LIVE: Q&A med Avanzas vd Gustaf Unger efter årsrapporten

Yes, it's windsurfing. Classic windsurfing, no foil, with a fin. Classic windsurfing.

Well, about ten years ago or so, they started coming with hydrofoils. So instead of a small fin, you have a sword that goes down and then a hydrofoil, so you lift off, you fly. You have a wing in the water, so you have much less water resistance. Then you can be out playing even when there is less wind and still plane and so on.

Yes, I started by building a windsurfing board with my brother in our parents' garage when I was 14 and my brother was 12. Without breathing masks and lots of glue and stuff. It probably wasn't good at all. But it was fun. It turned out really bad, very heavy. It was an Anders Bringdal design. He was top three in the world, Swedish. And it was made for sailing in Hawaii when it blows like 18 meters per second, and we were out on Baggen's fjord in Saltsjöbaden when it blew like 5 m/s, almost sinking. But then it started...

No, it's very high on my wishlist, but it's far away, very far. I have been to Hawaii, not surfing though. But I was on a beach that everyone said was Obama's favorite beach, and that alone made it quite cool. But the waves were incredible, it was just awesome to swim in them, and a bit scary because it was like being thrown into a tumble dryer. You just take that wave and see where you end up. It's quite cool.

Exactly, but it was the skilled ones who just lay outside those waves and chilled a bit, waiting. Because it's right when you get near the shore when they break that the danger arises.

Yes, well, my wine-drinking friends thought it was a bit lame that I started with kitesurfing. But there is no need for strength in kitesurfing, it's more about finesse. I think that's why.

A lot of technique. It's difficult, but it's so much fun. I think it's great fun. And in Stockholm now, it doesn't always blow enough in the Stockholm archipelago, so it has probably become a bit more kite than windsurfing the last two or three years for me in Stockholm.

Yes, you probably can be. I haven't experienced it actually. I think it's quite scary when you fly properly at speed. Because it's very easy to jump, but the hard part is landing so you don't get hurt. Exactly.

Yes, the really extreme ones, it looks completely insane. It really looks completely insane. I don't know, but it looks like it's 50 meters or something. But it's cool.

But I've never thought about it when I do water sports. But if I come near something, especially if one of the kids, especially when they were younger, if you come to some ruin in France or something and it's steep, then I can really feel it. I didn't feel that when I was younger. It's something after having children, the consequences.

Thank you. I can say congratulations to you. Yes, we've done well, all 660 of us who do this and do good things for customers, which makes them choose us instead of others. So good job, Filip. Yes, but this we've done really well, and it's so exciting somewhere. It's a very small group of people who have been closely following the report and working intensively with it all the way to the finish. So even if you work in the building, it becomes a surprise when the clock strikes yesterday morning and you get to see what the result was, because most of us actually have no idea. So it was very fun to see.

Yes, it actually is. It becomes big numbers. Two million customers, almost 1000 billion of customers' capital on our platform, over a billion in revenue for a single quarter. It's a bit dizzying.

Yes, in Q4 it was fund commissions. Our customers increasingly choose funds as an important building block in their portfolios. It now accounts for almost a third of customers' savings capital with us. It's a clear trend over time, and I think it will continue. And therefore, in Q4, it was especially November and December that stood out. Was the US election in November? I don't know, maybe the 7th or something. But it had started a bit before. I think we Swedes had more money left over; we have better prospects, lower inflation, lower interest rates. I look at my mortgage, it affects us directly. So we have a bit more money left over, a bit more confidence in the future, I think. That has made people more active and take more bets on the stock market. And one hopes for real wage increases going forward, because I've been surprised over time that people have saved so much even though many haven't had wage increases for a long time. So it's a saving, one must say.

Yes, when I started with stocks, it was 100% Swedish stocks for me. That was what I knew, what I was interested in. I read Affärsvärlden and Veckans Affärer, was interested in key figures, and so on. I had no idea about American companies; I didn't even know what they were called. So I've made this journey that many of our customers also make: you have a lot of focus in your portfolio where you live, which is financially a bit questionable. And our customers diversify their portfolios more and more over time, so they don't take too much bet on one country. I think the Stockholm stock exchange is about 1% of the world's market cap, or something. Very small. And I still have way too much home bias, if I'm to be completely honest. So that trend, and we saw in Q4 extra interest in American stocks. A lot happened there: a new president was elected, a lot happened with quantum stocks, etc. There was a lot of movement. And to buy something in the US, everyone who has traveled knows you go to Forex or somewhere else and exchange, and you pay a lot to get another currency. But we have a service where you don't have to think about it; you have Swedish kronor in your account, you choose to buy Nvidia or Tesla or something, and we solve everything. And that's a service; we take a bit of risk, etc. So there we charge to exchange from SEK to dollars for the customer so they can buy Nvidia. We make money on that. We call it currency net.

Yes, I really hope so. I actually stuck my neck out a bit, which goes against what we usually do at Avanza, where we don't talk about upcoming launches. But I was a bit new as CEO, and I think it was this summer that I told you we're working on it and we're developing a solution where you don't have to exchange every time you buy and sell within capital insurance. But we haven't completely finished. We're working a lot on it, and I hope we can launch it soon, but I don't dare give an exact timeline. Learned from experience.

If I look back at 2024, we were still in a higher inflation period. So prices increased; we saw it on our employees, we saw it on services we buy. So it was a fairly broad cost increase. But we also made strategic investments. We have a very clear focus on covering costs against our more transaction-intensive customers, whom we call stock market enthusiasts. We made big improvements in fundamental analysis help, technical analysis help, order placement, etc. So there were investments there too. But it was also a general cost type. We don't have the same price pressure in society now; inflation is where it should be. So going forward, it's more targeted investments we make.

Yes, good question. We run all our calculations on servers that are in our own data centers. That could be fetching an ISIN code and fetching the number of shares of a certain type that you have, then we spit out what the portfolio value is. That kind of calculation is done on our own servers and information is sent with our own network cards. A cloud solution in its simplest form is that these calculations are run on a server that someone else manages. There are three big ones: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft that do that. Why make that move? Why would it be better than someone else's server doing the calculation? That's a good question. This is driven by two things. One is that we believe innovation will happen more in cloud solutions in the future than what is called on-prem, on our premises. And we don't want to miss that. That's a belief about the future, a strategic bet. And then it's very important for us to attract the best people to Avanza and retain the best people. Many at Avanza work in development, and it may be that those coming out of the best technical universities now want to work with what they believe is the future. And I think what they believe is the future is more cloud solutions than on-prem solutions. So that drives us to be in this area where I think more innovation will happen, it will be easier to get new services, etc., and ensure we are where the best want to be.

Yes, there is definitely a focus question. What should Avanza be best at? Do we need to be best at managing a number of servers? Maybe we don't need to do that; there are others who have that as a pure business idea, and they are the cloud providers. So there is definitely an aspect of that.

Yes, 2025 is very much an investment year. We make forward-looking investments to deliver on the strategy we communicated in Q3, which runs to 2030. And we see we can do much more for Private Banking customers and people who could become customers. And we think we can do much more on the occupational pension side. For example, we acquired, or we announced an agreement to acquire Sigmastocks, which has an interesting management of active stock portfolios. So we want to be able to offer larger customers a digital discussion for capital management. It's a bit frustrating today that some of our customers love using us but choose another provider for a portfolio they want to forget about and have someone else manage. That feels bad; it's better that we do it. So we want to offer that. We want to continue to make improvements for this more complex customer segment, and I think it will benefit all our customers because the needs that exist among the more complex customers today will typically all customers want in five to seven years. That's how it's been for the last 10-20 years.

Yes, exactly. So many who are watching this. And now that we have two million customers, there has been talk in recent years that we have become broader, we've done more things for many, maybe that we build the Ferrari car for the most advanced. Do you think we need to find back to that a bit, to build this Ferrari car that will also create value for the broad mass?

Yes, I think so. I think it's Avanza's core. That's how we started; it's for that customer group we started. That's where we've always excelled. We've become very good at handling, I think, all our two million customers who have very different needs, and we should continue to do that. But it's important to have a clear edge. And that edge is customers who are demanding and complex and force us to be on our toes. And being best for those customers, I'm convinced, will ensure we are also best for other customers who today don't have as complex needs. But what is advanced and new today will be what everyone wants and is a bit of a commodity in five years.

No, absolutely. You typically distinguish: you might have a more active portfolio where you want to be involved in investment decisions yourself, be very active; then you might have another portfolio where you more focus on preserving value, not chasing extra returns all the time, lower risk, stable, and want someone else to manage it. So yes, discretionary capital management is by definition a 'do it for me' service. But the typical saver or investor in Sweden has different personas. And the ambition is that customers should be able to come to us with a sum of money and just have it taken care of. You shouldn't have to choose between Auto 6 or Auto 5 or something; someone should just take care of it. Then we have very initiated and interested customers. So my hope and belief is that we should be able to give our customers the opportunity to steer this, set the frameworks themselves. Do you want a bit more large cap exposure, a bit more small cap, a bit more home bias or not, a bit more value or growth tilt? So different packages actually, or the possibility for the customer to tailor a bit according to their preferences, but within those preferences, just let Avanza handle it. Then you don't have to think about reinvesting dividends and things; someone takes care of the management completely.

Yes, I'm not the kind of person who goes and chooses new commission classes on different days and so on. So I think there are others who are more qualified to respond. But I know that some think it doesn't rhyme optimally with our guiding principles: cheaper, better, simpler. Is it simple enough that you have to make choices like that? And I know that some think 'I would like to be able to make choices several times a day when I do my transactions for child savings or other things.' So I know that some customers have that view.

Well, we have to prioritize it with all other things customers want us to do and improve. We have the fantastic situation that we have much more we want to do than we can do in each time period, and that's really fun. So for us, it's very much about prioritizing. Is that more important than getting capital insurance with currency accounts out? Or is that more important than getting a better analysis service that helps customers with fundamental analysis and so on? Everything is weighed against each other constantly.

Yes, I put on my shareholder hat now. I'm a shareholder, I own quite a lot of shares. So the investment case for the Avanza share is very clear: a growth stock. So our shareholders expect us to increase profits, increase dividends to them. Otherwise, we would be traded at a completely different price-earnings multiple. So it's important that we increase our profit over time. Yes, it is. We have several different stakeholders: our customers, our employees, our owners, our regulators. It's about meeting all their needs in a good way. But the shareholders' clear signal to us, for example with the reaction on the stock price yesterday, is that we expect higher profits going forward.

Well, we are a bank, so capital is a bit different than if we were a manufacturing company. I don't feel I have any need to keep more capital in the company to be able to develop the company further. What limits me there is rather the cost I have. The capital we need to ensure we have a low risk level. Avanza has always had and continues to want to keep a very low risk level. We have low risk in the credits we give out, low risk in the investments our treasury department makes in our excess liquidity. It's government exposure, residential mortgage bonds, low risk, central bank certificates, etc. So very low risk. So when we grow, our need for capital increases quite slowly. That's why we can pay out such a large part of our profit and still feel well capitalized. I don't feel like I would want the dividend to be a little smaller so I would have more. That doesn't really fit.

I think taste and preference is a lot about how much risk appetite you want. We have made some adjustments during the year where we have increased the possibility, i.e., the loan-to-value ratio on quite a few stocks. We have become a bit more flexible to meet customer needs, and I think we do that without really taking risk to talk about. When it comes to the treasury portfolio, it's very easy for a company like Avanza to make much more money if you take more risk in the treasury portfolio. We have a lot of money sitting there. We have a balance sheet of 60, I don't remember the exact number, but say 67 billion, and we have lent out about 23 of them. The rest is placed by our treasurer in various securities as I described. But you can do like Silicon Valley Bank, for example, which took very long bets where the interest rate was locked for five to seven years. But on the other side of the balance sheet, we have very short-term deposits because customers can choose to have their deposits elsewhere. And if they do, then the treasurer at Silicon Valley Bank would have to sell those papers. And if the interest rate has gone up at the same time, he would have to sell all those bonds at a fairly large loss. We have very short interest rate duration to keep this risk low. So you should always challenge everything you do to make it better, but we should do that without ending up in such situations. It should be low risk on our balance sheet.

Yes, my focus has been here for 10 months now. My focus has been very much on getting to know the organization, getting to know the employees, understanding strengths and weaknesses, setting a strategy, and starting to execute on the strategy. And that's where we are now. And now we have, in the last three to four months, I think in a very fast way, started delivering on our strategy. So capital allocation, you pay, you propose to the AGM to pay out 82%. Why 70%? etc. So I'll come back to those questions. You can't focus on everything all the time.

Yes, I think that's a good question. First of all, we can create a lot of customer value and a lot of shareholder value I think in Sweden alone. But on the other hand, Sweden is the most advanced savings and investment market. I've worked in several countries, and even in Europe, you can talk about the Nordics sometimes. But I would say the Nordics are ahead; other Nordic countries are clearly behind Sweden, but they are still ahead of continental European countries. So Sweden is like the Premier League. And we are right in the Premier League; we should be able to compete well in the Allsvenskan too. I feel: why leave a lot of shareholder value to someone else when we should be able to do this really well somewhere else under easier conditions? So that's one thing. The other is that it's difficult to enter a new market, so we should be humble. One of our great strengths in Sweden is our brand, built up over 25 years. In another country, the brand is completely neutral on day one, and we have to start filling it. So we should do that with caution, with tact, at the right time, in the right way. Why set a time? Yes, it also puts pressure on ourselves a bit. I think that no-dated activities tend to never be prioritized. So I think it's a good question, and we have a lot left to do in Sweden. I can give an example of how it can affect the organization. I met a group of our recruiters this morning, and we have a job posting out. Someone contacted me and asked if this person could apply even though they don't speak Swedish. Previously, I would have thought 'no, the company language is Swedish'. But just by having this focus now, I realize that at some point we need to open up to be able to hire people who don't understand Swedish. So a small thing, but all these small things bring us closer to being ready.

Oh, well, there are many things that we could do well and that we have chosen not to do. And in the strategy work last spring and summer, which later resulted in the strategy we communicated in Q3, there were many interesting ideas. To mention things, we have a very close relationship with two million customers. We are perceived as a financial player. Shouldn't we also help our customers with property insurance? Property insurance is really about managing risk, just like investments and savings are about managing risk, having capital when needed if something happens in the future, and so on. And property insurance tries to remove extreme risk. It all hangs together, I think, as a risk management plan that we want to do. And it's important for us to maintain focus. For us, trading, savings, investments are priority 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And I think that is much of Avanza's success factor. I have seen other companies that are good at what we do, but they also do many other things, and it becomes very difficult to be the best.

And I, who meet many customers, know that this is recurring and has been around for a long time. Many want to have this Avanza card and pay with it and so on. But it also feels like it's not in focus here now with the new... It's not just a feeling, we have decided that we are not doing that now. And that is despite the fact that I also know that many customers would really wish for this, who would like to have Avanza as their only bank. And to get there, we would need to offer salary accounts, we would need to offer payments, we would need to offer mortgages on a large scale. And partly, if you are dealing with payments, it must be priority 1, 2, 3 because if you can't pay your bill to the Enforcement Authority because Avanza prioritized something else, then you will never become a customer here again. That means our focus on having PR on trading, trading, investments would not be priority, it would become priority two. I think that is dangerous. Then if you look from a shareholder perspective, if we were to serve our customers with mortgages, our two million customers, assume a certain proportion have mortgages following Sweden's share, then we would need to increase our equity from, I think the bank has 4 billion after we paid out the dividend, and we would need like 30 billion just to be able to hold this huge mortgage portfolio to help our customers. No dividends then? No, we would not be able to pay dividends for a very long time. We would earn a lot of money on net interest income and so on, but we would absolutely not be a growth stock when people look at how dividends develop forward. It would be a completely different investment case. So it's equally important to talk about what you should not do as what you should do. Clear focus.

And we should say, we have a whole live where we sit and talk about this as well, so if you want to dive deep into this, you can go in and watch that. Then I sit with product owner Hampus who has worked with this. There are many technical reasons why we had to remove this, and there are features that have not been transferred to the new one. That is why some are a bit dissatisfied. But there are many who are very satisfied too, really, and that is easily forgotten. We must constantly develop ourselves to ensure we meet customers' changing needs and ensure we aspire to be the best all the time. But I know that many customers do not like this change, and that is sad, and I hear it myself. I get a lot of emails, a lot of texts, a lot of phone calls from customers, especially when they are unhappy. Normally, maybe one would have chosen to make this change a little later when one had ensured that even these customers who are now a bit dissatisfied had gotten their features in the new solution. But we needed to get out of a technical solution that the B screen was built on. But I just want to balance that there are many who are very happy with the new one as well. And Hampus actually said to me after we ran the latest live that they measure satisfaction all the time, and you can set ratings, and it went up sharply after the latest live. Then I think that many took the time to learn and try to find features. So take some time yourself to go in and look. And it's not finished; we are under constant development all the time, so there will be a lot of new things. And I know that listeners will think I'm patronizing them, that's not my ambition. But I myself, if I am forced to have a changed experience in some system, I typically become skeptical at first because I can't find the buttons and so on. So that is also a human reaction. But if you have the attitude that we should not make any changes, then Avanza will not be a fun product going forward. And I, who have been a customer for a very long time, know that when the first site came, I felt like 'No', there was something called Avanza Labs where you could go in and test new modules, and then you felt 'No, this...' you are so used to the old. But very quickly you adapt, so it's not more complicated than that.

I don't know if it's my impression that there are more and more newcomers. I think I have seen that during my career in this industry for over 20 years, it has been a recurring theme because it is a very interesting industry. It is capital-light. We talk about how much we could distribute in dividends to our shareholders. It grows, the Swedish savers. And competition is good for us. It keeps us on our toes, just as customers put pressure on us, competitors put pressure on us. So I think that short-term it is painful, more fun, easier if you don't have much competition. But long-term it is worthless. And we have seen this with Volvo, Scania, Atlas Copco, Sandvik. If there is strong competition in a country, it benefits the development of that sector. So I think it's great when it comes to Private Banking. It's natural to want to compete there. Why? Because you can, I think, purely politically and in terms of societal development, whether right or wrong, but those who have a lot of money are becoming more numerous. So the Private Banking segment is growing faster than the general savings market. So it's clear that you want to be there and compete. Then I think that we can do great things in the Private Banking segment, but I think we can do a lot of exciting things via Avanza. I have seen many competitors from the inside, and it will be a lot of fun to take up this fight even more. And this is an area that you work closely with, it feels like as CEO you are everywhere. But I have gotten the feeling that the PB issue is close to your heart, you are passionate about it. Yes, and I think that it doesn't matter if you are a middle manager or a senior manager or sit on the board, you should help develop the business. It's about meeting customers, etc. And it's easier for me to meet some larger customers than to meet a huge number of smaller customers. Then I can certainly be better at being at various customer meetings and so on. But that's why we do this, so that as many as possible can sit and listen.

And we learned a bit there last summer when we had the podcast. Yes, we promise nothing again, but if you could dream, we don't need to promise. Yes, then I would like it to be integrated and seamless. And here you can trade stocks, here you can buy funds, here you can buy a discretionary management mandate, see performance, and aggregated, here is the performance for this discretionary portfolio, and so on. But we are in an early phase. Yes, and there is also something, authorities, shall we say, yes to this as well, right? Yes, but it's exciting. In our industry, in all industries, there is competition. The competition authority can have opinions. That is not the case here because it is such a small company, but in our industry when you are regulated or when you acquire a company that has licenses, then the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority will do an ownership review before we can own this company. That's how the whole industry works. So it is always a fairly long time between signing, that is when you sign an agreement to buy the shares in the company, until the actual shares and money change hands, which is called closing. So the time between signing and closing is quite long in our industry, and that is the interim we are in now. And then we cannot do anything? Or can we start? We like to run fast, so we do a lot. But we don't formally own the company yet. But we have an agreement with the current owners that gives us certain rights and so on. So cool. You also got some questions about acquisitions during the analyst call yesterday. Do you have more such acquisitions on your radar? Not in Sweden, no. It might pop up, but I have nothing that we are working on or feel that we are missing a component that we want to acquire. It's not even at that stage. But abroad, we have a lookout. Many stars have to align. It is quite rare that an interesting company in the right market comes up for sale at the right price and with the right timing. I think it's important to always have a lookout, and then as said, many stars have to align for something to come of it. But we are ready, so when a proposal comes up, we look at it. And we have actually already done that. We have signed an NDA with a company in another country, done due diligence, met management, and concluded that it doesn't fit us well enough. And that is also good training. It's not easy to acquire. No, it really isn't. But it's something you have practiced a lot, right? Yes, I have, actually. And abroad, it might also differ to buy abroad compared to Sweden, just like when investing, reading an American annual report is different from a Swedish one, so it's a bit different.

Yes, and the short answer is yes. We are not done, we are really not done. We are good at many things, but there are areas where others are better and we should not aspire to be best, for example producing analyses of companies. There are others who do that well. So I think we will see more of that. And speaking of that, we had a big change during 2024, which was that Placera changed in that the own editorial team is no longer there, and instead it is outsourced to Affärsvärlden, and there will be analyses on stocks, something we cannot do ourselves in the bank. So how do you share the first time with the new Placera? No, but I think it has been good progress. I think it feels fun. It feels fun that we are investing in Placera, it really is an investment. Yes, it is. And we will make technical improvements, things within Placera that you think we should develop. That's the point. Absolutely, absolutely. Yes. Cool. Mm and.

So our customers showed increased interest in crypto during Q4. I think it amounted to 5% of our turnover from crypto-related products. That's still a part. It was 2% in Q3, so a clear appetite. I haven't actually looked at figures further back, but it typically goes in waves. But we have also seen increased interest in securities, i.e., companies that have a very close connection to various cryptocurrencies, for example MicroStrategy in the US, and so on. So our customers show a great interest, at least during Q4, in crypto. The exposure they get is either via companies like MicroStrategy or via ETPs. But if you want direct exposure to a cryptocurrency, you cannot get that through us today. And in a way, that's a shame because then our customers have to go through other channels that may be more expensive and less transparent. On the other hand, I am trained to evaluate all investments based on cash flows, so I am a bit divided there. But we saw increased interest during Q4. And historically, there was an ambition for Avanza to do some collaboration with such a platform in Sweden. So is it on the radar at all to evaluate it, or are you satisfied with crypto as it is? Because it could be just as good to say that we have it our way. But do you have a stance on how we want to do it? No, no, but I think it would be wrong not to think about how we want to do it going forward. What is best for our customers? Is it right that those who have a great interest in crypto can only get exposure via ETPs and then find other ways? So we don't have a clear view yet. But do you think, because we are a platform, we have a multitude of different instruments to invest in, you say so yourself. But I am trained in cash flows and calculating on that. Same for me, so it doesn't come as naturally to think about something that is more speculative, that someone else is willing to pay more for it. But do you want us to be the platform that offers everything, or do you want us to move towards being able to also apply a filter to judge whether this is wise for customers or not? It's a difficult balance. But on that theme, I have actually invested a bit in crypto-related things, more to ensure that I am on top of things, because when you own something, you become more interested and you pick up things. So it's a way for me to ensure that I, as CEO, am relevant for customers if they put 5% in it. But I think it must align with what Avanza stands for. For example, when we were to introduce unlisted funds or funds that invest in unlisted credits and private equity, we had a lot of discussion about price. Because we show price, costs for the customer is a key word: cheaper. So I think we must always evaluate things we want on our platform against what Avanza stands for, and I think we do that. And it's not that we scrutinize every instrument. I don't know if we have 100,000 ISIN codes on our platform or something, but it's a lot anyway.

Yes, why don't we choose to make everything free as well, one might ask. And I think it's absolutely fantastic that you can get a global portfolio exposure for eight basis points through our Avanza Global. Absolutely fantastic that you can get exposure to Large Cap in Stockholm for zero bps. So I think we are incredibly customer-friendly on price generally. Then you can always discuss specific price points and argue that shouldn't you make it better, and it's important for us to always think about that. But I think it's important to take a step back: how much does it actually cost to manage a portfolio at Avanza? And there I think we are very competitive. And I answered a similar question, I think, if you look at where most of the money goes, for example fund fees. Yes, it's global funds and then Swedish funds in a longer perspective, not the last year. And there, eight basis points for a global fund and then a Swedish fund like Avanza Zero which is completely free, so it doesn't get cheaper than that. And there was actually also a question about Avanza Zero, whether it is only a cost for us or if we have any opportunity to make money on it. We always have opportunities to make changes, but we don't earn anything on it. It is a pure cost to deliver a fantastic service to our customers. And it also serves to get Swedes into saving, we have lowered the threshold to start saving, so it fulfills a broader societal view. We turned 25 last year, and together with other actors, we have helped lower costs for trading stocks in Sweden over these 25 years. And now there are newcomers, as you have experienced before. Do you feel that we still have a price advantage to become even cheaper, or are we losing it when competitors come who maybe pay back fund kickbacks or lower a certain price point? A company must be sustainable, it must have a business model that ensures it exists in the future. So you cannot have zero price to customers because then the company won't exist. And customers don't like that because they want to conduct their financial transactions with a stable party. We have seen several players come in, we saw The Giro from Holland, we saw Free Trade from the UK, which I think both offered free trading. But they still didn't win over customers; both had to shut down because the overall service must be good enough. And at Avanza, to run your Swedish transactions with someone else is almost a dereliction of duty, with the possibility of internal matching with us. So it's much more than just a price package. We should care about our customers and we should care about continuing to develop this market.

Yes, he will become head of the product organization, which is a very central part of Avanza. It is divided into a number of smaller groups: trading, mortgages, becoming a customer, and so on. So very central for managing the experience at Avanza and improving it. So his first task will be to get to know the colleagues, get to know the company, and then thereafter to help increase the pace on Strategy 2030. And what background does he have that made you think he is the right product chief for us? He is a former professional volleyball player. Oh, cool, extremely tall, almost scary when you stand and talk to him. We saw him at the Christmas party and he was a head taller than everyone else, if not two. But jokes aside, he likes to win, he likes to win exactly. And he has had leading positions in other companies that are far ahead in modern product development. So he likes stocks, he likes Avanza. Fun. And then we have a Head of Private and Investment Banking. Doesn't sound very Avanza-like title, but it was the best we could do because it shows that it is Private Banking and Investment Banking, corporate brokerage. Here someone is on the way in, or we are recruiting. So we will group together three units: Private Banking, where Private Banking Pro lies, together with the brokerage that handles more complex orders, and then Corporate Finance which helps companies with issuing new shares or buying and selling companies. All of these target larger and more complex customers, and they hang together, I think. It's business in the highest degree. So we want to bring that together and we want a good head to drive that business forward, and I think we can do much more there. And I mean, Private Banking is a clear part of the strategy, but there are more things we can do there. I haven't met candidates yet. So there has been a bit of focus on Q4 here until yesterday, but now full focus forward, and that process started already before Christmas. And both these roles will be in the management group. Yes, so we get even more product, even more business. That's the point. You want it more in the leadership? Was that important? Yes, I think it's always important in a company that business is at the center. So it will be great. We already have a strong management group, but it will become even better.

No, it's probably lower than it is on yours and Douglas's, I think. So I almost have to pass it on to you. Do you have anything in the pipeline? We have an additional colleague who is head of merch, and also Thomas 'Blomman' Blomqvist, so they will probably help with this. But it would be a bit cool. But at the same time, things that you can't just buy, but that you have to earn in some way, become more attractive. Was it he who had made that Avanza cap that the staff got? We got it for Christmas, all staff, and then we have sent it out to some selected ones. And I remember a board meeting maybe in December, someone on the board managed to get news that we had this. It became an incredible focus from these individuals to have that cap. I think they managed to solve it in the end. Very, very good.

Yes, our view today is that as a customer, you don't need to worry about different currencies. You just need to ensure you have enough money in your account to make a purchase, and when you sell, you get back Swedish kronor. It's an incredibly smooth service. It's like automatic transmission in a car. Exactly, it's automatic transmission. For it to be worth having manual transmission, you might need to be into rallying, otherwise it's not worth it. And for it to be worth handling multiple currencies, you need to be doing very frequent trades abroad, otherwise it's not worth it in our view. So that's why we target this towards Private Banking and Pro customers, who are more transaction-intensive. Could one think that in this building of the Ferrari we talked about, later push it down to everyone, that in the future it could become a broader product for everyone? Is that on the map or ruled out? I haven't thought about it now, but I think there is a clear analogy with what I talked about earlier: we want to ensure we are really good for the most complex and challenging customers, because their needs today will probably be the needs of those with more ordinary needs in five years. With that analogy, it's not impossible.

Yes, and then, good question. And then the question is: What does it cost to acquire a customer here? As this person has calculated, it is the marketing costs we report, divided by our 171,000 customers we got in 2024. I would guess, I recognize the ballpark of this figure. But there are many more costs we have to get customers; we have a whole team that works to make it as easy as possible to become a customer, and so on. So the real costs are probably higher, but we have very low customer acquisition costs. That is due to our very strong brand and our strong ambassadors among our customers. The typical way to become a customer is to be recommended by a friend or family. I am a customer at Avanza, it's great, I think you should do it too. But we are actually increasing our marketing costs in our budget for 2025 a bit. It is partly about strengthening the brand for Private Banking, where our Private Banking customers are very willing to recommend us because they apparently think the service is good. This is external data, but on the question 'Do you know the brand Avanza Private Banking?' it is very low. So we have a job to do there. But we want to hold on to our money.