from 6 to 8 weeks. Why is that?

You usually have two advisory meetings, the customer needs to get their medical records together, and the insurance company has to answer the risk request, this takes time. As of now in May, we are getting in the sales of the leads from March.

We definitely have a time lag between lead creation and sale, and then, of course, again from sale to commission because we only get paid once the customer has paid the first rate. You will see the P&L effect of the business always with a few months in delay.

However, even though I said that, our plans for Q1 has been currently met with 110%, and now over the year, our plans grow more and more ambitious month by month, and we're very determined to keep those plans. Far, it's been a lot of work so far, and the collaboration with FMK is going very smoothly.

I'm very happy that the engine is now up and running, and we will see the fruits of that over the next couple of months. This is one of the things that we have already started, and could you go to the next slide, please?

In parallel, we are also building up new income streams, like the first thing was the direct channel, and the second thing is that we are also building up a platform for our brokers to buy leads and then convert them themselves. We are currently working on the lead distribution platform.

We deliberately did this consecutively because we first wanted to optimize the campaigns with our internal sales team before we are selling the leads to our brokers because, of course, we want to sell high-quality leads and making sure the brokers are happy with the leads they are buying. In this business model, we profit from the lead sale as well as from our commission share through the platform.

We are planning to go live with this lead distribution platform in July. Then the third income stream is the transfer of the existing FMK online insurance business from one-off to recurring business.

FMK used to be a tip giver. That means FMK in the past was giving a tip to the customer where to take out insurance, and for this tip, FMK received a one-off payment from the insurance company only.

Now with us as a broker, we start to build up the new business as broker business. That means we are getting paid a running commission throughout the entire lifetime and the contract, and not only the one-off payment.

I guess it's a no-brainer. It's better that you get €100 every year for the next 10 to 15 years than getting €200 years euros once.

However, in terms of revenue, this can mean that you get less revenue in the first year of being a broker than to being a person who actually is just tipping the contract. We are doing this step-by-step because, of course, the insurance companies prefer to give you €200 once.

We delicately transforming the business to broker business in a way to make sure that we keep our income streams running. Enough of the very detailed spotlight.

Coming back to a higher-level market overview, and there's also good news from that point of view. The global AI market developments favor the FMK business models, that is an advertisement-based business models.

If you remember last year, one of the risk factors after transaction that we considered was what if in the future, every consumer will only have a paid ChatGPT subscription and there will be no more room for advertisement and searching? Even at that time, we predicted that most probably the Google ad finance model will prevail, and it does.

ChatGPT announced that it will expand ads in other countries, and just follow the lead of Google. Google themselves are already making money with ads in their AI overview.

I guess we can say that the technology has changed from a classical search engine to AI, but the underlying business model stays the same. It's an ad-financed business model, and with the first test that FMK also did in these AI overviews shows that the conversion in the AI advertisement is even better than in the search engine because it's more focused on what the user actually needs.

Then that's a little wrap-up on FMK. Also a few words on our AI initiatives.

We continue as a leader in the AI development in the German broker market. Besides our internal efficiency gains that we achieved with AI in the last 2 years, we're also putting out new AI features for all brokers on a very quick path to make their life more efficient.

I think last time, in the last earnings call, Ralph already introduced the Tarifpilot, that's a feature that assesses the entire portfolio of the broker and shows him or her optimization potential. We also already introduced the AVB Companion, and this is a feature that answers in real time terms and conditions questions on the terms of conditions of insurance tariffs of the entire German market dating back more than three decades.

It's an absolutely unique feature with a non-public data base that only we can access. It's absolutely unique in the German market.

Now newest development is Chettie, that is an AI assistant that helps with day-to-day service inquiries of the broker. This is now in a beta phase where friends and family can test, and this will go live soon as well.

We have more projects in the pipeline that we will reveal with appropriate marketing measures in the future. Just to put this in a larger context, those features are really important in the ongoing consolidation of the broker market because then in the future, there will be fewer brokers with more customers, and this can only work if we take off most of their administrative tasks off their shoulders.

We want to be the favorite help of the broker in the market, and we have shown with our AI initiatives we will be the favorite partner, and we will keep on bringing new features out to help our brokers to focus on their main business, which is selling insurance.

Thank you, Ramona. Thank you.

Again, that's what we told you the last earnings call, right? Everybody's talking about AI, but nobody's talking about the data, nobody's talking about the infrastructure, nobody's talking about the customer access.

We here at JDC, we have all three of them, right? We do have the deepest and strongest and biggest data bank in the German market.

That's the Morgen & Morgen data bank with 80,000 contract entries in tariffs out of the last 20 years. We're the only ones who can really have these comparison not only on the modern product, but also on the past product.

We do have the infrastructure with one of the most modern platforms in the market. With FMK, we do have the customer access that all is what you need to run these agentic AI agents in the future.

Just to give you news on the guidance that are no news, we're definitely staying with the guidance we gave you last time. On the next slide, that's the 300 to €330 million in turnover and also €35 to €38 million EBITDA.

If you see from the turnover side, €75 million is already in the books. We think that there will be only a temporary weakness in the new business.

If this comes just a little bit back to normal, it will be yeah, quite good guess that we reach this guidance. Also on the earnings side, we are on track.

Also with our key initiatives here, we want to give you the overview on our AI tools. I think there's a lot to come that helps the broker to be more efficient in the business and also to save costs for us internally, right?

Now we're working on a number of projects that also enhance our efficiency inside. That's all good news inside the company.

The rest, that's the crying eye is all of our business definitely depends on the development of especially the German consumer confidence. That's the number one topic, and there we are used, as Ralph said, some crises in their mindsets, but normally this comes back in the course of one or two other quarters.

That's so far from our side, and we're happy to take any questions you might have. I see, Judith, that there are some [already?]

in the box.

Yes, we do have a few questions already. Thank you very much for your presentation.

Ladies and gentlemen, [unclear] Q&A session. If you would like to ask questions via audio line, please click on the [raise hand?]

button, and [unclear] ask your questions in our chat. And [first one?]

is, the capital market has [rebounded strongly?] in April and May.

Will this influence the numbers positively the rest of this year? The second one, why was the tax rate in [unclear] so high this year when you still have tax loss carryforwards you can use?

Maybe

I can take both questions. The connection is not so good at this moment.

Yes, the capital markets in April and May will lead to higher performance fees in the following quarters, so that the answer is yes, this will have a positive influence. The tax [unclear] they were only incurred for FMK, and FMK does not have tax loss carryforwards.

[unclear] Because the group's closing [unclear]

and tax [unclear] and so

we were not able to use tax loss carryforwards [unclear] business. Mr.

Konrad, maybe you take off your camera, and the internet connection is lost at this point. Maybe one of you can take over to answer the second question?

Right now, Mr. Grabmaier, I cannot hear you even though you are unmuted.

Maybe Ms. Evens, can you jump in on that?

Hello, test, can you hear me? Okay.

Hi, yes, I'm here. I'm talking.

I think you asked two questions, and I guess both were already answered by Mr. Konrad, we can go to the next one.

Thank you very much. As the new business market is weaker, is there any cost-cutting actions you can do to offset this to smart living?

Of course, we are also taking the cost side under consideration. When it comes to new hires, we only focus on sales, but all the other new hires currently frozen.

We are taking this very seriously to making sure that our cost is not growing faster than our sales. That's for sure.

We started a new cost-cutting initiative where we really look into each and every cost point that we have and considering is that something that we still really need or is that something that we can save for the future? This is something that has been going on, this cost initiative over the past few months.

We really want to go ahead of the wave and be prepared in case that the market developments are not coming up in the future as we have planned, and yes, we are looking into that. That's fine.

Thank you very much, Dr. Evens.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're sorry for the technical problems on that side. The management board is on three different parts in Germany, maybe we can go on, Dr.

Evens.

Yes, we can go on. I'm here now, can hear you again.

I'm in the office in the middle of Wiesbaden, but obviously there are some connection problems. Sebastian is on the equity forum where he talks to some of you maybe in person, and maybe there's some internet problems.

We're here to answer your questions.

Thank you very much, Mr. Konrad, and we're doing our best.

What tax rate do you expect for 2026?

12%. The platform ex-FMK still has tax loss carried forward, there will be a very low tax rate, and FMK as they don't have tax losses carried forward, you should calculate 30%.

If you hear that, I can ask my back office that is listening to give a chart, I can pass the answer by end of the call.

Thank you very much. Why did you pay the minority shareholders for the Q1 profits?

Yes, also good question. All former profits at FMK have been paid, there's no beauty attached to minority shareholders.

For Q1, the profit from the whole year and then we include in Q1, the date of payments for the year 2026 will be paid [unclear].

Thank you very much, and we do have an audio question from Edwin [unclear]. Mr.

[unclear], you can hear us now. Please speak.

Hello,

good morning. Can you hear me?

Yes. A few questions from my side.

As to the German macro environment, we've seen a recovery in the Q4 of last year, and 2025 was already a little bit slower. Then Q1 didn't really come back.

Sebastian already alluded to the fact that it could get better. Is it just the Ukraine war and should we see that this is going to improve over the rest of the year?

Or is it too early to tell, and how does that affect the leeway for being in

the guidance? As Sebastian is on and off and having trouble with his internet connection, I take this question, Edwin.

To be honest, nobody knows exactly when consumer confidence comes back. What we know again is you can do without a second watch, but not without a retirement plan.

What we know is that people postpone their investments, and they don't cancel them, yeah? In general, the later the rebound will be, the harder it will be to reach the guidance.

That's clear, but from today's point of view, and Q1 was temporary and different for the JDC old platform or existing platform and for the FMK business. Nevertheless, we could generate EBITDA of €8 million, which is times four a little bit below the lower end of our guidance, and turnover of 75 million, which is times four at the lower end of our guidance.

We are still very confident that we will meet our guidance this year. It's really

the lower end of the guidance, right?

We are still very confident to reach our guidance because, again, €8 million in Q1 EBITDA times four is a little bit below the lower end of our guidance, and turnover times four is at the lower end of our guidance. This although the environment was very hard at the moment, we're very confident to reach our guidance this year.

Okay.

I was looking at the presentation that the large clients are growing by 11% in this environment. What's the reason that would underpin that while the IFAs are behind that, or is that

Major clients are growing by 11%, you're right, and the IFAs are let's say the ones they are the most dependent on economic environment because there's no structured system that tells everybody you need five meetings tomorrow to get your goals. In such phases, you can always see that structured sales teams, or Finum team, or ALH Group, or others, they perform better than the normal single brokers.

Cool. Thanks, Ralph.

Maybe for Ramona, FMK was the first 3 months €12.1 million, as Ralph said. As said, the comparison to, I think, almost 12 million in the last 4 months of last year, there's quite some growth there.

Is that fair to assume? What part of the FMK revenue is really insurance-related and what part is other business, to say?

Maybe, Ramona, I can take the question if you don't mind. The insurance portion is still low, as Ramona said.

We are generating leads, but with the leads, we don't pay FMK by lead, but with a commission split. As Ramona explained, there is a time delay of 6 weeks.

There's still not a relevant figure that FMK earns in insurance. Yes, there is a growth compared to the fourth quarter, yeah, but at FMK, you have to know that it's not like the JDC business a predictable business because the first quarter is good, then you have a weaker second and third, and a very good fourth quarter.

What depends if interest rates are rising, then the platforms want to spend money together and new customers. It's more driven by external influences, yeah, and in general, I would say they are on a good development, still very profitable, especially because there were no external positive effects in the first quarter.

Bitcoin was down, gold was down, nobody was thinking about doing investments, and so we are very happy with the development in the first quarter there.

I can imagine. Finally on the AI part, obviously, you've got Tarifpilot, you've got AVB, Chettie, and all these kinds of new AI features.

Is there a way that you can monetize that or are you already monetizing that, or is just, let's say, making more service for your clients, to say?

Ramona.

We, of course, always try to monetize that so that we have a freemium version with a basic features, and then you pay for the more advanced features. Obviously, the brokers are very hesitant to pay extra for the features as of now.

Might change in the future. I guess the main impact is really keeping our existing clients and brokers with us and being attractive for new young brokers to join our platform.

I guess that's the main initiative here with these features, and everything is a add-on. If we would just look at the add-on, what brokers pay for the additional features, then it wouldn't be profitable.

It's more like initiatives to keep and to attract new brokers. Ralph, do you want to

No, that's fine.

Clear. Thank you very much, and good luck in the Equity Forum.

Thank you very much, Edwin, for your questions. We will move on to the Q&A questions.

Did you lose tenders? Are you bidding for contracts of significant size?

That's the first time Sebastian is not able to tell us anything because his microphone is mute. Oh, we can hear you.

You can answer if you want to.

We told you I think the last or before the last that I just remember one tender that we did not win. The rest of the tenders, we won.

Is there any tenders of significant size? Definitely yes, but then we never know when they're signed as all these very big clients take ages to sign and to decide, no promises here.

Maybe I received feedback from our back office. The answer was the same.

Very hard to calculate or to predict the tax rate, but a best guess is between 15% and 20%, just as a feedback to this question.

Thank you very much, Mr. Konrad.

We're moving on. How many shares were you offered at the €22.50 price?

Sebastian, you want to answer?

That was surprising. That's the first tender we took, and we learned several things about the stock market.

One was there's a lot of people on arbitrage deals, you could see that the stock price rose very fast to the €22.50. Look, that's not surprising, but what was surprising that some of our very big institutions told us they put in a very big number of shares to get a small portion of it in the tender with an expectation of sometimes lower than a sixth or a fifth.

This is what happened. We received more than 1 million shares, and I'm happy to trade all these blocks because we do have a very strong conversation now about people looking for very big blocks.

I would be surprised if these of our investors that we identified are then also selling these blocks, but we'll find out in the next weeks.

The concrete figures are published on our website since 11:30 or something like this. Again, we would have commented on in our corporate news, but this was not possible because we received the information after our announcement.

Thank you. Could you please elaborate on your plans for the approximate 220k shares repurchased in the Q2?

Do you intend to cancel these shares and thereby reduce the total share count, or do you plan to retain them for other purposes such as acquisitions or employee compensation plans?

Not for employee compensation, yeah, but the other two options are options. We are allowed to hold them and to cancel them, and we have not decided yet, but it will not be used as management incentive plan.

That's what we can promise. We will do with the shares what's the best for shareholders.

What is the limiting factor for faster onboarding of R+V, Versicherungskammer Bayern, Sparkassen, and Allianz? Do you expect onboarding to increase?

It's a very good question, actually. You hear us being impatient about the progress of exactly these biggest clients.

We see a lot of progress with the savings banks in the Rhinelands region, not really much in Versicherungskammer and Sparkassen-Versicherung regions. It's just there are some movement in the heads, and I hear from their boards that they are sometimes very happy with the projects, especially R+V tells me, "Well, we could double the number of banks," right?

From 5 to 20 and having 800, there's a long way to go. We don't see that there's limiting factors, but we also don't have any big idea how we can really improve the progress and increase the speed of these projects as we basically are in very good project meetings, but it obviously takes some time.

Do we expect onboarding to increase? The number of savings banks on the platform is high, but it's on the end until you convert clients at the very point of sale in the branch, and this is something we have to get to faster.

Thank you. With Netfonds being bought at double the valuation of JDC, at what time would you consider putting JDC up for sale to get some same multiple?

With the stock below the 22.5 and more than 1.2 million shares tendered in the program, are you considering doing another tender?

Number one, it's actually you as the investors having to tell you at what price you would sell, right? Obviously, there is a huge gap in valuation, and we always said, Ralph and I, it's not on us to know the best of the world.

If an attractive offer is coming in, we'll ask you all, obviously, right? We'll not be being glued to our chairs for whatever.

That's an open market. You can ask us as investors, and as we think that we will get to reach these 1 billion in valuation, but not now, but in some years out, right?

You also have to consider that money now might be better than money later, but definitely not at the current prices, right? And

It's important, Sebastian, to point out that from my point of view, the difference in valuation is not because Netfonds is a better company. We think it's different, of course, yeah?

The difference is driven by the fact that private markets at the moment evaluate much higher than public markets. I can remember times where it were different, and that was the reason why a lot of companies wanted to go public, but now it's different.

The truth is somewhere in between, but maybe not at the valuation that we have today.

The second part of the question, whether we are considering doing another tender, well, obviously, that's very new information for us, right? Came in Friday night and now this morning.

Obviously, right? First, we have to talk to the investors that would give and that we identified whether they would like to sell at all because that's not so clear at the moment.

Then, yes, obviously, we think in comparison to buying other platforms at 17.5 times, commercial brokers at 16 to 18 times, or private brokers at 11, 12 times, we are the cheapest target in the market. Just by own interest, it's a very good idea to spend our money now on shares.

Thank you very much. With an eye on the time, we have eight questions left in our chat box.

I will fastly read them. Hi, congratulations on a solid quarter in the midst of market turmoil.

Thank you for taking my questions. First one, there has been a lot of talk about market headwinds and uncertainty today.

Which macro assumptions, if any, are built into reaching in the 2026 guidance? Second, how much of the March leads spike is due to number of campaigns versus campaign optimization?

Although early, is the expected LTV still up to expectations? Third, speaking of capital allocation, would you consider additional bids in 2026?

I think we answered three. We answer number three.

Just very short, the number one, yes, when we look at the guidance, we just lived through the Q4, which was not good in new business as well. Some of the headwinds are calculated in.

We could not foresee the Iran war unfortunately, but it's not something that we are afraid of. I think we're right on track to reach our guidance in '26, and we are very very relaxed on that.

Number two, I give to Ramona or Ralph.

Answer is both. We increased the number of campaigns and we also optimized campaigns already.

LTV, I'm not quite sure what you mean with that abbreviation, but we are still within our plans, and it's pretty much, as I said, we are 110% of our plans that we have achieved. We are still within the expected results.

Thank you very much. You have the goal to reach 1 billion market cap.

The share price is weak, and the market is not willing to increase the valuation multiple. Through what measures could you grow more than forecasted?

That's a question on consumer confidence in the future. We calculate this goal by just extrapolating our gross figures, right?

If you take 15% growth for another 4, 5 years, you will see that you come to €500 million plus in turnover and also then to 60 million EBITDA. Obviously, at an 8.5 multiple, then the billion is far out.

Then if you have what was normal platform multiples until now or what private equity pays, that's the way to go, right? The measures are take all these AI efforts that make our business much more efficient and have huge cost-saving effects, and then top it up with a much faster way to get across to the client by not just having 500 people call centers calling people, but have a bot calling 40,000 clients in a minute, right?

There's so much new potential in these new tools which we will show you once it's in reach.

Maybe we can ask one question regarding the Altersvorsorgedepot because the rest of the remaining questions are already answered, I think. Maybe let's focus on this one.

Okay.

Regarding the coming Altersvorsorgedepot in Germany, will this pose a chance for FMK to sell leads to banks or a threat to other pension options?

Maybe I take this. Yes, this will be big, right?

This is one of these campaigns Ralph was talking about. Everybody, all these neo-brokers, all the fund industry that has now access to which was formerly a realm of insurance companies now wants to attract the client to have him for other products as well.

This for FMK will be very, very big. My sentiment for the rest of the business, right, there was this Riester product in the market that was not sold extensively, and this also goes for the other insurance products.

There will be some positive effect also for the rest of the platform, but for FMK, this could be the thing for the next year.

If I may just add, FMK is already ready to go. All the landing pages are already created.

You can buy it only from the 1st of January 2027. You can already put your data in there and make sure you are the first ones actually able to buy that sort of product.

They are ready to go right now. There's very very little interest in searching for Altersvorsorgedepot, but of course, the next time it's going to be in the news or at the latest at the end of the year, we are ready to get in all the customer interest that there will be.

Maybe we take this as a spotlight for the next earnings call because I think it's a very interesting what are the different effects on our platform. FMK very positive.

Broker platform, maybe a little bit a question mark, but we will give you the answers, and there's a lot of potential because what most of you might not know is that insurers who offer this very cheap Altersvorsorgedepot, they will also offer the same with higher commissions and let's say try to sell this. There's also a very good chance for the rest of the platform.

The question was, is it a chance or a threat? It's definitely more a chance than a threat.

Thank you very much. Very good last words.

With that, we have come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you very much for your interest in the JDC Group Aktiengesellschaft.

A big thank you also to the management board for your presentation and your time. Should you have any further questions at a later date, please feel free to reach out to investor relations, of course.

I wish you all a successful day around the world, and with that, I'm handing over to Sebastian for some final remarks.

Yes, thank you, Judith. Again, we apologize for the technical problems.

That's the first time that happened. We'll find the source, and this will not happen again, we hope.

Thank you for your trust, and yeah, it's challenging times, but you can see that the base of our business, that's the recurring business, that's growing. That's the core for our future growth, right?

This is growing as it was, and it's 82% of our business, we're not afraid of some weaknesses in a temporary new business phase because we always know this comes in waves. Normally, these are one or two quarters, and then at the third and fourth quarter, this may catch up.

We will see better times ahead, and this also gives us the impression that the shares stay cheap, and we will definitely cost buying back more shares, and also try everything that furthers our growth. We see a lot of potential in all these AI figures, as Ramona showed you.

I think we are market leaders in developing these tools based on the data bank and the infrastructure that we own. Stay tuned for more good news from our platform.

We will do our best to achieve our goals this year. We are very positive to reach the guidance, and also for the years out, there's a lot of growth ahead.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.