Hello everyone and welcome. I feel myself as being a small child because when I see a lot of people in front of me, I realize that we have all the possibility of having a successful two days here in Cluj and with the capital markets as well. Thank you everyone for being here and also for those in online. From obvious reasons, I begin my short intro by telling you that we are also online with this event, just for you to know. We are not searching for any of you to appear on the screen, but it might happen. Aurel Bernat is my name. Nice to have you here. I feel like we are among friends and family because during the last three years with a very small team of IR, we managed somehow to cover all our investor base and we are more than happy that for the first time we are having more than 100 participants. We will be during the two days, more than 170 actually. For the second time, we are in Cluj because this is the third investor day that we are organizing. The first one has been here in these premises. The second one has been at BT Stup, our outstanding projects of microfinancing. While we were there, all of you folks were asking whether we return to Cluj or not, and this time we made it happen. Just a couple of words about who will attend. I would like to thank from all of you coming from 16 countries. We will be having approximately 90 analysts, 24 institutional investors from abroad and 26 from Romania will be gathered during these 48 hours plus in Cluj. Once again, thank you for that. Today we will be talking about Banca Transilvania. You will see the speeches of the top management. Tomorrow we are also hosting the CEE Most Wanted Companies, meaning that we gathered 15 local issuers and five issuers from abroad and you will have the chance to talk to them here in the heart of Transylvania in Cluj-Napoca. We have special guests. I will not be taking now your time to present them but I highly appreciate all our investors, these local institutionals and from abroad, also high-level Financial Supervisory Authority representative, National Bank of Romania and so forth. You will be also discussing with them and having a good time hopefully. With this, I conclude my short introduction and I give the floor to Ernest R. Teague and let's have an enjoyable day today all together. Thank you. Good morning and welcome. Aurel was saying that he feels small. After him I am indeed smaller. We will try to speak big with big numbers, big ambitions, definitely possible. We want to explain about what we did. Definitely that is my part as the CEO to brag about our success and growth so far. Then I will be throwing my colleagues to lion's den so that they can explain what is next and we will be all assuming in front of you. Thank you, Aurel. We have a very strong starting point in terms of customer numbers, in terms of diversification of products and services, industries that we are in terms of favorability, liquidity, capital ratios. We have been building a strong franchise, a strong financial group in the last three decades. The ambitions are getting even bigger. If you had the chance to look at Ziarul Financiar today, you will see also how we named our ambition. Hopefully we will be able to convince you in these very difficult times our optimism does not sound naive but pragmatic to you because now if you open Reuters, Bloomberg, any newspaper, any TV channel, it is very difficult to find something very encouraging about business growth. On the other hand, when I look at BT's story, when I look at Romania's story, we did not have in these last 35 years to more than 30 years, only stable periods, only stable years. I would like to. When we speak about predictable growth in volatile times, it is always mistaken. I mean, predictability with stability. It does not mean necessary stability. If you look at even to our last six, seven years, I would like to make a parenthesis here. I guess it was 2017, I was at a conference organized by Ziarul Financiar and two bankers, us and our main competitor on the stage we were complaining about regulations, about all the, let us say, bureaucracy being created, about challenges politically, fiscally and so on. One of the other panelists said that we are just obviously very spoiled new generation. You did not see a war, you did not see a big crisis, you did not see anything drastic happening in your lives, and you are just complaining about a small crisis which happened in 2008. Since then we have pandemics. We have war, inflation, fiscal consolidation, or challenges everywhere. We are reading every day that the bonds yields reached all-time highs for the last 20 years, 25 years, even for the developed economies. All these, let us say, hard resets, including for Romania, are opportunities for growth. We are definitely optimistic. We cannot open our shop if you are not optimistic about Romania. We are also knowing very well, as many of you, the, how do you say, potential of the country. We will be trying to give you some insight. In terms of BT, our growth definitely comes from a couple of dimensions. One is a diversified and big customer base. Another one is, as I said, a strong capital and liquidity base. Another one is very strong shareholders and partnerships that we have. From the very beginning of the bank, we were enjoying interest from institutional investors, from financial institutions, but also retail investors. This gives us the strength and the courage to go ahead. I guess I cannot be arrogant enough about our execution powers, because when we started counting only the mergers and acquisitions, the integrations that we did, not only in banking but in other segments, in other industries as well, in financial sector. We have reached over 25 acquisitions done in Romania and Republic of Moldova, all of them successfully integrated. While it wasn't a choice for us between integration and organic growth, each time when we had an integration in Romania or abroad, we had been also market leader in terms of organic growth. It's I guess our execution capability. The people you see in this nice building in Bucharest, in our network, are doing a great job, and they will continue doing a great job. This is the ambition. It's not just a number for growth. We are naming it BT100. It's about BT Group. We are saying that at the core of this BT100, it will be the bank BT, Banca Transilvania, is the core of it, supplying the platforms, customer base, brand image, the strength, capital, and liquidity. All the subsidiaries around the bank will accelerate, amplify our growth. We will continue our focus on organic growth. Definitely, we also see that in terms of market share, we are reaching some certain limits, maybe at least in Romania. We will continue selective mergers and acquisitions in banking and outside banking, especially in leasing, asset management, pensions. There are also participants here or online from our competition, main competitors. If anybody has an idea of, how do you say, doing a deleveraging, let me tell it more politely, we are here to discuss. Definitely, we want to accelerate the development of BT Group at a faster pace. I will show you in a couple of slides how much our subsidiaries have been contributing to our growth, our business. As it is in our case, each year, the good results that you deliver are becoming responsibility and almost a burden for the next years because the budgets are only increasing regardless of the macroeconomic or fiscal conditions in Romania or abroad. We want to reach 7.5 million customers, and this will be mainly Romanian customers. We are not including any international expansion plan in what we are presenting here for the moment. We would like to benefit from our operational efficiencies, from our network effect, and create more benefits for our customer base in all the segments that we are in. If I look at the growth, we had been doing a lot of, as any other corporation, any other institution, we do management retreats. We look at our numbers. We see if our ambitions are ambitious enough. When we look at the numbers, actually, we see that in the last four cycles of five years, every five years, BT has doubled its group, its asset base. We have grown our market share much beyond the GDP growth, much beyond our competition. We didn't anchor our growth only to GDP of Romania. We didn't get blocked in the statistical noise that financial inclusion in Romania is very low because we are always looking at the loans to GDP ratio, comparing it. Actually, financial sector in Romania is not growing only in lending. In the segments that banks cannot attack, we are finding solutions through our leasing company, through our micro-lending company, through our consumer lending company, so that the group has been growing much above the markets and GDP growth of Romania. Only one year here in the chart, as you see, only in 2022, we did not outperform the market. It was a strategically good, practically bad decision then, because when everybody was doing MREL and capital-based funding and transactions inflating the balance sheets, we decided that interest rates then they seemed too high, and we postponed. We resisted the urge, and we used our capital much more efficiently than we worked back to the markets, definitely paying the price for it. When I look at our cosmos, I would say to our subsidiaries, some of them are having actually seven years or three years, especially in the pensions business. When we look at the numbers of contribution in terms of customers, in terms of profitability, in terms of growth, we see that diversification was one of the best strategic decisions that BT has taken in its own strategy, in its own business model, operating model. Because we did not just sit down and complain about low demand, but created different ways to address the needs of population, Romanian companies, small entrepreneurs. When we look at BT Asset Management, BT Pensii, BT Capital Partners in capital markets, our foothold is increasing not only as an issuer, but also as an active participant and intermediary. We have also competitors here. I would like to thank again, Financial Supervisory Authority being presented here at the highest level. This shows that what we do is visible, hopefully appreciated. Also, as we still say, it is just the beginning of next chapters to be written. The bank still remains in the core. We are not saying that we will be slowing down in the bank's growth, in the balance sheet growth of the bank or lending growth. We will still aiming and willing and will be growing above market averages in terms of lending. But also the contribution of the subsidiaries will grow each year to come. In 2020, I speak about BT Group and our subsidiaries a lot, maybe stealing the show from Aurel and Bogdan as well. In 2020, in total assets of the group, subsidiaries were around 6%. Now they are 11%, and we are saying that in 2030, when we reach BT100, they will be around 21% of our total group balance sheet, contributing to more than 35%, almost 37% of the profitability of our group. This is also a message for the investors, for the analysts, is that while we are continuing ambitious in traditional and universal banking, we are also creating further a business model that offers fee-based, less capital-intensive income stream for the bank, for the group. Also, it creates more loyalty, because if when the customers have more products, more contracts with us, definitely the engagement increases. It increases also back the business in the bank as well. BT Asset Management in 2015, was having 10% almost market share. The market grew aggressively, especially on the wealth and asset management. Romania is growing very fast. Meanwhile, BT Asset Management increased its market share to almost 23%. BT Capital Partners, from a small broker, small intermediary, became a very strong retail franchise, a very important investment banking boutique, taking part in most of the large transactions, not only Banca Transilvania bond issuances, but also a lot of IPOs and other fixed income instruments. BT Leasing has copied. Actually, they learned very well from the model of BT organic growth plus M&A, and actually they overdid what we had been doing. They did better than we did lately. Acquiring SIAB Leasing, acquiring Bancpost ERB Leasing from Bancpost and OTP Leasing, but also growing very fast organically. They are already at almost 20% market share. BT Mic or BT Microlending, microfinance, almost created its own market. When we speak about 52% market share, this was a market untapped, uncreated. Small companies who were not able to access even BT's products, have found a partner of growth. BT Mic in Romanian means small. So the small BT is growing faster than the big BT and bringing bankability eligibility to the smaller businesses. BT Pensii, which is our latest venture and strategic growth path, has already reached 21%, over 21% market share in Pillar Three. We want to use our customer base both in the companies but also in the retail business very actively to promote BT Pensii and products Pillar Two and Pillar Three. When we look at the, as I said, when we were looking at our numbers with respect to the, actually from 2015 to 2016, we see that our assets grew almost 5x, 4.7 x asset growth. Again, both M&As, growth of subsidiaries, and organic growth of all our businesses. From 48 billion lei, the group assets reached at end of last year 225 billion. When we say BT100, actually, at the current exchange rate, we are saying that we will be reaching in end of 2030 almost 520 billion lei of assets total as a group. We didn't give up. It wasn't a choice. As I said, it wasn't M&A versus organic growth. Growth itself didn't block our profitability. We are very conscious of our cost base. We are very conscious of our profitability and margins. So we had been delivering on average 20% or more return equity to our shareholders, to our investors in all the years to come. With the exception of 2020 when the pandemic definitely affected badly our bottom line, although we are still happy. We have learned a lot from all these events. If I look back, I guess it was one of the best moments that we invested shareholders' money by postponing installments, by asking customers to stay at home and safe instead of coming to the bank, or instead of being concerned about paying their installments to the bank. So I guess it was a very good financial decision, not just a human decision. As you know, and every three months as we are discussing about our financial results, we are very attentive to our capital adequacy ratio. We are an interesting story, I guess, for European Banking Authority, for European Central Bank, not only for National Bank of Romania, because we don't have a mother bank. So everybody is very much paying high attention to our capital base. Our capital adequacy ratio, as you see, had been always about 20%. This is in the bad days or good days. Our cost of risk, except one-offs of the period when the war started or pandemic hit, we have been at around 90 basis points cost of risk every year. I am reiterating, when we are focusing on growth, most of the concerns are that if we will be, how to say, delivering the same shareholder return, if we will be delivering same profitability. It is again, I am underlining it. It is not a choice, and we want to continue offering being an attractive investment for our shareholders. We are offering good yields and returns with a very strong risk management, liquidity, and capital management. Being active in the markets to preserve, to defend, and hopefully to grow our margins. In the numbers you will be seeing also in the presentation on our website. We had been offering 21.4% return on equity on average, with 15% compound annual growth of earnings per share, 90 basis points of cost of risk, with 360 basis points of net interest margin. Here, I would like to mention that net interest margin, 360 basis points on average, we will be seeing, I guess, in a slide afterwards. We had been delivering when the interest rates were 1.75%, and we are delivering when the interest rates are 7%, so that our business model, our pricing model is very much adapted to the changing market conditions so that we can maintain our bottom line when the interest rates are low or they are going higher. Definitely for the economic growth and let us say better lifestyle as we want inflation interest rates to be low. On the other hand, there is also strong debate I see between central banks recently. What is the minimum level of inflation that can really encourage growth? It is zero inflation as had been seen in many developing countries, is not very attractive for growth in the medium and long term. Our return for the investors had been almost more than 360% in the last six years. We had attracted EUR 4.5 billion of capital through the instruments that we have issued in Europe and in Romania from shareholders supporting our capital base and supporting the dividend payouts, dividend payout ratio. We are committed, as long as the markets, as long as the regulations allow us, we would like to maintain the equilibrium, the balance between cash payout and share distribution almost 50/50. Hopefully, both the markets and our business growth will allow us to do so further. Now we have 6,150,000 customers. These customers are doing their daily banking, they are doing their investments, they are doing their spending investment decisions, and recently also their pension decisions through BT Group. We have created this ecosystem of the network of companies which addresses actually the one-stop shop. Here also our very strong applications, BT Pay, BT Go, and our very strong network, as we are still very much keen on maintaining the phygital banking, the best digital apps accessible at any time for any transaction. Meanwhile, maintaining the network at a very efficient level to offer face-to-face advisory, consultancy, sales, and help to our customers. Romanian diaspora is also playing a very important part in our strategy. Now around 5.5 million Romanians are living abroad. They are not only in Italy, they are not only in Spain, and Romanian diaspora is not just collecting or harvesting agricultural products. They are investing in businesses. They are becoming executives in businesses. Especially when we look at Spain, Italy, and U.K., we see a huge potential of small and medium-sized enterprises started up by Romanian diaspora. They are already with us. The good thing is that the ones banking with BT, they have a very strong Net Promoter Score, 71 points, which is very close to our numbers in Romania as well. We are the company, we are the institution that brings part of home to them through our applications, through our services, through our connections. We try to make their lives easier. Now we learn more about them. We are trying to be more active. One of the dimensions of our strategic growth from now on will be Romanian diaspora. Our competitors are also speaking about this, and we are happy. As we say, we are very much focused. We are a Romanian bank within Romanian borders. We know the needs. Also when we, how say, make our strategy, our business model, our budget, we do not really need to read newspapers. We understand Romania better than anyone else. How say, we are very proud of where we reached with our online platforms. 45% of the onboarding account opening, first interaction with the bank is happening online. BT Go, which has followed the footsteps of BT Pay became one of the most beloved and highly used applications on App Stores of the different operating systems and growing very fast. Actually, BT Go itself, like BT Pay, became a reason of acquiring customers. It is not just they help the customers who are coming to BT to do, let us say, easier transactions, easier onboarding, but people come to us, people are being referred to us thanks to our digital platforms. In Romania, when we say about 6.15 million customers, actually it means 35% of the bankable population has an account already with BT, and 25% of the bankable population uses BT as primary bank. This is both an encouraging point, but also it creates another ambition for us because it means that we have still a few dozen percentages to grow our customer base and to make sure that everyone having an account at BT uses BT as the primary account. Here, as I said, the combination of very strong digital applications available and functional, relevant, good user together with a very strong network that we still develop in Romania will help us to grow our differentiation. Here you see also in the lower part of the slide, the NPS, Net Promoter Score of each business line. I am always saying this, banks are not very much beloved by the population, by the politicians, but we are very much trusted. In our case, I would say that at least we are more liked than our competition, and this gives us a very strong favorability for growth further. We will be reaching EUR 100 billion as a group. It is more than doubling our total asset base. This was actually, again, as we were discussing internally, we said if we manage to grow our asset size as BT Group, doubling it every five years, doubling it in the next five years, it is not ambition enough. It is just business as usual. We have to, from EUR 44 billion, we have to go to EUR 100 billion and this is a commitment, not just a number thrown here, because hopefully we will be in front of you and addressing you where we are, how we are staying in the next quarters, several quarters to come. We want to maintain our leadership not only as BT, but also in asset management, in capital markets, intermediary pensions, micro-lending, and any other financial business that we will be venturing into. Meanwhile, we want to maintain our cost-to-income ratio, bringing it down to low 40s from 45%-46% currently, which is being affected, as you know, by the banking tax as well. Still hoping that authorities, politicians will keep their promises, giving up on the tax, plus our own efforts of efficientization or automation using more AI will help us to bring the cost-income ratio to low 40s or even below, while maintaining over 20% return on equity and maintaining our favorability. That is the most beloved and trusted bank in Romania. Saying this, it looks like a sales pitch, but on the other hand, this is also what we have done in the last 30-plus years. That is why I am comfortable mentioning them, knowing that, as I said, we will be answering your questions every quarter from now on these numbers. We come back to Romania. Definitely, as I said, when you read newspapers, when you look at TV, when you listen to our leaders, there is a lot of short-term noise. Maybe we should treat Romania as adults. We shouldn't treat Romania as my teenage daughter treats herself when she has a pimple. Romania has huge potential, especially when we look not only what we have, but what we are about to have in the next few years. We will be doubling our highway structure by 2030. I guess in Western European countries, if the highway structure will be doubled, you will not see much of an effect because it is already there. The margin impact will be quite low. If in Japan, the trains will go 10 km faster, I guess it will not be news, but if it will happen in Romania, it will mean that we will be going 25% faster. In energy, we are about to announce become energy independent, producing from renewable sources, also from natural resources, our own energy, investing heavily in distribution, storage capacity already. We all know the numbers that Bulgaria has 6x the storage capacity of Romania, but Bulgaria, it will not be efficient to double its storage capacity. On the other hand, Romania this year is growing fastest in the region in terms of storage and production. We are also, I guess in the traditional economy, in the old school economy, I can say with the new technology, Romania is the leader of corn and sunflower production in Romania. When we look at European map, you cannot do many of the things by jumping over Romania, including hopefully soon, when the reconstruction of Ukraine will start. There are very few countries who has access to all transportation facilities to sea ports and roads, having the logistic capacity, which is heavily being developed. You will see in the numbers presented by our corporate teams. In the last two, three years, we had been growing a lot in corporate banking, thanks to the investments done also in logistics and infrastructure. Although we are complaining a lot about EU funds absorption rate, which could have been better. Even in the last exercise between 2021-2027, Romania is over 35%, while European Union average is 27%. So at least relatively we did better. Maybe it was too much money thrown with too many conditions and regulations towards European countries. But in the previous, let's say programs, Romania reached 99% absorption rate. This fund about to come back, the new programs are to be announced, and Romania definitely will be the beneficiary. Every EUR invested in Romania will bring more impact to Romanian economy, but also to European economy as compared to Western and developed countries. I would like to we will be here during the breaks as well to answer your questions. You can check if we are too ambitious, too naive, or delusional about the future. As I said, there is a lot of short-term noise, a lot of structural problems, but Romania is passing through a very critical juncture where from consumption economy, we are trying to move towards or back towards production and industrial economy. Any change, each of you in your companies passing through transformation programs, modifications, or restructurings, I don't see any of these programs without pain, without noise. Indeed, Romania is also adjusting itself socially, financially, but on the other hand, is a pro-European economy, pro-European country. An important demographic partner of Europe. I think the potential is here. We have learned a lot our lesson tapping this potential so far, and we are here to both benefit and also amplify this potential further. I hope after I show the numbers, my colleagues will convince you even more about what and how we will do it. On the other hand, as I said, in the breaks or any time through our investor relations, we are happy to answer your questions further. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Ömer. I will build on what Ömer was saying on my presentation. But first of all, good morning, ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, friends. I see so many of you here, and thank you for joining our event. For those of you that are here for the first time, and some of you are, welcome to Cluj, hometown of Banca Transilvania. My title of my presentation today is Adjustment Down, Convergence Ahead. Somehow it captures the essence of my message that I want to send to you today. This is because Romania has been through adjustments for some time now. Growth has been modest, inflation high, deficits are still there. But on the other side, what we are looking at is the data shows us that the economy is at the bottom or about to be at the bottom of the cycle. What we are seeing from here on is growth. Moreover, the type of growth that we've seen so far is changing. Romania, the growth so far was mostly based on consumption and deficits. Now what we see is that model is changing into investments and productivity, which again, is much healthier model. This is what we are going to anticipate to see in the economy. This is what I'm going to talk to you about in the following minutes. Now, if you look at Romania for a longer period of time, a long picture of Romania for the past 10 days, the convergence towards European average has been amazing. In the past 10 years, the GDP per capita at PPS increased from 56% 10 years ago to 78% last year. Few countries around us managed to do this in that short period of time. Moreover, if you look at the GDP itself, EUR 380 billion GDP means size. A size that means households, means entrepreneurs, means companies. Means that the economy is growing. At this figure, 380 billion, it places Romania at the second in the CEE. Now, if you look at the shorter periods of time, we are looking at the end of this year. Our expectations are to see the GDP into a small contraction, debt of - 0.2. Debt to GDP increasing, but at a slower pace. We are looking at 61.8%. Budget deficit is decreasing and latest results show us an even better performance of the deficit and a stable currency. Short-term pressure is here, and we still have the high inflation that practically erodes the purchasing power of the consumers. We are looking at a weak external demand, meaning that companies, that exports are affected by this, and also the fiscal consolidation that puts pressure on the economy overall. On the other side, if you look at the medium-term anchors, they are still there. These are the anchors that will move the economy from here on. We are looking at EU funding investments. Ömer was just showing on the screen the track record that Romania has into implementing EU funded investments. Even the latest data shows that we are above the average. Infrastructure pipeline, the investments that have been in this sector and still are pushing the economy with a higher added value. Also the income convergence that help us in the following period of time to also for the consumer to increase their spending. Now, if you look at the fiscal consolidation, because this is the term when we've been talking about for the past period of time and will be talking about. The fiscal consolidation will be a key element from here on in Romania because it builds the credibility of the economy of the whole country. Now, if you look at the deficits, progress has been amazing. We've managed from 9.3% to grow in our estimation to 6% this year, maybe even lower than this, and next year to 5.3%. That means that we are on the right track. If you look at debt to GDP, debt to GDP indeed is increasing. We still have order for financing, but at a slower pace. We still have the FX reserves of the National Bank that offer a liquidity buffer. Again, the EU funded the funds that will fund the economy from here on, and all the credibility that is around the rating. When we look at the GDP below the number, what we see is very much related to my message that I want to send to you today, is that the model is changing into a much healthier growth model. What we've seen, and we're looking at until the end of 2024, the blue part, it shows that consumption was the main driver. What we see from here on, the black part, is that investments are driving the economy, that it will drive the economy from here on. We are also looking in the numbers and latest numbers in terms of the structure of the GDP shows the investment of last 2.4%. We see it increasing and contributing to the GDP from here on as well. We are looking at the same GDP, but from the supply side. We see the sectors that have been contributing to the economy, and especially if you look at the construction, especially the investment that has been in this sector, has performed very well, and again, have a higher added value for the whole economy. Agriculture as well. The drag that comes from services, that practically is the result of the fiscal consolidation and the less purchasing power of the consumers. Investments. This is a new growth model, and this is what I want to showcase to you in the next slides. We are looking here at the comparative price levels for investments, where EU average is 100. We are looking at Romania, 75.8% price level. That means what? EUR 1 invested in Romania brings a higher contribution. We are the 24.2% below EU price level and the second lowest in Europe. This brings an advantage for the economy, especially now when we are talking about a new growth model of investments in the economy. Moreover, if we look at several sectors from the same perspective of the comparative price levels, besides overall investment that I've been just talking about of 75.8%, if you look at the software, we've been saying for software industry, we've been saying for a long period of time about the software industry and the capacity of Romania. Romania has the lowest price level in Europe still, 94.2%. That means along with We are included the universities that are here and all the skilled labor force. Romania will still be on this sector, one of the main drivers. If you look at construction, I showed you previously the input of the construction in the GDP. In terms of construction, you see also the comparative price levels for overall construction in Romania, 62.1%, one of the lowest in Europe. When it comes to residential buildings, lowest, 47.6%. Also, when we look at civil engineering, and especially we've seen around us in the past one and a half years how much investment was in this sector, and again, the added value that brings to the economy for a longer period of time. So investment does have this cost advantage. We are aware that cost alone doesn't guarantee a successful investment. But if you look around us, skilled labor force, trained people, governance, infrastructure, it offers exactly what is needed for the economy to grow further on. Untapped potential. At the very beginning, I was showing to you the 78% of GDP per capita and how much Romania managed to increase in the past 10 years. Now we are looking at the same 78% but divided among the regions in Romania. Now it's striking to see that if you look at the Bucharest city, it's 188%, so over the EU's average. We are looking at 71, where we are now, right in Transylvania. But if you look at the east part, 48%. What it means from our perspective as economists, we are looking at internal convergence. If so far, most of the convergence was towards EU, now what we expect to see is more internal convergence, meaning that all the investment that we've seen so far, and we will see from here on, will bring the east parts of Romania much closer to the average. That means, again, investment. All the infrastructure that already is getting us closer to the east part of Romania will help future investments towards those regions. So again, another reason to look at investment as the main driver for the next period of time in the economy. Not to mention that we have the financing from all these EU funding and EU cohesion mechanism safe and the next funding. Now, before I close my presentation, we need to look at the five signals that will determine the next move. They're very important. First of all, budget execution. I was saying this budget execution is what builds the credibility for Romania and for the economy from here on. So far, the results show better expectations of the results so far than we as economists forecasted. EU fund absorption, strong. Track record shows us over 90%. Also for the RRF, so far the data shows that we are above the EU average. Inflation and wages are stabilizing. That finally can give the economy some push. Current account financing, again, stabilizing. Ratings, improving perception. Again, these five signals will be very important and will determine the track for the economy and for Romania for the next period of time. Now, if you look for the next year, the data that I showed you and presented you so far, we'll see the impact from all these investments into the economy, moving from a low growth to 2.3 expectation for 2027. Unemployment stable. Budget deficit decreasing, 5.3% on track with the EU agreement. Public debt. Again, I talked about public debt and the currency stabilized without higher volatility and as well for a decrease in the key. Yes, I apologize indeed. As a final message, for me is that Romania is now in a changing period for the growth model of the economy. The economy that is growing, we've seen the data. Banca Transilvania is here to support that growth. Growth of the economy means companies, means entrepreneurs, means households that need financing, and Banca Transilvania is here along, has the knowledge, has the infrastructure, and has the team to finance the future growth of Romania. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ioan. I look forward to discussing with you later in the break about- That was- I was about to say the same thing, so don't take my speech. But anyhow, thank you very much- Thank you for all the optimism you heard, Ömer and also Ioan Nistor, with a very, I would say, optimistic view, but it is our duty to have it as well. I would like to tell you that we don't want to make this conference as a monologue. On the back of each of your badges, you have a QR code from which you can download our app and also address questions. After Ioan Nistor, you will have the business lines, headed by Oana Ilaș, the Head of Retail. You will also have a glance for the corporate and large corporate business as well. At the end of these three presentations, more to go, you will have a Q&A session, so we are looking forward to receiving all your questions. I will be addressing them, and afterwards, my colleagues, the entire management team, will answer them. Be aware of this occasion as well, and thank you very much. Big applause for Oana. Thank you for joining. Very happy to see all of you here. Good morning to everyone. Retail now. Retail, yes, it is a very important love of mine, and for sure I can talk about retail for hours. But of course, today I will try to make it briefly and basically to show you how retail banking will contribute to this ambition that we have with BT100. First of all, last night I remembered something that last year in Bucharest when we had the Investor Day, I mentioned that I see retail in BT as a strong river. I thought a little bit about that and I said that this is a very strong river that has been built step by step over the years, gathering energy from our customers, from the communities that we have brought together with us with the help of our technology, but also, of course, with our people. I thought a little bit about this metaphor and if it still works. I think it still works, but it has a different dimension now, and I see that this river has become stronger and broader, but most of all, I see it as it has become deeper. This is really the story that I want to share with you today. Today I want to share about the depth of the river because the next chapter of BT on the retail side, or I would call it rather the volume, the next volume, because we have so many plans ahead. Although the context is always challenging, we keep the positivity and the good energy and the passion into everything that we do. We are optimistic that here in BT, with everything that we have gathered along with the partners, with the customers, with everybody trusting us, and this is very important, we have a great future ahead and we can deliver much more. Basically what we want for the future five years is not just to grow the customer base, but rather to become more relevant in each interaction we have with our customer, more relevant in their everyday banking, more relevant when they need financing, when they want to save, when they start to accumulate wealth and they want to invest or to think further to their pension funds, when they need to take care of their family and to bring the family into our ecosystem. Increasingly, what we want is to build on the top of it more on the non-traditional banking. Yes today, I will talk about the scale, because scale it is important, but more about the depth and how we intend to transform both into sustainable growth for BT Group. That gets me to the first slide of my presentation to where we are today. Because of course, in order to build further on, we have to look into our new foundation. Basically the future of yesterday that now is our stronger foundation for what we have ahead. We have 4.5 million active customers. This is a very important distinction here because here we are counting only very active customers. What's more important than this number, basically for me, is that we have the highest percentage of customers who use BT as the main bank. That's very important, probably the most important number because having an account somewhere is not so complicated. But choosing a bank, a financial group to have your main relationship with is what is more relevant into continuing in a sustainable way the growth that we commit ourselves to. This means basically trust. I think that as Ömer mentioned several times, trust is probably one of our most important assets and this is what we want to preserve further on. So the real question now is not how we build on that we have the scale, but what we build on the top of this scale. We have now 1.6 million loans in our retail portfolio, which keeps us in the position of being the largest retail lender in Romania. Although we have experienced this year challenges in the demand, especially on the mortgages side, the mortgages side was more challenging as compared to other years. We have kept our momentum, we have managed to grow steadily also on the mortgage side, but the consumer lending somehow completed the loan book and we consolidated further on our market share on the lending side in the retail. We have on the other side, 1.2 million customers saving with us in the bank. What I see even more important at this point in time, as we promised in the past, they started to diversify more and more and to access complementary savings and investment products from the BT Group. That also got us to 700,000 customers of BT using our ecosystem and our network to access BT Asset Management products, BT Pensii products, BT Capital Partners products, and that is very important for us. Because diversification comes naturally, and we look at it as a very healthy perspective for our customers to further on diversify. We want, of course, most of them to diversify within the group. On the other hand, when I look at the mortgages again, I see that we still have future potential in Romania. Because at this point in time, mortgages count for 11% of the GDP, and looking to our neighborhoods in Poland, for example, there they account for 28%. So we think that we have good perspectives into not just gaining market share, but to grow also with the potential of the market. Here we can further on grow also when we look at the financial inclusion. Because although we have good progress, still there is a lot of room to grow with that as well. So looking at these 700,000 customers that we have with investments and pensions linked to the products that we have, we have a 60% year-on-year growth, and this is significant. On the top of it, what makes me even happier is that looking at the BT Asset Management portfolio of the customers, we see that 65% out of these customers have chosen our Direct Invest product. So basically they are recurrently investing. Why is this important for us? It is important because it's a very good foundation for generating a habit. So it's not a just one-off investment, but basically they generate monthly investments and putting money in a different pocket. That brings us to our commitment to have a better financial planning in place for these customers and to contribute as much as we can to their financial education. When I look further on and I see that our customers are banking with us every day, they borrow with us, they save with us, and increasingly they invest for the future with us, this is what I mean when I was talking that I will move from scale to the depth. This is basically the result of it all. We have very big four distinctive advantages that I want to touch here. We have the scale in all its dimensions: the scale in terms of number of customers, the scale in terms of network, in terms of our digital ecosystem base, the scale in terms of employees, of terminals that we are equipped with. But we have also a very good enlarged and strengthened togetherness of the group out of this constellation of subsidiaries that we have around us. Also we have this digital model that we are very committed to keep and to make it further on much more relevant into servicing better and better our customers. This brings me to where we go from here. It is a very good thing to have a stronger foundation because you definitely can look to a brighter future and you know that you can build on the top of that stronger foundation. Looking at that, I see that the strong foundation is valuable only if we know how and what to do further on with it. Here, what we intend to do is rather to become more intentional and to look at the different life moments rather than to products and services. Here we have very strong propositions in several segments. We have 800,000 customers, young customers, and this is very encouraging for us. This segment of customers has a market share penetration higher than other segments in our portfolio. We look at it and I think that this segment keeps us younger and fitter and with even more energy ahead of us. Looking at it, this is something that we touch very carefully through the communities that we have built around them. We connected with the festivals, with the Formula 1, and with everything that we have built there, and it is a proven success. We have hundreds of thousands of specific cards issued for these communities, and they are very much connected one to another, and that is very encouraging. Looking at this specific age, we see there that the customers first begin maybe with a card, maybe with BT Pay, and then they grow. They finish school, they get their first salary and stay with us. Maybe they get a loan. They start to accumulate a little bit of wealth. They start to invest. They put money, and then they maybe buy a house. They have a family and the relationship expands. This important segment of customer, it is another strategic segment that we are looking forward when we see the future of our retail strategy. Also, we have this broad offering from all financial needs. Here I am talking again about the group. We have gone a long way with the group integration in all the channels that we have, in the digital ecosystem, in the network, in the contact centers, because all the channels are working better and better together. This has been one of the best moves that we have done so far. Now this move puts us in the situation that we can really, really expand these kind of interactions. On the foundation, we have created the largest payments ecosystem in Romania as a differentiator, with 8.6 million cards, with more than 300,000 acquiring terminals, with more than 50,000 Star locations and more than 30,000 online stores equipped with Pay with BT Pay, which is, if you remember from last year, it is our ecosystem payment experience, and it is having a lot of traction within our online stores. We have the phygital model. We have Pay with BT on one side. We want to connect it more, and Tibi probably will touch that as well. With the legal entities side, we have the broad physical presence in our communities, and we have the AI-augmented human touch as well, contact center, where we have done a lot of things, technology-driven and AI-connected as well. Where we head from here, deeper relationships, higher value. How? Moving from products and services towards dedicated propositions, capturing moments in our clients' lives, focusing on youth, on family, on wealth, on diaspora, on home, and many more. We want BT as a lifestyle ecosystem with integrated experiences beyond financial services for key life moments. We want to move just from traditional banking and to capture more revenue streams from entertainment, from wealth, from travel and so many other dimensions. Another very important thing is based on our foundation with very good and talented people onboarded in BT, and I'm so grateful to have such an amazing team that supports all our ambition. Romania and BT here was on the stage in Paris this year with the first AI-augmented transaction, agentic commerce. I'm glad to say that it was hard work, it was an ambition, but we were in this position only because we captured everything. We have all the dimensions in the payments ecosystem. We have issuer on one side, so we were able to capture the issuing perspective with also equipping one of our merchants with AI readiness in order to perform this kind of transaction. This was just a proof that we are ready for what's next in this payment landscape that we have ahead. Also, our focus is to capture it all and to have a more harmonized channel mix with BT Pay as an orchestrator. On the other hand, through ramping up the capabilities of the network, in which we believe highly as a differentiator for us, with advisory-focused network enabled by technology, and with this predictive AI-augmented human contact center that we are investing a lot in, and they are very committed to put all the effort to provide better and better service for our customers. Also, what is very important here is that we have specific segments of customers that we are focusing on, and it's not just the youngsters. We have grown more than in our segments on our premium banking customers. We have now 175,000 customers from the premium segment. Our private banking segment has done a great job, and earlier this year, they received from Euromoney, the Best Private Bank in Romania, something that we are very proud of. This proves that the team there is very well-equipped for what's ahead of us. Also what we see is that we have diaspora ahead of us. I will talk about diaspora more because diaspora is a strategic direction that we want to look into, and we want to develop further on what we offer in BT Retail related to the relationships that they have with Romania as well. Now we are servicing more than 200,000 customers on the retail digital ecosystem on diaspora, but our ambition is to get to half a million in the years to come. Here, universal banking is important, and we want to keep ourselves a universal bank. Universal banking does not mean universal experience, because a 19-year-old young person in Cluj has different needs as compared to a premium banking customer from Bucharest or compared to a family living in London. We want to evolve, and we want to move our operating model into servicing better and better all these segments of customers. Here, increasingly, we want to organize ourselves not only around banking product, as I mentioned, but around moments. When buying a home, when starting to invest, when traveling, when living abroad, but remaining connected to Romania. Today, still many of these needs are met through products and services, and we want just one coherent BT experience for all these customers. We have a powerful starting advantage here, again, with the BT Financial Group, with all the banking investment, pensions, bank insurance, and all the products connected into it. Moving forward, I will move to our proven deliveries, and we have some. If you remember last year when we met, we talked about BT Pay and about wanting and having this ambition to consolidate it as the heart of the retail universe. Back then, I said something. At that time, I saw BT Pay that moved from being the key to one room, to being the key to the entire mansion. This metaphor is still valid, only that the mansion got bigger with integrating even more of the subsidiaries and of the partners into this mansion. The number itself, 1st of September, actually, it was the day we exceeded 5 million active users in BT Pay ecosystem. We have a very steady growth further on. Just from the beginning of this year, we grew with more than 450,000 customers onboarded in this ecosystem, and we see a huge potential ahead, especially with the integration of all these complementary needs that we plan to do. Here, basically, we want to position it even more in being an experience orchestrator, our authentication layer. This is a proven track as well. At this point in time, more than 90% of our contact center interactions are authenticated by BT Pay. The customers are authenticated like this, and then further on use the engine connected to identifying proactively the issues that that customer can have and helping our colleagues in the contact center equipped with support from AI agents to identify better the needs and to give a proper resolution for our customers in a quicker time. Also talking about BT Pay and about the proven delivery, as we have integrated more and more journeys from our financial group subsidiaries, we see that now 55% of the new subscribers for BT Asset Management comes from BT Pay. More than 370,000 customer of BT Asset Management now are using actively BT Pay to do transactions, to perform transactions, to onboard, to enroll to the Direct Invest, and to have a look on their portfolio and to diversify their investments there. BT Pensii, which has joined later on. Now 30% of the new subscribers come via BT Pay. Then we expanded the power with BT Capital Partners, and the first ETF, launched in April this year, brought 23,000 customers directly via BT Pay. Now we also redefined the investor onboarding in BT Capital Partners, and we connected it to BT Pay, and this accounts for 95% adoption among new investors just in the first three months. BT Broker joined the BT Pay ecosystem. We have home insurance there. We have the pipes, and we are planning a heavy roadmap in terms of our bank insurance products to go fully digitally, not just in terms of origination and visualization, but also heading towards connecting it to our valuable partners into having the claim management and everything connected there as well. Also we expanded BT Pay and the group togetherness, as I mentioned, beyond the borders. Diaspora is a real focus for us, but we have started the journey. Even this year, we enhanced and we improved significantly our onboarding process for our diaspora citizens. We are allowing now for them to onboard digitally just with a passport. We created a package, a value proposition dedicated for them. Recently, with the help of our colleagues in the investment subsidiaries, and with the support of our partners from the authorities, we managed to allow also non-residents to be onboarded in BT Pay and to access our investment funds in BT Asset Management. This is something that the customers are really appreciating. I can provide you very good feedback about it. Because we are not just saying, I can talk a lot about retail, but I'm much more obsessed with execution. We have started this journey later last autumn, and we conducted several projects, and part of this project started to deliver already. BT Pay has a new redesign. Why it was so important for us to have this foundation layer ready for what's to come, and I will tell you about a more important program, which is a retail entire transformation. We wanted to have this foundation. We wanted to prepare the new shop. Now we are preparing better products, better bundles, and better everything to put in it. As we speak, all the employees of the group have access to the new application, and the customers will be ready to use it early this month. I will not talk about the agentic because Aurel is already telling me that I don't have enough time, but I will be very happy to answer any kind of questions after that. This moves me to something very important, and here I will spend several minutes. Everything that we prepared, everything in our foundation allows us to the big ambition, that is the ambition to support the BT100. We have the scale, we have the ecosystem, we have the financial group, and that is why we created RIISE. RIISE is the retail transformation program, which touches everything. Not just the digital ecosystem or the network or the contact center, but also all the relationship with the partnerships that we have, the very valued partnerships that we have. It has 6 specific dimensions. One is the segments. We looked deeper into the segments, and we identified properly how to serve better the segments that we have with a focus on the premium, on the private banking, but also on the youngsters, also on the families, also on the emerging affluent customers that we identified. Second, we are moving towards these winning propositions, where we want to give different perspectives, not related to products and services, but rather to the customer needs. Here we are focusing on everyday banking, on travel, on home, on diaspora, and many more. Third, seamless journeys, because the customers don't care which department owns a different process in the bank or which subsidiary owns a specific process. Here with the seamless journeys, because we saw this as a matrix, combining the winning propositions also with the seamless journeys, we included everybody. This RISE program is not a program that we develop in one vertical. It's not the retail program itself. It connects everybody. It is a program sustained by the entire executive board and not just on the executive board of BT, but also from the subsidiary side. Fourth, the orchestrated channel mix. As we said, BT Pay as an orchestrator, the network will be lifted up and we see a lot of changes there and we will bring a new face with more seamless journeys in the network as well, with more modularity. But of course, it has to be paperless, it has to be light hardware, it has to be lower level of cables there. But we have a very tough plan on how to execute this in a very well-driven model. Also with the contact center becoming more and more important, both in the inbound and on outbound activities. Five, the customer value management. We are taking it to the next level and we are creating these layers of data and AI-enabled customer value management engine to target customers with the right offer at the right time through the right channel. Six, we would not be able to do this without strengthening our partnerships. When I talk about partnership, I talk about partnership with merchants, partnerships with companies that we work with. This is something that we are very committed to work further on with and to enhance our relationships, because we don't have to own everything that we want to attract in this ecosystem, but to make it the safe space where our valued partners want to be. This gets us to the final ambition in our retail journey towards BT100, where we aim to have more than 6 million active customers. When we talk about BT Pay, we want to have even more because in BT Pay we are connecting even non-customers. Doubling the retail loan book increases the share of non-risk income and increasing the revenue per customer. When we talk about increasing the revenue per customer, we don't mean that we will introduce new fees or that we will put a product on the shelf and we will try to find whom to sell it to. But we will do this by increasing the relevance that we have and the meaningfulness of our relationship with the 360-degree customer of the group. This is basically our promise into delivering the retail contribution to BT100. [Non-English content] Aurel, [Non-English content] He's very diligent. Thank you, Aurel. Thanks, Oana, a lot. I will not come on the stage with you. I give all the applauses only to you. Next in line will be Tibi. Oana, thank you very much. You were gorgeous. Thank you. I am here for questions. Hello, everyone. I need a bit of setup to do. Thank you, Aurel. Next, we are going to walk through the landscape of what we call entrepreneurial segments. Oana presented you our retail business with individual clients. I am going to show you what we do and what we are going to do with our entrepreneurial segments. By entrepreneurial segments, we mean from the early days of setting up your own company, from the very small ones, going through the SME cycles of businesses, up to medium corporates of about EUR 50 million turnover. We call these entrepreneurial segments because typically these businesses, they still have a dependency. They still depend on their founders. Most of the times, the founders of the businesses are also the persons that are also managing the businesses. There is this dependency, and this is why we like to call them entrepreneurial segments. Later on, after my presentation, my colleague, Cosmin, will show you also the big ones, the elephants. Of course, they are also, in a way, entrepreneurial, but they are less dependent. They are already big enough, less dependent on the initial founders. Though I typically say size does not always matter, this slide contradicts me immediately because when we talk about numbers of customers, the size of portfolios, obviously this makes a difference, and size does matter. You see, we start by showing you where we are right now. 680,000 legal entity customers, small companies, medium-sized companies, medium-sized corporates, and, well, it is not an official figure, but these days we are celebrating the next round number. This is really important to us. In this number, we also have the newborn companies, the very young companies of Romania. This year, even above our expectations, almost one out of two, 45%, almost one out of two newborn companies in Romania opened their first business account with BT. Maybe some of you remembered, if you attended the last year BT Investor Days in Stup, we were showing you one out of three. We are almost at one out of two this year. We have various kind of explanation for that. Maybe the bank got a little more attractive to them. Maybe they are more comfortable to us. We have, like I said, different explanations. We love all those explanations. The thing is that for us, it is essential that we remain like a central point for the newborn companies. Because once these companies are growing, and we know because we study the behavior of small companies quite a lot, we know that actually the majority of those companies will stay small, but some of them will grow, and chances are that they will grow still with BT. Next to this, we have reached both 100,000 companies that have some sort of financing from the BT Group. Obviously, the big chunk of it comes from the bank, but we are also having subsidiaries contributing to this number, like BT Leasing or BT Mic or other subsidiaries. Nobody in the financial system in Romania has that reach in terms of the market, in terms of financing solutions. Obviously, this also gives a glimpse of the potential as we manage to do better and better all these group synergies. Of course, this year we are again almost EUR 30 billion in terms of the loan stock in the bank. Here the thing that we think is the most important is the fact that our pace, our dynamic was about 10% this year, which is higher than the market dynamic. We always follow the market dynamic, and we strive on every year that we are slightly above or always ahead the market dynamic. Oana told you lots of amazing things that they are working on the retail side of the bank. Now you can imagine that all those businesses, thinking about synergies, thinking about real synergies, all those businesses, behind all those businesses are people, real people, and real people will create the new businesses. If I can use a line from my favorite movie called "The Lion King," it is sort of the circle of life. I had to see that movie like 20 times with all of my kids. It is like the circle of life. I think it is one of the most interesting assets of the bank that we do not really talk enough. Again, some of you who were present in our last year presentation heard me talking about the fact that we are starting this big transformation thing, this big transformation project, which we did not give much details about it. We did. We spent last year drafting the business case, formalizing the business case, starting preaching the business case, and this year, we are now fully working to implement the business case. Probably somewhere next year, second quarter or around the second quarter, we are going to deploy a full new commercial model for every business segment. Of course, these days talking about transformation, it is like a cliché. It is a cliché because transformation should be normal for every businesses. However, in fact, transformation is never normal because it never comes naturally. Organizations, businesses don't just transform because they need to transform. It always takes time. It always creates anxiety because it affects the roles and the lives of everyone involved. In our case, transformation, or in any case, you need to have that sort of mindset that pushes for the transformation. To add something to the table, again, in theory, transformation happens best when organizations are doing okay. However, you have an additional challenge when the organization is doing okay because you need to do a lot more explaining why changing something that is doing okay. As strange as it may sound, sometimes people accept faster and they react quicker when they know the organization is not okay because they just realize that there's no other way to do it. We had a lot of preaching and communicating and explaining the why, and why it makes sense, and why we need to do this all the time. We also have these ambitions, and we have milestones, but we know that if we do this right, actually, the process never stops. It's going to be a permanent process. Like I said, we spent last year and a good part of this year doing a lot of internal communication and a lot of preaching and preaching and preaching. Sometimes I find myself talking in a weird way with my kids at home. Fortunately, they're not that interested, but I think with all that preaching, when I retire, I can go to a village somewhere, find an empty church, and continue preaching. This transformation is not an incremental thing. Basically, we are redesigning everything and writing again the commercial models. You have here a few examples about that. From thinking in terms of our new segments, again, we are developing four segments within this entrepreneurial landscape of businesses, and then we recreate financial ratings. We do, again, the modeling. We do all the processes around it. We rethink the way we use data. We upgrade the management capacity of our team, and we're also reshuffling our entire team and our entire sales team in the head office and in the branches. It's basically involving everyone. I would like to now talk a bit about our digital dimension, and I'm showing here two examples. These are very different examples. They all happened this year. We improved quite radically our onboarding flow of companies. The way a business can open a business account with BT solely using the digital application, and secondly, a full online SME loans. From end to end, within less than 10 minutes, you are able to actually get the money and use the money and make a payment as an SME. I'm showing these two examples, not necessarily because, for example, the online onboarding, I think, I'm not sure whether this is the best available onboarding online in the market, but certainly it's one of the best, and it's available 24 hours, so you can do that in your weekend if you don't have enough time. That's a feature. It may sound strange, but there are not that many banks that are offering this service for companies 24 hours. The online loan, I think, was responsible for more than 25%, more than 30%, actually, of our total number of SME loans this year. So it helps a lot building the client base. I chose these two flows not necessarily because they are okay. They are okay, and I am sure they will become even better in time. But it is about the continuity, about the experience in itself, and the way we think about our digital dimension. You think about you set up your company, you onboard your company to the bank, you run your company, you manage your business, and you borrow money, or you fund your business, everything in the same application. That is the idea behind the BT Go application. Still on BT Go, I also have the next slide. Of course, some figures about the current scale of the application. We are quite happy and proud, not only with the number of customers, more than 600,000 customers enrolled on the BT Go, but for 86%, these are active customers making real transactions on a monthly basis. Not just because of the volume of the transactions, but because when we developed the app, we were trying to have in mind the perspective of the business owner, of the person managing a business. So we thought about it. It is like BT Pay, that Oana presented to you, for businesses. It is like BT Pay for businesses, but with a perspective in which it is extremely important how you make payments, how you do accounting, reconciliation. That is an endless nightmare for people. How you get your account statements in multiple formats, how you can actually do a lot of things, see a lot of products from your sales, from your POS machine devices and everything, all available quite easy in one app. Because we love that Go thing, we just go for the market practice. The market practice makes, so when you develop a business hub, you call it BT Pay for Business or George Business or ING Business or whatever name you can think of. We just loved the way this Go particle reflects actually the very nature of businesses, being always on the run, always on the move, not having enough time, where you actually, in a hectic way, tirelessly, on a daily basis, through your business struggles, you need to just connect and do your thing. This is why we were stuck with this BT Go. We are quite happy right now. We are three years from the launching. We are now starting to see the benefits of what we have done. On a quarterly basis, we are publishing and releasing newer new features. At some point, probably, it is going to be difficult for anyone to just keep the pace of all those new things that we are putting. But hopefully, for everyone, there is going to be a very clear way available in the application that will help you and support you to run your business. I mentioned at some point that through this transformation process that we are working on, we are actually redesigning the value proposition and our commercial models for each and every segment. For each and every segment, we would like to be. If you think about these segments in the sense of the stages of growth of any business, actually, our segments are following the process of growing a business. We would like to be the best partner for growing your business. Of course, many banks talk about that, and we are not the first bank to say that we would like to be the partner for developing a business. However, I think that the difference is going to be in the level of commitment. To what degree, how deeper you are going to go, how deeper are going to be your business insights in supporting those businesses. Because, we banks sometimes say all those things, but actually what we are doing in the end is in an efficient way, we are selling and pushing our products toward companies. This is our commitment. We are going to the next level. Again, some of you were with us last year in STUP, and maybe some of you remember, I tried to tell you the story of that place, which is basically a place designed for young companies, for newborns, it is like a maternity for startup companies, where you can find practical advices and recommendations on how to run your business. Of course, if you just opened up a coffee shop, you are not going to find the better recipe of coffee in the place, in STUP. But you are going to find practical advices on how to run your coffee shop so that you do not have problems, and you can actually dedicate all your resources to make that special coffee. Now, some people ask us, "Well, you are doing that without. It is basically like an advisory hub for very, very small companies." What about the larger companies? What about the more established businesses? We have started from the ground, and now we are scaling up, and we are building in Bucharest, I think the strongest hub for the SME businesses and the strongest and the largest hub for medium-sized corporate businesses. That is the level of commitment, because gradually, step by step, by upgrading also the skills and everything of our entire team, we would be able to support those businesses not just with the typical banking products, but also going multiple layers in terms of business support. That is going to be different, and that is going to feel different. Micros and even smaller than micros, the SME hub, the corporate hub, that will be a next level in terms of business support that we are building in Bucharest. Why starting with Bucharest? For obvious reasons. It is where you basically have 40% of all businesses in Romania, if not more in some areas. Again, thinking about our value proposition, the fact that we would like to be the best partner for every stage of growth of these companies. If we start doing that from their early days, and then with the micros, and then we continue with the SMEs, and then with the corporate businesses, and we do this well, in time, I think we will achieve amazing things. Not only that we are going to achieve our business potential, but I think we can create new potential for ourselves because that happens when the bank acts as a true enabler for the economy. I cannot really honestly think of any better mission than this. Thank you so much. Okay. Good afternoon. Also from my side, very well welcome to a close. I am the closing act for today in the part of the business. The conclusion is that after Oana presented all the major things and the magic that they are doing in retail and Tibi, the growth path of the company from the nano towards the mid-tier. We are concluding with the larger tier. My name is Cosmin Călin. I am handling in Banca Transilvania, the Large Corporate Business, the Project Finance, and the Factoring. Within the project finance you will see also during the presentation, the syndication desk, in which we have some major achievements during the year. As mentioned previously, one of our main aim also in the large corporate business was to position as the prime financier and the prime supporter of Romanian economy. During the last couple of years, with all the challenging environment, currently we are proud to say that we are the prime financier of all the strategic projects in Romania. Either infrastructure, either oil and gas or energy efficiency or energy strategic projects developed by private or public institution. All this together resulted in a very strong growth in the last couple of years. Double-digit growth in the last five years, primarily driven by the fact that even though there is a challenging environment, the strategic projects in Romania continued. Even though that sometimes we are not noticing, many of the strategic things that were planned for Romania were already implemented, and we are proud that we have been part of this success story. Very briefly, there are a couple of points about the evolution also as of June. The evolution is double-digit growth with a very strong growth also this year. Growth driven by many, let us say, sectors. There is no particular sector in which we have secured this growth. But what I would like to pinpoint is the fact that currently there is a cash-driven economy and the fact that cash is becoming the king. Factoring is becoming also a very important tool. In the last period, we have developed factoring as a platform in order to create liquidity in the market and also support the mid-tier, the small companies accessing liquidity and accessing liquidity at premium rates based on the credit rating and the credit risk of, let us say, the main clients, the big corporations. In factoring, as you will see, we have managed to do some very strong results, and this is good because factoring was a platform for the growth of the small companies and also the mid-tier companies. Structured finance. In structured finance, as mentioned in the beginning, syndicated desk. In the syndication, we were quite new in the market for the last 5 years. We have been positioned as A player and then as a prime player in the syndicated market and currently in the last two years, we have positioned as main arranger of most of the, I would say, strategic syndicated loans that we are arranging on the Romanian market. Having in mind that we are non-affiliated and the fact that it's a local, let's say, team and local expertise built and also constructed from taking expertise and skills from various other players. The results are more fantastic in the sense that we are proud and, let's say, we are very glad that we have developed such a skill in Banca Transilvania and positioned Banca Transilvania as such a player in the local market and also potentially in the region. Going a bit further, these are the main takes that, let's say, we have for this year and also for the next year. As mentioned, we are the first financier, the prime financier of Romania strategic projects and we are proud that from the top 100 blue-chip companies in Romania, we have a big stake being our, let's say, home clients and another stake of being clients that are going to be and we are proposing to be, let's say, home clients. In terms of the performance, large corporate has been one of the drivers in the growth of the lending and one of the drivers also in the growth of the profitability. As we'll see in the further slides, we are aiming for a cross-selling and a very profitable business. Large corporate, even though traditionally it is perceived as low margin, we are perceiving large corporate as a platform first and secondly, our main platform for cross-sale and for development in conjunction with all the other business lines in the bank. In terms of the skill sector, as mentioned also previously, 18.2% of the portfolio is project finance, but here is also syndicated loan. This is why we have built and we have invested a lot in the syndication desk and syndication became one of our main skill that we are very proud of. Energy, not only energy efficiency or renewable, but also energy from distribution to supply also is part of a strategic segment. Retail, you will see this year we have done the biggest M&A financing, the biggest, let's say, acquisition from a local company to offer international chain. Talking about the potential, here is a snapshot of the key deals that were executed this year. As you can see, there was a lot of activity and what I will pinpoint, there are a couple of major deals that were present in Romania and, let's say, we have been involved in structuring, arranging or fully underwriting them. Out of them is the major acquisition of Carrefour chain. That was one of the landmark deals in the M&A market in Romania, but besides this, also deals in the energy infrastructure, healthcare, and so on. Here is a very brief snapshot of the main deals that were executed in the first half of 2026. Talking briefly about the future. What we are aiming is to continue this growth and to continue this success story also in the next couple of years. We are planning, let's say, a conservatory 10% increase for 2027 in terms of loans and 15% in terms of deposits. We are forecasting a very, let's say, robust NPL rate of 1.5% or even below. And factoring, as mentioned, we are seeing factoring as one of the key drivers of, let's say, our support in the economy and factoring is targeted to have more than EUR 12 billion in terms of volumes. Very briefly, we are pinpointing some of the skills again and some of the takes that we are seeing also in 2027 and 2028 to be one of our major contributors to a balanced growth and, let's say, in our support in the overall economic ecosystem of Romania. Talking very briefly about the model. The model is based on three pillars. The main pillar, as mentioned, is not only about the placement or not only about leveraging into the economy, but also creating value add in the economy and, from this value add in the economy, creating, let's say, side business and creating a platform for the other business lines. And large corporates, we are seeing as one of the key driver in supporting the SME and supporting the mid-tier clients during, let's say, the rainy days. This is what we have done it also in the pandemics. This is what we have done it in the hyperinflation during the Ukraine conflict. We have gradually built a kind of ecosystem in order to support, let's say, the full economic ecosystem of Romania. Capital efficiency is one of the main KPIs that we are following. Large corporate means large deals. Large deals means large capital and capital deployment. Therefore, we have been pioneer and we are pioneer in one of, in accessing and even constructing together with the help of either supranational insurance companies, great insurance companies, in developing risk sharing, risk mitigating instruments that we are largely using at this moment. And we have the support, and we thank all our partners in this venture. As also in Ömer presentation, capital is one of our main, let's say, point of interest and one of the things that we are weighing in arranging each and every large deal. And last, the future is scaling us, the business proposition and the value proposition. We have couple of sectors that's in Romania that are accelerated key drivers for GDP growth, and we are prime financier of this sector infrastructure. We are, let's say, deep in infrastructure, and we are seeing infrastructure as the main strategic sector for the development of Romania in the next couple of years. And here we are coming with a big support, let's say for the clients, for the local clients. Also, what we have started and we have started to see a lot of Romanian entrepreneurs or Romanian mid-tier or large-tier clients going regionally or trying to go regionally. And here we are offering the full support from the advisory support that Tibi mentioned to, let's say, the financing package in order to, let's say, help as many local companies go regional and have a successful M&A. On a reverse note, we have a lot of well-established global companies in Romania that they are taking the decision to further finance Romania from their home treasuries. For this also, we started a kind of regional cross-border approach for the main strategic companies that are also present in Romania, and they have strategic project for Romania, investment project for Romania by financed from outside. So us gradually we are coming to be part of this financing package from a cross-border perspective. Last but not least, we have a very strong emphasis on ESG projects and projects that are either with a strong sustainability component or sustainability-linked component. Very briefly let's say in a nutshell, you saw the evolution of the loans and the deposits. Here we have added also some of the other two ratios that we're following is the NPL rate, and the NPL rate had a sharp decrease, showing a strong origination and a strong credit quality of the originated deals, despite the fact that all this period was a period full of challenges and full of volatility. So you can see that the NPL rate is decreasing sharply all through this period, while the cost-to-income ratio also it's one of the KPI that we're following quite closely and on the KPIs segment we have some positive results. So thank you very much from my side. This is all. And for any type of question, I'll be more than glad. Thank you. Thanks a lot. He was giving only good news because it's not over yet, so we still have to sit for 3 hours, for the next 3 hours as well. This is just a joke, but leaving it aside, what we are going to do, until now we had the monologue. We presented you the positiveness of our business. But now on the stage will be the top management of Banca Transilvania, and it's your time. You already sent several questions to me. I will be addressing to my colleagues as well. But in the same time, you address them directly if you wish. We'll have a microphone. We are spreading it around, so be our guest to put the question. The second, we already have 5 million customers in BT Pay, but we still want to have 170 + in our app. If you download the app that we are having, there you can also find our presentation. I saw several of you making pictures, taking pictures of our presentation. So use it's for your own sake. And it's free. It's free. It's those small things that are free because usually we charge everything, and now I'm taking a close look to all of our investors to assure them that our ROE will be strong in the future as well. So thank you once again for bearing with us. It's quite relaxing once again to having you on the stage. I already have all the questions prepared. Thanks for addressing them. Huge amount Most probably will not be able to address all of them, but I will make a short list of those who matter. So colleagues of mine and of ours, you are more than welcome to join. Thank you. I will find myself a place here so that you can see all of them. I will also try to address each and every one of them, a relevant question from all that you have sent. You look nice. I would start with Oana, because you were mentioning that I was rushing you, so now you have the entire floor. The first question towards you would be: Is it possible for the diaspora to have a mortgage loan in BT in order to buy properties in Romania and Romanian citizens to buy property outside of the country? For diaspora, in order to have a mortgage to buy something in Romania, first of all, it is possible for them to enroll in our community from the distance. Now, with the passport, as I mentioned. We also have remote advisory for them so they can benefit from remote advisory. The full online mortgage lending is not possible yet in Romania for any bank. What we are targeting here basically is to digitize as much as we can out of the process. We also have in target, of course, to facilitate the access to financing properties abroad for our Romanians living in diaspora. We have this kind of question. We are trained by compliance and governance not to give very direct answers. It is possible, but it is not online and it is not a process fully online. As long as the income, the revenues are registered, fiscalized in the country of origin, we can accept and do. We already have some transactions like this. Since you have the microphone, Ömer, I will address you the next question. It's a very easy one, so compliance won't be complaining about it. In a nutshell, people are asking about BT100. Could you give us the three most important ingredients to reach that point? Three most important ingredients. It will sound very much of corporate/banking cliché, but definitely I start with our people, because during the presentation, I mentioned our execution powers. Whatever we do, we invest in technology, we invest in organic growth, new products, platforms, network, and just our, how say, growth of business as usual. We cannot do it without our people, and we want to maintain the culture, the spirit of BT in a sense. Second is the, how say it, diversified and strong shareholder base because, during good times, bad times, in order to, how say, go forward, you need to have the backing of the names that already are in this amphitheater or are in our shareholding base. Also not only to maintain but to accelerate our approach in technology. Oana was saying in her presentation, we were a pioneer in agentic AI payment in Europe. We are being shown as a case study to other banks. Our motto in technology was the best early adopter. Whatever happens somewhere in the world, we should be the best early adopter of it in Romania because we are a small bank. We don't have the time for R&D to make proof of concept and to invent new flows, processes. But now, how say, very strong team on IT and a strong delivery team. We should also assume this role of, how say, as I said, the traditional pillars of people, technology, and our shareholders. Thanks, Ömer, for that, and since you were, taking a look to Andrzej, then I jumped with my questions directly to you because we have some questions concerning cybersecurity protocols. What do we have in place to protect the sensitive data about our customers? The second question would be: How is BT Pay integrated within the secure infrastructure? Okay, let me start with cybersecurity. I think it's a very hot topic for everyone. We made a lot of discussions about it, especially in the time of AI. AI is equally a benefit for all of us, but also it generates a risk. Cybersecurity is one of the topics. We work on cybersecurity topics with our partners, key partners on technology delivery, but also partners who are delivering the platforms like cloud solutions. The hot topic for all of us is looking for the future rather than the now. We did a significant assessment of our infrastructure. It looks we can confirm that it was also done based on the regulator's request. We are quite secured. We are secured on borderlines. We still have a lot of things to do internally to make it improved, but we are on the edge of the top of the security topics. We are looking for the future also. We are speaking about the post one, two security with engineers from other partners, which is also topic for all. That is a main focus for us. Having done basic security, we are working on improvements going forward. About integration of BT Pay, Ruth, that was a question with- Yes, indeed. In this infrastructure. Infrastructure. BT Pay is integrated with the rest of the platform, in the way that we are trying to make these functions, which are exposing to BT Pay available for all channels. We are creating the layer when all these benefits, as Tibi mentioned on his presentation, when we are trying to build synergies between different products and business lines. We are trying to build the same layer of integration to expose services to all platforms. Which means BT Pay will be one of the channels for clients within all benefits from the group. This is the future of the integration layer when we want to add on more components, including our subsidiary services. One service sharing all reusable components to all channels, which leads also to the efficiency of the delivery. That's our plan. Thank you, Andrzej. Since Tibi is right next to you, I will go with a question towards him because there is a very qualitative question here from the audience. Could you elaborate more on the NPS from the SME clients acquired during 2026? Yeah, I think I can do that briefly. Without going into many details, some of the details I need to check them again myself. But we do measure that on a monthly basis. For the first 6 months of the year, our SME onboarding flow had quite a high score around 82 something, which in the language of NPS, it's quite good. We are happy with parts of the flow. We are happy with the fact that, again, it's available all the time, 24 hours, and you can end-to-end reach, get your IBAN, and make your first payment. There are parts of the process which are not optimal. I can give you some examples. In banks have all these packages. So you open a business account, and you get this package, and you have a number of features and a number of payments. If you do, I don't know, X card transactions, you get Y, I don't know, another feature. It's pretty complicated. Even though we've got, I think, one of the best packages on the market in terms of this combination between what you pay versus what you get, I still think we need to be, for instance, way more clear and with a value proposition, way more straightforward, so that when you get your current account package, you don't have all these smaller prints somewhere saying that, "Well, if you go beyond a certain turnover on your account and or a certain number of payments." That's a bit complicated. So that's a part which is not optimal. Another part which is not optimal, and we're working on it, like I said, on BT Go, we are releasing on a quarterly basis, either new stuff or improving existing features. Something that we're not yet 100% happy and probably will never be for some business accounts when the structure of the company is slightly more complicated. So not like the typical SME structure where you get, I don't know, another company being shareholder in that company and in that company, another structure of companies and so on and so forth. There is usually difficult to ensure it end-to-end. Then we have a separate flow where we pick up those customers, we take them from the online queue and deal with them on an old school basis. So that's the limit so far of the online flow. It goes best with the simplest form of organization of companies. But in time, with so much technology and artificial intelligence and everything around us, I'm sure we will have solutions for those sophisticated companies as well. Thank you, Tibi. I have a question regarding ROBOR. I would start with George to put you the question in terms of decisions and how it will be paid. I will quote, "Now that you received the reasoned ROBOR decision, will it be paid in the fourth quarter of 2026 or will you be seeking suspension? Thank you very much. Short answer, we will be seeking suspension and pending a decision not to allow a suspension, we will be seeking a delayed payment via letter of guarantee. This is something that we have done before with amounts due to the state, and it was accepted by the fiscal authorities. We will be seeking, quote-unquote, "our day in court" because we think we have a defendable case against the decision of the Competition Council. Thanks a lot. No problem. The list, how to say, the motivation or the decision, the details didn't bring anything new, from our point of view. We have made our position very clear. There is no, I mean, it's not the case, but also there is no evidence of deliberate, let's say manipulation or intervention in the functioning of the market. First, everybody, including the authorities confirming that Banca Transilvania complies with the actual regulation. Although my personal opinion, I mean, if this transparency is considered to be a manipulating factor, then we should really start questioning the functioning of the whole economy, all pricing mechanisms. As George has said, and as we already mentioned, we will defend ourselves and also make our case, explain to the authorities and public, the details. I'm hopeful that it will be, let's say, common sense and good result. Ömer, I will still stay at you because I can take several questions which are repeating themselves. They regard the bank's future development going into foreign markets, how we see deeper market penetration, regional diversification, entering other countries, as I mentioned, about organic or even M&A growth. Just take us through the story because it helps me a lot. I mean, as I said during my presentation, indeed, in terms of organic growth and M&A, we will, I guess, come to certain limits soon in Romania. On the other hand, we still think that the Romanian economy will grow when we say BT100, we are not saying that we will do it somewhere else, we will do it in Romania. So, I'll say focus will remain Romania. On the other hand, we speak about expansion abroad. It's not similar to when I started to banking 30 something years ago. You don't just go with banks, you go with your apps, you go after diaspora, you go with transactions. Companies brought by our large co business line having needs in European Union, so we can be partnering with them. That's why there are several dimensions. In most of them, we are either active or willing to be active. As regard to acquiring a bank or a financial institution abroad, what I can tell is that until now we were saying that we are not interested at all. Now we started reading macro-analysis. We started reading bank reports. But there is no ongoing process. There is no discussion for any geography, any country. And, especially when we look to a year or two to come, our focus will remain Romania or the geographies where we are already. Thanks for that. In terms of business, going back to business, Cosmin, I am looking at you for the next question. Recently, I mean, a couple of seconds ago or minutes ago, you said that corporates were assessing their budgets and the local situation before bigger investment. Yet we demonstrate that we can grow at around 10% to 15% in terms of large corporate. Since the political uncertainty is still there for longer, are customers postponing their investment pipeline? How do you see the future? Yeah. So, okay, challenging periods are for the last eight years. So each and every year had a certain challenge, but in the same time, each and every year, goes the GDP and, let's say, the economy had a steady growth. Yeah, some of the clients are postponing their investment plan. Some of the clients are accelerating their investment plan. So on the average, I would say that there is demand for investment. There is still a strong CapEx program. There are investments in, let's say, also here it was discussed about agentic, about AI, about digital, about robots. So everybody is considering to get more and more efficient these days. So if couple of years ago it was the energy efficiency or energy independence, right now it is technology independence or technology efficiency or cost efficiency. So investments we are seeing that they are continuing. In terms of how we differentiate ourselves from competition, I would go towards, Leon, a little bit because we have this phygital that Oana was explaining, and meanwhile we are handing cash. We do operations that other banks are not active in the market. Tell us a little bit more about this differentiation in terms of operations overall. Yeah. In terms of integration of, let's say, all needs of the customer, it is important to have a layer in which you can offer speed, control, and customer experience. How we make possible to offer much speed? It is integrated all, as we discussed with cash, with not working with external suppliers. We try to internalize because it was a lot of needs for cash collection, for the customer needs to be prompt and to solve the issues. As I detailed in those examples, it is important to have not handling in between bank and suppliers to being able to have internal, less system involved, less person involved, and to have faster decision and to see how quick is delivery of the expected results. Second, control. The customer have different needs. It is in accordance with the customer needs or it is solving partial the problem. For that, with much better, let's say, integrated process, it is possible to see the quality of the delivery, and it is also possible to tune delivery to be in expectation with the customer needs and the future to learn from this lesson. Last but not least is regarding the putting together data, putting together decision, putting together process, it is possible to have intelligent approach. What means intelligent approach? If in the past it was automatic step-by-step, now it is possible to have entire look of the entire flow, entire customer journey, and for that to see where is necessary to tune and how can be end-to-end, let's say, reshuffle and end-to-end for this, for scalability and for simplicity. In a nutshell, putting on the same roof all of this is not putting on the, let's say, theoretical roof. It is re-seeing, reshuffling and, yes, somehow to offer faster, simple and custom-centric delivery for outcome because this is the expectation. Last but not least, how we can learn and return to improve. Thank you. Thank you, Leon. Aurel, I want to add something in terms of positive, many things like while our competition is going out of cash processing, we are investing in cash processing centers. When they are outsourcing ATM networks, we are buying ATMs. I was checking the number. I was even behind. We reached 320,000, almost, POS, soft POSs and the real ones. These are not things that are happening to us. Although it doesn't look a good tactical decision, coming back to what I said about emerald issues, it is strategically a very important decision for us, because once you start doing it, you start working with a big retailer, with POS network. Big retailer brings salary accounts. You service those salary accounts, they get also retail loans from you because, how to say, they spend this money in our SME banking department or our customers from SME banking portfolio. We create an ecosystem and we are filling the gaps. We are always going to exchange it. We are somehow living in a world, everything is either black or white. Position and usage of cash doesn't mean that, how to say, if there's high usage of cash, things are not fiscalized. But on the other hand, how to say, as we bring convenience and comfort to our customers, they will start working more with us. And that's why, how to say, especially on the operations side, all the efforts we did to the things others started giving up, closing network, shutting down POS networks, as I said, externalizing, they're actually helping our business growth. In our case, I will just continue saying the same thing as Winston Churchill, I guess, said, "Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake." We are very happy about our competition's strategy on that. Nice. Nice, indeed. Well, your message is positive and I'm fine-tuning my questions as well because your questions seem to be very positive. I think the noise that is around us, by putting all our answers in a very positive manner. I will be fine-tuning it through Bogdan, for instance, because some of you addressed the question about NPLs, about the workout activity, what signals do we have? If you could continue from here, it would be great. With positive, yeah? Positiveness. All day long. Okay, I will try to be positive on this. Actually, looking on the portfolio, I will structure the answer into two aspects. First is regarding the portfolio and NPL portfolio of the bank. I would say that, comparing with the peers and comparing with the banking sector, and despite of those political turbulences, geopolitical aspects, inflation, fiscal interventions, what we have seen in our portfolio is there is resilience of our clients and the fact that these external factors do not influence a lot our NPL portfolio, which is a good, let's say, signal for the underwriting and also a good signal for the way we are targeting our clients. The second fact is that looking at those and thereby NPL ratios at June it's around 2.4%, which is again, very good looking to the banking system and looking to our peers. This is triggering also the fact that we are very conscious in the way we are doing, first of all, originating and targeting of new clients. Also we are very cautious on the way we are structuring the restructuring and workout activities, collection activities if a client has problems. Looking to the new NPL, the formation of the new NPL, we do not see structural problems. We do not see sectors which are affected in our portfolio, affected in more substance than individual clients having some issues, especially one-offs with some big clients having some issues which are affecting our NPL ratio on different sectors. But looking generally, we do not see that there is a specific sector where we encounter problems. Even in the agricultural sector, where most of the banks are having issues with agri exposures due to the latest agri season and the latest forecasts, we are optimistic that those NPL ratios or NPL exposures which we have in our portfolio might have chances to heal in the next period of time. Going to the second part of the answer, one is the portfolio and the second is the infrastructure, and is the platform or the workout and recovery platform. We have invested, in the last 13 years, a lot in this platform. When I am speaking about workout platform, I am not speaking only about the systems, but I am speaking about the human working in this environment, this ecosystem. We have a very steady team working with us in this workout and restructuring platform, developing new ways of doing restructuring and new ways of doing collections with our clients. I think this is the thing which brought us these results regarding the extremely well NPL ratio that we have. When we are speaking investment in these workout and recovery platforms, we have to think that we invest a lot in the collection tools, and we have the best-in-class, I think, tool, which is CapOnE, dedicated collection tool, where we have the client from one DPD until the moment we are recovering the exposure or we are sending the client throughout the base to end foreclosure procedure. Recently we have invested and we are helping our, let's say, collection teams with AI tools. We implemented some AI technologies complementary to this Capone tool in order to help increase our productivity. Whatever a collection agent has been doing up till last year, doing manually or doing with RPAs, right now, with the help of AI, we managed to triple or quadruple the productivity of such collection agents. I am very thankful to this platform and the way it is functioning and I really look with optimism throughout the future of the evolution of portfolio, because whatever we are managing to collect throughout our portfolio actually is offsetting whatever new inflows are coming from NPLs, which is a good signal. Of course, our portfolio and our business colleagues are providing and are increasing their portfolio, so it is normal that also the NPLs as the numbers to increase, but as a percentage to remain steady. It is perfect, Bogdan, that you give so many details because in our non-deal roadshows we are asked quite frequently. Now I guess all of us have the details from the source. You being nine on the stage, there is one person who has not got any question addressed yet. Cătălin, towards you is the simplest question, and it sounds like this: the probability of rating downgrade of the sovereign. That's the question. I was ready to say that as a CRO, when you are the last one and you are not flooded with questions, this is the best sign of having the things under control, but you destroyed my speech with your question. In risk management, we are working a lot with probabilities. Unfortunately, when you talk about politics, probabilities do not make sense anymore. Then we start playing with hope. As I said last year, praying, which still remains a good risk management practice in the current times. To be honest, I wouldn't say the probability most probably is the same like before yesterday. I don't think the probability changed too much of a rating downgrade. What I can say is that we are ready to face it in case it's coming, but we are also ready to overpass the moment when it will not come. This stays in our philosophy about risk management. When I'm saying about our philosophy is the BT philosophy. In such a way that we are calibrating our risk appetite to a level to be able to walk through good times as well as shaky times. What do I mean by this? Is that all the tools that we are having. When I'm talking about tools, I'm referring also to the way that we are strengthening our balance sheet position and capital positions are ready to absorb both business growth and downtimes. Why do I use this word, downtimes? Because the current risks are not linked only to the potential sovereign downgrade, are linked also to potential weakening of the credit portfolio. Of course, most of the, I would say, the highest risks at the horizon, which are linked to the financial crime. Here I'm talking about fraud, cyber, and money laundering. I would say that this is the answer. Yeah. On the sovereign downgrade. I will give a question to any of you who would like to answer. It is perhaps clichéd, but it still remains relevant, what keeps us awake at night? I will reshuffle it a little bit. What are the things that keep us going and awake during the morning? What are those targets? Because once again, every one of you told us that we are positive, optimistic. Ioan even had a couple of questions here. You do not have a microphone prepared, but if you want to jump in, you can. What makes us to be so optimistic? I would try with any one of you. Let us know, what do you think that in your line is the thing that will make the difference and which will make the bank grow as we did until now? As I took the microphone, I will start. Hopefully we will not model our risk strategy hoping and praying. I will say, first of all, we are looking at the indeed potential of the market. It is indeed wrong to take a picture of the country every day. If you look at where Romania arrived in the last five, 10, 15, 20, 30 years, it is a huge progress. I came in December 1999 in Bucharest first time. When I look at the city then and now, it is indeed a European city. When I look at Cluj during my first visit in February 2000 and Cluj now, they are two different cities. Romania still has natural resources, energy resources. As I said, it is open to outside. Making a macroeconomic analysis puts Romania in a very good shape. Indeed, political instability is a persistent thing, pricing, but, also demography is still very strong, well-educated, young. We have definitely, by doing, we are also charging ourselves, our mental batteries, our emotional batteries, well, because you see the impact then when we are speaking about what impact we create, be it on Cosmin's side, on the large corporate or, in the nano businesses or retail customers, we see what we do. We are not in a capital, 1,600, 2,600 km away from Bucharest or Cluj or Iași or Giurgiu. So, we see what impact we create. It definitely encourages us. It makes us happy about going further. Also we have a very strong business culture coming back to what Bogdan was also saying. Besides investing in technology, customers know that, we are not acting very aggressively against them. As long as there's communication, transparency, we try to find solutions. We try to share burdens. That's why we don't come to the market from time to time with EUR 500 million of NPL portfolio. We try to solve problems when they are fresh. We try to assist and guide customers. Sometimes we even increase our exposure. If you trust that we find solutions. It's a combination of many factors, but I start with Romania and the potential of Romania. We are very critical of ourselves, highly critical of ourselves. You have been, more about you, Diana, Vlad, been on the road this year. I don't know how many cities, how many roadshows, how many investors you have seen. When I look at, well, say, the demand we had in our last bond issues, I think from outside we look better. It's not from distance. It's more from outside. And, definitely living day to day, I go to Bucharest and I complain about the traffic and all the problems. But actually yesterday I was having a meeting with the mayor. He said, "If you want peace and calm, indeed, you voted for the wrong person, but if you want your kids to have subway, to have better roads and infrastructure, that's it." Now we are investing. We are passing through this cycle, many things postponed that makes us feel the burden. But, again, we had been complaining two years ago, we had been complaining five years ago. We had been complaining in 2006 and 2007 about politics, about the fact that Romania doesn't reach its potential. And look where we are as BT, as some of our customers, or as the country. The only thing bothers me is the national football team's results. The greater truth is that all of us live much better than 100 years ago's kings, so we should enjoy this. And with this positiveness, I would say, to give the floor also to you who want to address direct questions, live questions, please be our guest. Just raise your hands and we'll be there. Also, if you want a credit card, do the same. I'm not sure whether you want the card or the mic, but we start with the mic. Hello, everybody. Thank you for taking our questions. I have more specific questions, so not that general. First of all, regarding the staff evolution. What I've noticed at BRD, for example, this year, they realized a steep cut down of headcounts. Now, taking into consideration the AI part and going forward, are you going to do the same thing? Can I just jump in with something? We will be having also panels after the break. One of the topics, we already thought about this question because it was a kind of obvious question that will appear. Nevenca, she will be leading the answer. Meanwhile, I look to my boss. I will try to be short. Possibly, definitely, I like stealing the show from my colleagues. I want to start with something that I truly believe. I do not have many good examples of businesses doing better, proliferating and growing, becoming more profitable by doing restructurings. I am not speaking about only financial sector, I am not speaking about our competition. On the other hand, technology helps us to make things more efficient. I still think when I look at profitability per employee, assets per employee, we are quite efficient, at least in Romanian financial ecosystem. On the other hand, all our plans are having certain dimensions. Nevenca, I will try to leave it to you to give more details, but when we grew our assets 5 x, we did not double our headcount. On the other hand, when we look from now on, when we look at BT100, EUR 100 billion, the ambition is a very slight increase or no increase in headcounts, but reskilling our personnel, using more technology, adding more assets and profitability. Again, I do not know the reasons or strategy or the plans analysis behind it. For us, yes, we are also closing locations because we want to invest in existing locations more or maybe open new locations. We are giving up certain activities because you can do it just by AI or by technology itself, not only AI. We start new business lines. Tibi was mentioning that we are opening a corporate hub in Bucharest. It is recruitment, actually. We are growing, but it is for business. We do not start with the headcount. BT has benefited a lot from its human capital. We do not want to take decisions. In 2019/2020, everybody knew that, everybody was sure that nobody will work from the office. Everybody will work from home. At BT, in our head office, 85% of the personnel is coming to office. What is it? In our network, everybody is in the offices. Obviously, we do not want to go after the fashionable words. We want to invest in technology, but not for the sake of headcount. We want to invest in technology in order to increase our balances. Basically, you will not see high increases in headcounts. As Ioan was saying, inflation on the wages, wage-based or led inflation started to stabilize a bit, which is good for all businesses, for our customers as well. I will say our target is not having a certain number of employees. We want to have hardworking and competent people who will further help us. In 15 years, having more than 25 integrations, indeed, it shows the, let's say, quality of our personnel and execution power from front office up to the people that you see around you. Okay, thank you. The other question regards the Competition Council fine. As an analyst, I should make a provision for this year or no? George, you can factor it in, and hopefully numbers will look still good as we also consider. As we said, how we see it, provisioning depends very much on the probability of winning or losing the case. Definitely, it's a discussion with our external auditors as well. But we are very confident about our case. George? Please. Currently, we are in the process of preparing the court defense, taking the external lawyers' opinions regarding the probability of losing or winning this case, and based on these probabilities, we'll discuss together with auditors. But our strong To sell as an in-house lawyers and our strong analysis showing that the case is weak for the Competition Council, since we have chances to gain. Okay, thank you. The next question, the last one. You put aside EUR 700 million in retained earnings. Should we expect a special dividend this year? I can say that, all my colleagues are very stressed now about what I can say. I can say that this calendar year, it's not possible. So there won't be. It was a one-off event. It might be at certain periods in time, but we will not go to more American Anglo-Saxon way of quarterly, semesterly dividends, unless we will make wonders in our, let's say, maybe an M&A and huge bargaining or some big one-offs. Otherwise, we would like to, as I said, go for also predictability. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Any other question? Who would like to be responsible for not having lunch? Yeah, thanks a lot. This is perhaps a quick one then. No, I was just joking. I just wanted to ask to what extent is your position in payments a competitive edge? Maybe you can help us understand that a little bit better. I guess like issuing, merchant acquiring, and all the potential data you might generate and just increased customer stickiness. Thanks. Are you from Stripe? Thank you very much for that question because it's something very dear to me and something that we invest in a lot and it's that part where we significantly exceeded the market share as compared to other segments for many years. In our case, as Ömer mentioned, it was a lot about the decisions that we have taken. So, that we kept the entire payment ecosystem, basically. From the issuing side, we also invested a lot on the acquiring side, not just on the physical premises, but also on e-commerce, and we have invested a lot in the card system. So we have internally the front end, the back office, a very strong e-commerce service that we offer to our customers. On the top of this, because your question also touched the stickiness, and this is something that we have started to create more actively since 2011. I hope that this also attracted Ömer when he joined the bank as well. We understood even back then that unless we are doing something to capture the value proposition that we are offering, combining this bundle of both sides into one thing, and then we created our multi-merchant loyalty scheme. That was something that has been developed day by day, every year up to these 50,000 merchants that I mentioned that are part in the ecosystem, and they are contributing to the togetherness that we are offering there. Also, based on this ecosystem that we created, we were able to create the Pay with BT Pay experience, which would not have been possible unless we would have had a very strong position on both issuing and acquiring, because regardless of how good you can be on the issuing side or in the app in terms of creating a best-in-class user experience, unless the customer is able to touch it recurrently, it is irrelevant. Further on, exactly on the top of everything, we feel that we are in a good position. We are very well-positioned for what's to come on the agentic shopping. Because having all these building blocks, having the issuing, having the strongest cards portfolio in the market, bundling together all the account to account, bill payments, everything, because we are not talking about just card payments. Now everything is in the ecosystem. Bundled with the building blocks from the acquiring side and having the capabilities and the talents inside of us. Having a very good data engine that is evolving, we are enabling ourselves with greater capacity to create the marketplace so that we can connect and equip our merchants also with agenticness readiness, in order to capture the future of payments in a responsible and still custom-led interaction. The basic value proposition for financial institutions, especially banks, is current account and payments. It starts with that. My kids don't need a mortgage loan, or they don't really look at the, how say, working capital loans of the bank, but they want to pay their Starbucks. They want to pay to Uber. We know that for customers, it's important to have good performance, convenience, and good cost. Here I would say that so far we are successful in good performance and convenience, compensating for not being the best cost maybe in the market. But we are very much attentive that if you are not covering all aspects of payment ecosystem, anything else you do doesn't count much, and you become a monoliner then. I would like just to add, it is about preparation, execution, and results. How? During the merger and acquisition, very quick, the portfolio of new customers saw that we were prepared before and in execution and after the scalability was there. In Black Friday, a lot of merchants and big merchants are coming and seeing what's happening. In the golden seconds, we grew from, as an example, 150, after that 350, and the last Black Friday, we have more than 550 transactions in one second. In one second, if something is not functioning, two planes, two big planes of the passenger is suffering. Also with the POS, when the law has been changed, who was able to execute and to deploy very fast the POS in the market, physical POS, soft POS, another, and we reach more than 100,000 POS in 120, and also the ability to maintain, to have day-to-day maintenance and being able to run. That's predictability. Invest now for future, being ready and when something happening to verify the, why not, the favorability. Thank you. Any other questions if you have? If not, I must say that we can execute. We were promising you that at 1:00 P.M. we will. We still have six minutes left. So we did the praying, we executed well, we have a strategy to implement, and we remain positive. Nevertheless, what I would like to say is that we continue this type of discussions during the afternoon, because from 2:00 P.M., we'll be having two separate panels. The first of them will be for investment subsidiaries. You will have some details about our plans in pension, asset management, and brokerage side. The second panel is a, let's say, continuation of what we were doing actually here, talking about the bank as business as usual. You will be having Nevenca Doca, the HR manager of Banca Transilvania, and also two other colleagues in Sergiu Mircea's person, the head of marketing, and Andrzej coming back on stage for the digital part and technology. So hopefully you enjoyed it until now. I will have several other messages to send you, but later on, because otherwise, I will lose your confidence. We still have some surprises for you. We will be around so- Everybody, yeah? Everybody will- Will answer any question. Will be around. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, colleagues. Thanks, investors. It was nice. Good afternoon. I hope you enjoyed the meal. Looking forward to further develop the discussions today regarding the evolution of BT, and to have pragmatic discussions about BT100, because earlier today we have discussed about our ambitions to become about BT100 and to have EUR 100 million in assets in 2013. The colleagues before have discussed intensively about the importance of the subsidiaries in achieving this goal. You have seen in the presentation of Ömer that two years ago, the contribution of the subsidiary was around 6% in the total profit of the group. Lately, it almost doubled to 11%, and the ambitions for 2030 is to double again to 21%. There is no pressure on subsidiaries about this, so we will take it very positively about this target. And we are very optimistic that the contribution of subsidiaries, the total profit of group, it's the things which has to happen and we have place to where to increase the synergies across the subsidiaries. However, for today, we have decided not to cover the full ecosystem of subsidiaries, where to present the activity of the full subsidiaries, but to cover only a part of the subsidiaries and the part related to the investment ecosystem of our group. And we have invited today among us three dear colleagues of ours, covering the pension, the capital markets, and the asset management. So we have today, Dan, we have Corina, and we have Daniela, discussing with us the potential of the subsidiaries and the trends of the activities they are covering within those subsidiaries within the BT Group. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for making time for having this discussion, and I will start with the pension fund, Corina, because it's a new baby in our ecosystem. I still consider it a new baby, even if the BT Broker is newer, let's say it's younger. But investment banking in investment, sorry, ecosystem, you are a new baby and we are seeing a lot of potential. We are seeing from my presentation that your business grows very, very fast. You are overachieving the market, and we are also seeing some operational issues regarding the, let's say, the challenges to happen next year. So if you can touch a little bit about the operational development and how are you preparing this paying agent business for the next year to come? Indeed, thank you for having me. Romania's private pensions industry is about to undergo a major change in the coming year as it steps into a new phase in its development, and that is transitioning from accumulating retirement savings to paying retirement income. And this is a natural chapter in the industry's evolution of 19 years, and it aims to provide the exact purpose for which the industry was created, and that is a private monthly retirement income. So, right now, private pensions funds in Romania manage assets in the equivalent of roughly 11% of GDP on behalf of less than 10 million people. And out of more than 300,000 are already aged 60 and above, so they're expected to retire in the next few years. So to that end, we are preparing our payment agent, our pensions payment agent business, that will become operational next year. And so this way we are focusing on three verticals, and that's customer readiness, operational readiness, and investment readiness. We aim to provide a seamless customer experience digitally enabled. I borrow the word from Oana. And we aim to have processes that are both scalable and robust. Now, the strategic importance of this type of business is quite clear. Until now, private pensions accompanied customers during their retirement savings journey. But from now on, we will accompany them during retirement as well. So it's not just simple business line, a new business line. It completes the pensions customer life cycle, and it allows us to create a deeper and longer and more valuable customer relationship. Okay, this is purely operational, but now we have Pillar Two, we have Pillar Three in our portfolio. We know that the importance of the private pension for any individual. How do you see the growth? A part of this operational issue where we have to see the switch throughout the how to pay the private pension. How do you see the future of the individual pension, private pension for BT Pensii? Well, indeed, we have two separate businesses right now within Banca Transilvania, and that's BT Pensii, that manages the Pillar Three pensions, and BT Pension Master, which manages the Pillar Two pensions. And together, we manage approximately RON 12 billion on behalf of more than 900,000 customers. And what we want to do next is to gather the Pillar Two business, and that's the mandatory private pensions, plus the Pillar Three business, which is the voluntary private pensions, plus the new paying agent that we're developing under the same roof. We want to gather them under the same roof and to create a true retirement platform. And obviously, this has very straightforward benefits, ranging from stronger customer value proposition to operational scale and increased efficiency, but also deeper integration into better ecosystem. But most importantly, it takes us from managing pensions products to managing lifetime customer relationships. Okay. We have seen that we work together, let's say, in some projects within the employees of the bank, trying to educate them, to understand about the pension business and about the importance of having private pension. And we have seen how difficult it was, even inside within the bank to bring this education to our own employee. How do you envisage this education program to go outside of the public and to make more attractive to the public and to increase the education program for our public and for our clients in such a way to be better aware about the advantages of the private pension? I think if I were to scale the pensions risks that are shaping the business right now, I would place on the highest stage the lack of participation and the insufficient savings that people have accumulated for retirement. To that end, this is where financial education kicks in, and this is where it can truly make a difference. And we're focusing in this area on retirement literacy, on employer adoption, as well as on digital education. And FIT, our leading financial education program that we have in Banca Transilvania, is doing a very good job to this end and educating people in terms of investing, pensions, retirement planning, and saving. And what we also do is we understand that education is much simpler when it is embedded in everyday customer service or customer experience. That is why we have included pension balance into BT Pay, so that people can now check how much savings for retirement they have alongside their everyday finances. In doing so, retirement savings no longer feel it's something very remote, but something very relevant and present right now. What really starts to stick is the fact that retirement planning doesn't start when you turn 60, but rather it starts with the first contribution, and it compounds over decades. I think for us, financial education is not a mere CSR activity, but it is embedded in our long-term financial strategy. However, in the market, we have well-established players doing this business, and the natural question is, okay, with a new entry into this market, how will you differentiate among the well-established players? What it will be the, let's say, our advantage, what it will be the benefits of our products comparing with our main competitors, if you can share with us some ideas. Yes, of course. But to get to that, I think it's important to highlight some of the results that we have seen in our business that we have been developing throughout the years. For example, in the Pillar Three business that we have been developing for six years now, during the last three years, the industry has attracted more than 450,000 participants. To that 450,000 people, Banca Transilvania contributed 44%. So that 200,000 people came in the last three years through Banca Transilvania. If we look at this year alone, out of all people who have started this year to save for retirement through a voluntary pension fund, more than half chose Banca Transilvania and came into the system through Banca Transilvania channels. So speaking of competition and market growth, we don't see each other as purely market growth beneficiaries, but rather as market growth creators. This market, although it has doubled in size in the last three years, is still so much under-penetrated, as compared to more mature markets, of course. Pillar Three currently manages around 9 billion lei, and that's roughly 4% of private pensions assets. That is little. But looking at these numbers shows us that the potential ahead of us is very high. Not only the numbers show us that the potential is quite high, but also the key growth drivers in the market. When I say that, I'm referring to a rise in household income or to employer adoption, which is also increasing, or to greater awareness from the retail in terms of retirement adequacy. So all of these forces have determined us to set up a very ambitious goal for our voluntary pension business, and that is to double our size within the next three years. It's a bit more ambitious than the bank's overall objective. Pension products. We are managing a pension platform, and within this platform, Pillar Two is the base. It's the base of retirement savings. Then comes Pillar Three, which allows customers to build on that foundation and to contribute voluntarily to their retirement, through investment profiles that reflect their risk preferences, whether they're more conservative, even with guarantees, but also are more growth-oriented. On top of that comes the new paying agents that we talked about earlier, which is the payment of the pension when we retire. Why this makes sense is because it's simple. A customer can stay and can remain within the same ecosystem, the same trust from their first contribution until they receive their first retirement payment, and of course, carry on. I think our mission is quite simple, and our diversification is quite easy to understand. We are uniquely positioned to capture growth because we have, in Banca Transilvania pensions business, we have the youngest customer base in the Romanian private pensions system. Adding on that young customer base, our customer life cycle proposition that we've talked about, and adding to that, Banca Transilvania's digital capabilities and scale, that positions us uniquely to capture substantial growth in the next few years. That's why our goal is quite simply to become Romania's preferred lifetime partner for retirement. Yes. We know that in the last two years, we have worked together, and we have seen the importance of having such a large network sales force within the Banca Transilvania. As Oana also mentioned in her presentation, this is the huge competitive advantage what we are having because we can sell pension products through our sales force, and more than that, into this application, into BT Pay, the clients to see their contribution and to see lively the contribution into this fund, which is a huge advantage comparing with the other players. Thank you very much for describing some of the activities and some of your plans regarding the pension. I will turn now to Daniela. I will jump directly to one hot topic, which is individual investment accounts. How do you see this in the capital market developing in the next months, years to come? Good afternoon, everybody. Warm welcome to Cluj-Napoca. How do we see it in the next years? Looking at the capital markets, the Romanian capital markets, we see, for example, in 2019, the overall capital market had around 50,000 accounts opened. Now, when we are talking half year this year, there are already over 3,000 accounts overall in the capital markets. Out of which, BT Capital Partners has 30% of the market. So 30% of the accounts are within BT Capital Partners. What we are seeing into the market, we see more and more interest in capital markets. Either we are talking about the stock exchange, international markets, and we see that people were Corina talked a lot about pension and what we are doing with the money so that we have money after we are retired. Looking at the investors right now, retail and individuals accounts, they are looking to invest their economies so that they diversify during deposits, investments, and if one I told you to download BT Pay, until I finish my answer, I would tell you to access BT Pay or open an account via BT Pay. It is less than 2 minutes, and this is something that got us also a lot of clients. Since being integrated in the BT Pay ecosystem, more and more clients found it more easily to open the accounts. Capital markets have become more, I would say, even sexy for investors and for Romanian people to invest in it and to protect somehow their economies in the now and in the future. Let us also address the elephant in the room because, okay, we came from many years where the capital markets increased, so BT Pay increased a lot. One of the successful, let us say, stories into the market. We see, and you mentioned that a lot of retail investors are opening accounts, new accounts with us, and are investing their economies. However, in the last month, due to some, let us say, geopolitical, political, and external situation, we have seen that there is a decrease into the capital market, especially in the BT Pay. Do you think that the individual investors at this moment of time are resilient to such type of businesses? For the ones that are here and have been in the markets during 2008, 2009, they understand that what we see during these days, it is just the volatility times. And the fact that we saw some decreases in the prices comes also from a lot of retail investors, which actually they wanted to take out some of the profits, as you mentioned, because stock exchange grew this year, last year. So we are one of the top stock exchange in terms of increasing of the indexes. In our case, we see investors much more resilient than, let us say, even 10 years ago. We see that they are looking and more educated in terms of looking at the market as a long-term investment. They are not necessarily looking at the market as just buy and sell right now and get out of the market. We are thinking that they are more resilient. Whatever is going to come, we see much more cash and liquidity in the market. Whatever is going to come or not, there will be opportunities. Actually, this is what the investors are looking at, for opportunities for other companies or for new investments. You are the largest brokerage company already in the market. Speaking about BT100, what are your future development plans? We are the largest broker in Romania. Over 50% of the assets under custody in Romania in Bucharest Stock Exchange are within us, BT Capital Partners. Our plans, it is being part of Banca Transilvania Financial Group, so the only thing that you can do is be number one and double the assets under custody. We are looking to acquire more clients, and doubling the assets that we have in the custody. Either we are talking new clients, or we are talking clients from Romania, or clients from abroad. We want to bring international investors to invest in Romania. We want to become a proxy for Romania. Whenever you want to invest in Romania as an individual account or also as institutional investors, we want to be there. The money to get from institutional investors, international individual accounts, to Romania via us. Easy to say, easy to execute, easy to obtain. Easy to say. But in your- To obtain, yeah, we are definitely sure we're great. Yeah. In your appearance and your discussions and our discussions we are having, we are very often saying that the market needs more issue. Do you expect that given the current circumstances with this political situation and the uncertainty in, let's say, regarding the budgeting, regarding where Cătălin is praying to the ranking to be, how the country could be. How do you see the development of this market? New IPOs you are seeing on the For many years, Bucharest Stock Exchange was, who was first. We need the investors and we need companies. Companies don't come to stock exchange because we don't have investors. We don't have investors because we don't have companies. Right now, we prayed also, but not necessarily due to that. Right now, we are at the stage of we have investors. We have retail investors, we have institutional investors. So the money is there in the market to be invested in good companies with good results and good stories and future plans. And what we see, it's actually a lot of companies are looking more towards listing and complementary financing. And the last IPO which have been in Romania, got us more and more meetings with companies, which are ready to prepare and get to the market. Yes, definitely, we're going to see more IPOs, of course, depending on the time and on the markets, because this is something that we have a lot of times in the discussion with entrepreneurs. Can you guarantee us a good listing? Well, no, we cannot guarantee because it's depending a lot on the markets. But we have a very good pipeline, and depending on the markets, depending on how fast they were going to manage to prepare them for the market, we're definitely looking for more IPOs in 2027, 2028. Looking forward to see these results. Thank you very much, Daniela, jumping to Dan on the asset management side. You have already, you had a very successful year. Your results are incredibly well. What makes this success? How do you describe this success of yours? Good afternoon. Yes, it has been a very good year for asset management industry in Romania and particularly for BT Asset Management. Our strong performance this year wasn't the result of a single product or just for favorable market conditions. It was a combination of several factors that work together. First, I would mention BT Pay. BT Pay was the main driver of growth. Clients have a friendly tool to invest, fully digital, and we benefit from this powerful tool. Basically, we managed to increase our base of clients with more than 66% this year. Second, I would name the strength of Banca Transilvania Financial Group. The cooperation between BT Asset Management and Banca Transilvania, BT Capital Partners, BT Pensii, and other group companies, helped us to reach our base customer. Help us to create awareness of our product. Another aspect that helped us was the range of our products. Clients were looking for market opportunities this year, and our products met their requirements. We have equity funds, like index funds or ETFs, that were very welcome by our investors. This helped a lot. I mention another factor, of course. We had a good year because we have favorable market conditions. Client portfolio rise encouraged more and more investors to invest. Clients to invest, sorry. Another aspect that I would mention is that we also grew faster than the market. Market performing well, but BT Asset Management performed better. We gained market share. We ranked first in top asset manager. Dan, still you have a lot of retail clients. Yeah. Still, as in Daniela business, there is a volatility in the market. How do you see this is? Do our client base is resilient? How is acting in such volatility? Yeah, we all see that these days we experience some volatility on the market, and it's nothing new for the market. I would group retail clients into three categories. First, I would mention the beginners, the investor who has the first contact with the market. This category of the market is a category that would, let's say, be panic when the market becomes volatile. They tend to check their portfolio frequently, and they are more likely to sell when the markets decline. Another category of the clients is experienced clients. They understand when the ups and down is a normal part of the market. They invest regularly, and they see that market decline as an opportunity to buy. And third, but not the least, I will mention the clients who accumulate on the long term investment funds. This type of clients, I would say that is the most valuable clients for the asset management industry. These clients don't try to predict the market. They are present in the market, investing small amount of money regularly month by month, and accumulate wealth over time. About this third category, specifically. In the last period of time, we have seen a hype regarding the new ETFs, speaking about local or the international ETFs, much of the discussion regarding this. In your portfolio, how do you see the clients orientating in between the normal funds which you are offering as asset management and the ETFs provided by the market? Yes. This year was particularly good for us because of the evolution of the equity funds, index funds, ETF, as you mentioned. Let's say market performance was very good. We encourage people to invest regularly, EUR 100 per month or even less, month by month. In time, they can see in their portfolio a little fortune, let's say. We managed to increase our base of customers this year, with 63%, we reached more than half a million clients. The evolution of the equity funds was very good this year. I will say that this excellent performance this year was a combination of several factors. I would name that market performance, I would name the Banca Transilvania's strength, BT Pay, and innovation and digitalization, we continue investing that. Of course, none of this would have been possible without the effort of our team. But you spoke about innovation and the digitalization. Looking to the existing distribution channels of yours, and the new development regarding the digitalization, that I know that you have a lot of digitalization project in your subsidiary ongoing already. How do you envisage to change the distribution channels for your products in the future? Well, the client behavior changed a lot lately. Clients expect a different experience than they had 10 years ago. They are looking for digitalization, for digital onboarding, for mobile solution, for simple and transparent products, long-term investment plan. Currently, we distribute our funds through Banca Transilvania via four pillars. First is Banca Transilvania network. We address retail, private and premium customers, and also corporate clients. As I mentioned before, BT Pay is other pillar of distribution, the most important one. All clients have the possibility to invest via in a friendly and easier way. Third pillar of distribution is Salt Bank. Through Salt, we address younger customers that are preferring a digital experience. And also we address clients direct at our headquarter, especially institutional ones. Looking ahead, we will expand our distribution through corporate clients, business clients through BT Go. I guess we'll launch this channel at the beginning of the next year. And so we'll be able to create a strong ecosystem that will be very difficult for competitors to create. Thank you very much, Dan. I will not end this panel without letting the audience to have the possibility to address a few questions if they would like, and if they want to address some questions to our panelists. If not, then thank you very much for being present here and sharing with us those info. I will pass the microphone to my colleague, Aurel, to switch very fast to the next channel in such a way to respect the agenda. Thank you very much for having us and for attending to this panel, and have a great afternoon. Thank you both. After the subsidiaries and the investments, we are going back to the bank, so business as usual. I would like to have beside me, Eve, Andrzej, their businesses. I have a question from the audience, if their business was unusual. No, it's very usual. What we want to do, and Sergiu, what we want to do is to emphasize more on the investment side. We are seeing the international trends, we are seeing our own trends. We understand that just banking at the basics is not enough anymore for our customers, so we want to upsell more and to be in the advisory part of the business. That's why I was mentioning that we are going back to the basics as a bank to talk about branding, to talk about the human resource, and obviously about technology. I hope you enjoyed also the previous panel. Thanks a lot for being together. Since you already had some questions asked from the audience a couple of minutes ago, I will start with you, Nevenca. There is this, let's say, pressure in terms of FTE, usually, about how we manage people. I will continue in the same spirit of the question, let's see how we adapt in this environment. Thank you. Thank you. I would like maybe to add on what Ömer has already mentioned to the question that was asked regarding the headcount versus AI adoption. I would say that it's not that simple. There are not only two dimensions, headcount or AI. There are many more others. First of all, there is efficiency, and all of us are aiming to the highest efficiency possible. But in the same time, we want to grow, and we want to grow aggressively. There are not many business cases, as Ömer mentioned, that were successful doing both in the same time. You either grow or you either become very efficient. I will also add something to the bank that you mentioned. That bank is not in a growth phase. It's definitely in an efficiency-gaining phase. That's one thing. Second thing is that unfortunately, they have to navigate quite a turmoil situation with their staff and unions, as some of us are aware of. BT, going through the 20 plus acquisitions and integrations, some of them small, but some of them quite large and involving unions, we managed to navigate that very smoothly and very quietly. You haven't heard of issues. That's what we are trying to do. Adopt AI, obviously, carefully because there are risks. Some risks are related to cyber, as were already mentioned. But the other risk, which is a bit more subtle and maybe a bit more perverse in that sense, is the cost of AI. AI is not cheap. Unless you are using it smart and for use cases that are adding value, then you might find, and some companies already found themselves in a situation where they spend more on AI than they managed to save. We are looking at adopting AI smartly. For efficiency, but more than for efficiency, we want to use it for growth, for revenue generation, for developing these apps that you heard at the retail, BT Pensii, BT Asset Management grow 60%, 50% because of the facilities and the features of those platforms. That also involve AI. Regarding headcount, to go to the point, we are not aiming to reduce. We will have probably some decrease there, but it will be the natural one. What we do is refresh part of the staff. We already see three extensive transformation programs this year. One was at the beginning of this year, we absorbed within the bank one of the subsidiaries, the technology subsidiary. We in-housed that to create a platform for delivery and to create synergies and to speed up the delivery. That was a quite large project in itself. Then it is the transformation of the entrepreneurial business line which has in scope more than 1,000 people that needed to be evaluated, reassessed, reallocated for the four segments. There we also had, let's say, early retirement proposition for some of our colleagues while also acquiring new competence from corporate banks. Then we will, as we speak, next week start the transformation program in retail, RISE, which again, will have in scope a few thousands colleagues in the network. The aim being to automate or simplify or get rid of all the bureaucracy in the network and have them really spend time with clients. Advisory, selling, post-sales activities. For us, people are at the core. Everything that you heard all day are the results of the people using and their activity being augmented by AI and other technologies, not only AI. But people, smart people, educated people, dedicated people, engaged, hardworking, all these are features that we need to get to BT100 in less than five years now, in a little bit more than four years. Not an easy adventure. I will only add that AI training, upskilling, we started that, I think April or May, and Andrzej help me here. April or May last year, in the spring of last year, on three layers. First of all, for all staff. All staff had access and attended workshops organized with our partners, the technology partners on AI. What AI is, how it can be used. Obviously, the AI progressed since the last 18 months. All staff was one layer. Second layer were software engineers. We had extensive trainings for software engineers, so that they can speed up the code writing, testing, business analysis, all the delivery process flow. The third layer were so-called citizen developers. People in every department. Early adopters, geeks in all departments that are curious, are eager, are above average technical skilled. We are now starting to see the value of it. Last year, it was an experiment. We invested. Not so much return. This year, we are starting to see. Explain actually what we do and why it is not easy and why I am really optimistic, frankly. If you look at the fast changes in the technology, it is coming in two aspects, which is a high trust and high tech usually we know. When you speak about AI, it is about high trust to high tech, which is extremely difficult for people, for early adopters. Another aspect is that, actually, when you look at the adoption of the AI, it is not just about one number. It is about how deep adoption is, how wide adoption is, and how fast will it go. This is actually not an easy part. What you heard from Oana, Ömer, and my previously speaking colleagues, we are making it wide. We are going everywhere with adoption of AI. Just give you a couple of numbers. On project base, when we see the early adoption and also monetization aspect, we have got approximately 60 plus solutions already running in the organization, and pretty the same number of projects which are actually on the delivery. When you look at these citizen developers, the numbers are even more impressive from the numbers perspective, not from adoption perspective. We have got approximately 3,600 agents running, developed by citizen developers. What is the reusability? I would say it is low. However, we have got another category of citizen developers, which are more advanced, and we have got a lower number. It is approximately 650 agents, and adoption is on the level of 10%-15%. The reusability can. We have got another layer of agents created by either our partners or technology-advanced people. It is on the level 70. Number is lower, but reusability 100%. On top of it, we have got the partners, big names like Microsoft. They are enabling us because we use a partnership with them, enabling 300 agents to be used. Everyone can adopt it. Do we have an ambition to monetize heavily from the citizen developers? No. Do we see the adoption phase on it? Yes. This is actually helping us to make adoption wider. We enabled this year 9,000 licenses for Copilot for everyone in the organization. 9,000. Almost everyone can use it. This is really heavy. We also made our kind of journey on learning about AI. What we learned, that this is so new and so fast-moving target that we all learn by doing. We are experimenting like others. When I compare us to other organizations, not necessarily banking organizations, we are quite good in our region. There are other countries who are moving faster, but we are quite good. That's one aspect of what we learned. Another thing, what we learned, that it's much more efficient to measure impact than adoption. We don't really care how many people are using our tools, because currently in my team, 650 people in development, 200 people approximately in data, are using AI daily. Every day. But it doesn't make an impact, which I expect not necessarily yet. We are measuring the impact actually. We're looking measures on the impact level. Last thing, which will land, it's better to go with a governed process than entropy. The governance will bring what Nevenca mentioned, a high ratio of adoption, will bring also risk management, but will also bring then a level of reusability, which we actually expect. This is super important. Just last thing I want to talk about this AI adoption, just to highlight where we use it. There are four main scenarios. One is the smart operations, when entire operations team is pushing forward different automations. Second domain is about, I'm calling that empowered employees. That's what we got in call center I want to mention, that's what we got in branches. We are empowering people with assistant support. When people are using them, but they are making decision by themselves. Third one is automation behind the scene. We are doing the AI behind processes, behind the systems. Third one is about the technology modernization. We train people in my team for the reason, because we want to do fully agentic software or product delivery life cycle. That's our ambition. On top of it, I would say that that's what is our ambition. Ultimate goal would be have AI on the observability level, which allows us to not just improve processes, but also transform processes on a business level. But we are definitely not there, I can tell you, we are looking for that. I think this is the first dialogue during the day in which about AI, you were able to talk from HR towards technology back and forth about the topic. This means that there is a good vibe in the organization concerning AI. I was wondering whether you, Andrzej, for instance, and your team, you are actually pushing projects towards the network and towards the employees of Banca Transilvania? Or is the business side the one that keeps on calling for you and you are implementing solutions or agents for them? It's in both ways. We've got teams which are heavily struggling with heavy work, which is not necessarily fascinating, like repetitive tasks. There is a huge demand of asks of the solutions. What we are trying to focus on is trying to build enablers. We are enabling some technologies to be reused. A good example of the project, which is for everyone, we are working together with Nevenca, is marketplace where everyone can publish agents created, and then everyone can consume it and connect with other people. I think this is the best way. I mean, look at a network of people. Definitely. We talk about technology, we talk about this phygital presence of ours within the community, which brings customers to us, and we grew quite a lot. From my point of view, which I very much enjoy, is the way in which we brand ourselves. I mean, the way in which we grow our brand. There are several, not only banks, but usually businesses which touch the price, for instance, or they try touch different promotions. Whilst you, Sergiu, and the team that you are managing, you are much more in the building the brand instead of promoting on the amounts, on the discounts, and on everything. Can you take us through a little bit on the philosophy behind everything? Thank you, Aurel. Nice to see you all included again. Yes, I would start by talking a bit on the market, because what we see right now on the Romanian banking market is that there is lots of competition, but there is a kind of, I would say, dynamic competition. Basically, we don't see the same competitors every time. They are changing. If you are looking, three years ago, we had totally different names than we are talking today. This shows that many of the banks don't show the consistency, the discipline, or the stamina to be on the market for long terms. They are acting in waves. None of those who are here, by the way. I mean, we talk only by the rest, which are not present. For sure. We see them operating in campaign modes, lots of pricing initiatives, and we also see this spilling up in their P&L. On our side, we say that one of our strengths in our commercial approach is that we kind of show the consistency to play the same game on the long run. We rarely enter price fights, and even if we casually enter, it's not something aggressive or consistent. Basically, to answer your question, I would say that Banca Transilvania competes more in terms of brand, and we are also helped by our network and the trust we have. We see that many of the competitors are playing very short term, with price and with referral fees. With referral fees, we see on the market lots of referral fees and incentives that are going to the customers. It shows that those banks don't have the pricing power to stay on the market present for the long run. The bank has a very good appeal on the customers. Our CEO mentioned, 45.35% of the bankable population in Romania is BT customers. Out of this, we have the highest conversion rate to main bank to customers that say that Banca Transilvania is the main bank. This is 71%, 71 of those, 45% of the banking customers are saying that we are the main bank, is the highest conversion rate in the market. This brings us to 25% of the total bankable population that it is considering BT as its main bank. Of course, we have lots of space to grow, because if you're looking at the numbers, only 12 million people in Romania are having a bank account or are banked within a bank in Romania, an established bank in Romania. This is a huge growing potential for the entire banking sector that we can- The local one. The local one. If you are talking about differentiators, I would touch a little bit our style of getting involved into the community. For example, if you are looking at our marketing and advertising strategy, we are the number one bank. I think we are not in top 10 TV advertisers. Basically, our budget does not go at all towards TV, radio, or outdoor, which are not engaging ways of communicating. Our investment goes towards events, engaging the communities online, where we have a very good practice on social media. This gets us to the fact that Banca Transilvania is quite very close to the local communities. By local communities, I don't mean Cluj or Bucharest. I mean 500 communities all around the country. On short, I would say that, to answer your question, we have five things to remember. BT has a very long time horizon. Basically, we are investing even in marketing and promotions, with a long horizon ahead. We have very strong customer acquisition, the strongest in Romania, with almost half of the new customers, new accounts that are opening in a year coming to us. We are very engaging with our advertising and involved in the local communities. We have very strong network effects due to our 5 million customer base. Very briefly, could you also touch on the diaspora in terms of branding? How do you see that we have a genuine message towards them in order to get them into our ecosystem? I will touch, but it will not be briefly. Let's do it in 30 minutes. Diaspora is a huge addressable market for us because I think that the Romanian diaspora is the size of Ireland. We have huge potential there. The problem, to say so, the context is that Romanian diaspora is not at all equal or homogenous. We are talking about 10, possibly eight, 10 different markets, with customers and profiles that are totally different. For example, if you are looking at, let's say, the old diaspora, Romanians that are in Italy and Spain, we are seeing a very established diaspora. People that are there for an average of almost 20 years. They have their life there. They are mostly involved in blue-collar jobs. They come very often to Romania, and they keep the relationship with their families. At the totally opposite, you have Germany and U.K. and the Nordics, where we see a much younger diaspora in terms of people that are there for an average of 8, 9 years. They are working white-collar jobs in services. They are much more well-educated. They are much more inclined to use banking services, but they don't keep the relationship with the country as close as those in the Mediterranean countries. We have 8 or 10 different markets we are looking into, each of them having something specific. Still, we consider that from all the banks in Romania, Banca Transilvania has the biggest chances to attract them because they still have a very significant relationship with Romanian ways. They have a family in Romania. They have a property in Romania. They pay bills in Romania. They are having some savings or investments in Romania, or they are attracted to this. They have, many of them, as your question was, future property ambitions. They want to buy something here in Romania. They have financial obligations towards their parents or their children. All this is taking us to the fact that they have a need for banking in Romania. That's why we believe that we are the natural partner for them. What we see right now is that we are having very good market adoption, and we are growing quite well. Our proposition is broadening. Each month, we have a better proposition for them, and this is also spilling into the NPS and their satisfaction with BT, but also on our profitability because we are able to give them more products. What I would say is that we are in a very good position for diaspora. On the not so good side, I would say that what we've seen in the past year is that due to the fact that we are activating with advertising and with promotions on the Western European market, we have higher than expected acquisition costs. Basically, it's significantly expensive to take a customer from Western Europe, even if it's Romanian, than as compared to taking them from Romania. Thanks for that, Sergiu. I still have one question, which I hold as the last one for you, Nevenca, because for each and every one of us, I think it's important to see how the job market actually looks right now in the age of AI. My simple question would be, how is actually recruitment going on nowadays with all the technology, and what are those three things that you as a professional are searching for, or you are searching for when it comes about hiring new talents? If your question refers to using AI in selection, in screening, we have tested several tools, several apps using AI. In short, the conclusion is, I don't know if you saw that meme that was circulating at some point, that there is a selection loop that an AI is screening the CVs written by another AI. That was our experience. If the CV is written looking at the profile that you advertise, that you need, then an AI can write a perfectly eligible CV. So we don't rely on that. We use it for screening. It speeds up screening, but then a human recruiter is looking at traits like, because as Ömer mentioned, we are working, and we insist on working from the office. For us, collaboration, sharing, learning from each other, teamwork are critical. So a human is assessing skills and proves that those traits exist. What are we looking for? In technical terms, the jobs that we look for these days are in cyber, obviously, in data management, enterprise architecture, more than in banking, I have to say. That's one thing, and second thing, in terms of so-called soft skills, we are looking for people that have a certain learning agility, because whatever you know today will be obsolete in a couple of months or a couple of years. So we need, all of us, we need this learning agility, willingness to learn, ability to learn. Then obviously, with the complexity around us, we need people able to manage this complexity, to have a solid judgment and critical thinking, and also to be comfortable, to have a certain comfort in working, navigating high uncertainty. And we go to bed in the evening with some news, and in the morning, the world is different in some of the days. And there are people that can, not necessarily they like the uncertainty, but they can cope with uncertainty. These are the skills that we are trying to look in our own people and in the candidates that we are meeting. Thank you very much, Nevenca. I think that this would conclude our short panel if you want to stick to our schedule. But I invite all of you to address questions if you have to my colleagues, because we are not pressured by any other panel. So any questions? I'm thanking you very much for being today here. Yes, go ahead. Yes, we have it. AI topic has been discussed a lot today. Maybe you could elaborate on these two vectors, because you seem to be applying AI widely across all, more or less all the employees received it, and you seem to use it in all the functions as well or try to use it. At the same time, today it was also mentioned that you try to use it smartly and efficiently. To me somewhat these two are conflicting. How do you measure that this usage is actually efficient and smart and done in a reasonable way so that your usage and tokens are not used up uselessly, basically? I can give you a couple of examples, right? I mentioned that we learned that going with the frame is better than going with entropy. We are enabling tools for everyone, but we are giving frames for everyone also in the same time. In last November, a year ago, even earlier, we said we should measure adoption. We trained everyone in my development team, and we started to check if they're using it. And obviously, they were using it. More they used and more the time they gained, more time they wasted. That was the first reaction. They're using for convenience. We said maybe we should look at it from a different angle. Maybe we should measure factors like throughput. How much more you can deliver in the period of time. And for this year, we've got the ambition. Actually, it is the objective. It is not the ambition, it is a number. 30% of increase of the throughput. I do not want to say they were adding extra capacity on 30%, but it is a throughput increase. We said it is not enough also. Maybe we should look from the impact perspectives, what kind of impact we create by adding the throughput. We started to measure the cost of feature. We got a standardized, recognized by client feature, and we are trying to measure, are we increasing the cost or we are reducing the cost? Because it is not just about moving things faster, but adding also AI tokens behind the delivery. Yes, we are decreasing the human being interactions, but we are adding money. What we are trying to measure is the impact. Now we are at that level, that even for technical interviews, when we are hiring technical people and have a practical exercise, we are not just measuring how efficient is the job done, but how many tokens they use to make it. From recruitment to frames and delivery. Entropy is on giving everyone everything what they want, but the frame is there. That is how we do that. We still have an answer from Leon. I feel that you would like to give an answer, so I will switch places. I would like to say how can be. Last year, we was in Seattle. We have a meeting with Microsoft, and after that, we saw how we can start. We pilot it very quickly, and for the last year it was, let us say, how we can adopt in the operation in the back office large scale and how can be. For last year, the target was to being able to achieve the equivalent in FTE, using agentic AI for 20, and we reach more, and for this year is for 100 people. How can be smart and efficient? Smart to being able to use the AI, in our case, it was inflows, okay, not to have the using agentic, democratic with prompts and so and so. Inflow to see where it's a lot of, let's say, necessary to have human touch for different things, has been trained, and after that, the AI is producing results. With human supervision, after that, say yes/no, and moving forward. That means it's not possible to have hallucination. Second, to see the efficiency, because very quick we measure with the equivalent in FTE, which is the cost with an equivalent FTE, cost of development, and cost of tokens. For that, we try to have an ROE, including development and cost of tokens, if possible, to be less than one year in equivalent of FTEs. For something which is very complex, and after that to being able to put in a repository and to be reusable by others, up to two years. It's feasible. This year we will reach equivalent of 100 FTEs with ROE for more than 60, less than one year. For other, let's say 40% to put in repository and to be democratic use by other colleagues. Thank you. Thank you, Leon. If I may also follow up, one more question on AI and AI risks. Last few weeks, this has been globally has become a topic. How do you as a bank, which is a trust business with lots of sensitive information, how do you manage this? I'm not knowledgeable enough, how does the supervisory here in Romania look upon AI usage inside of banks? How do you mitigate the risks? Of course. With everything which you said is a risk associated. First of all, it is about then sharing the data. We are always using the model where we have enterprise model where we keep data on us. We use models, we are bringing models to the data, not sending our data to the models. We use models which are really trusted, and we can maintain it. We have technical capability to switch on, switch off models which we want to allow to use by employees. This comes also with the location of the data. We have our own data repository in cloud. We use it, but we also make sure that whenever we are using that, it is kept in Europe. That is one of the obligations we have, and that also we can maintain. We can just decide and execute by ourselves where we keep the data and who is accessing different models. It is fully controlled. There are different things which are coming with the models, actually, because you can easily create a model, for example, to evaluate your insurance price, but you can also use the same outcomes of the same tools to exclude clients who offer different products. All these tools can be used in different ways. That is why we have the framework around that and the risk is included in that. We are using the AI tools as assisted service, so always human being decide on a final action. Any other question? Yes. You right there. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. You mentioned earlier that the customer acquisition cost is way higher for diaspora customers than domestic customers. A lot of the talks about today have been about growing the number of diaspora customers. Does the lifetime value sort of justify the higher acquisition cost? Hello. Thank you for the question. Yes, indeed. What we see, we are in this journey for diaspora for more than a year right now, and we are starting to have the right learnings. Even before, Banca Transilvania had a very large number of customers, above 10% of our entire database, that are living abroad. When we started our journey to conquer the diaspora, to say so, it was more than to build a customer database, but to deepen the proposition and to bring more products and to take this even further. What we saw in this first year is that indeed, the customer acquisition is significantly more expensive due to the fact that we are working, we are playing on a Western market, which has higher costs due to the GDP per capita that is higher there. But what we see right now is that we depreciate, we amortize the cost acquisition even better than we had expected. It's going well, and due to the fact that we are deepening the value proposition, it's expected to improve. By the way, this will be the most blended panel of all, but I hope you enjoy it. Oana will also take my place. I was hoping to take her place, but she's taking mine, so it's okay like this. No, it's actually. I just want to thread a little bit on your question because I think it's important, and thank you, Sergiu, for everything that you said. Yes, we are working together. But when we talk about diaspora, and here it's a very focused strategic direction for us. When we touch a customer in diaspora, basically, we are touching a network. So they are connected to people at home and solving some connection issues that they have there, paying some bills at home or transferring money. Basically, we enlarge not just the diaspora itself, but also the customer database that is living in Romania. As Sergiu mentioned, we are evolving on the value proposition that we put on for the diaspora. So we will definitely continue this roadmap with very diligent execution into bringing lending, into bringing into this ecosystem other products, other services, especially for them. We are building, as I mentioned in my presentation, some winning propositions. One is developed especially for diaspora, exactly in this connection that we have with the part of the families and friends that are living here. We have started to offer them investments and access to investments and pensions here in Romania. What we are building there is the bank with one person relationship, but rather the community itself. So it's expanding in terms of benefits and monetization, not just on one-to-one, but rather as a network effect. Thank you very much. Thank you, Oana. There we go. Thank you. Just one another question for diaspora. How can you For Sergiu about diaspora. Well, for everybody. Since the Western banks have higher level of services and usually lower management fees, how can you compete offering them services as a local Romanian bank? Basically, the insight we started with, and it proves that it is a valid point, is that the Romanians outside of the country still have a very strong relationship with Romania. 40% of them want to turn back to Romania at some point, for sure. It is a desire. We do not know if it will happen. And they keep a very strong relationship with the country, which generates strong needs for lei banking, basically. Romania is not in the Eurozone, and they still have to work with lei to pay bills in Romania. It is something that even the most technological competitor, for example, Revolut, does not have local relationships to allow you, to enable you to pay bills in, I do not know, Cluj or Pitești or something like that. We are tackling this part of the relationship. Also, some of them, and in a high percentage, are interested in saving in Romania due to the interest differential, but also to invest in Romania because we had a very promising story of growth above the Western Europe and catching up with the rest of the continent, and they want to invest in Romania. Also, property, it is a very valid proposition for Romanians. You know that Romanians are a country of owners, and everybody wants to own something here. What we see is that many of the people in diaspora, even if they do not intend to move back to Romania, they have future property ambitions here, and they want to save money. What we are seeing is due to their strong connections with Romania, we are able to attract them mostly for their own needs. A follow-up question. What about taxes? For example, if Romanian emigrates to Ireland, which has rather high capital gains tax and dividend taxes, if they invest in Romanian via BT, do they have to pay taxes on their capital gains or not? I don't want to take other two microphones. Sorry for that. In terms of capital gains, Romania, we might say that it's a paradise, because if you are dealing through a registered company here in Romania, you are actually paying 1% or 3% from your net gains, depending whether you hold or not more than one year those instruments. So in this respect, in terms of direct capital gains, if you refer as an individual, it is low. You're not giving advice? No, I wasn't giving an Irish law. I was telling how it happens in Romania. This is why, for instance, it's relevant for us to grow with BT Capital Partners. I give you a microphone because I think you want to give them some good news. No, no. I just wanted to make it clear that we're not giving advice on the Irish law, fiscal authorities, because they might need to go to the Irish taxes authorities and to file separately or claim because depend on the double treaty taxes, let's say, laws which are in between Ireland and Romania, some things can happen. So I don't think that I am prepared to answer to if the Irish law is applying or not in Romania. I wasn't catching both parts of the question. Indeed, thank you, Bogdan. I was only answering to the retail investors which are actually investing through Romanian entities and somehow highlighting the tax rates applicable for BT Capital Partners, for instance. Yes. Any other question? That would conclude our session, our panel, and thank you very much for you joining. It is also my pleasure to have a final word about what happened today and to tell you what will be the next stages of today's development. Meantime, for those listening online, we thank them very much because they were in high numbers, and even more to you because you are here with us. I would say two things about what we prepared to you today. First of all, I hope you saw that the vibe is extremely good in Banca Transilvania. We meet often. You often ask us about politics, about what is happening around us, turmoil, geopolitics, and so on. I must admit that lately, during the last one and a half year, we talk more or less about politics and macroeconomics, less about our business, which is fine for us. We would like you to see that we have projects, we have the willingness, we have the manpower, we have the capital, thanks to you, to progress. The second thing is that sometimes, that's a personal approach, I feel like only the bad news are good news. We tend to see them more often. We tend to react more to the bad news. Well, guess what? We only gave good news until now, and I think that the society and also us as investors, we need this kind of approach, because at the end of the day, in 80% of the cases, more or less, things are evolving on the positive side. I'm not saying we shouldn't worry about the 20% that goes south, but overall, it's much better to remain calm and to invest on long-term, and this is what we are doing. Now, once again, thank you for being here. We make another step in our schedule