JDC Group AG (JDC) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Welcome to the earnings call regarding the H1 figures for 2026 of the JDC Group AG. The company CEO, Dr. Sebastian Grabmeier, and CFO, Ralf Conrad, as well as COO, Dr. Ramona Evans, will guide you through the figures in a moment, followed by a Q&A session via audio line and chat. And with that said, I hand over to you, Mr. Grabmeier.

Yeah, thank you, Mara, for the warm welcome. also welcome from our side from the management board of jdc you can see it's challenging times but again we could deliver a record half year and also a very good q2 2026 so my name is sebastian co-founder and ceo of jdc group and with me the call is my partner ralph and my colleague ramona so Ralf says hello hi hi Ralf here responsible for finance M&A and IT and Ramona hi everyone I'm Ramona and I'm the COO and responsible for the operations of the JDC group excellent yeah you can see that all our KPIs are knowing just one direction up right so obviously we are a platform company we are taking in all the data of all the product companies that's more than 250 insurance groups the investment platforms the mortgaging banks so now we serve about 2.5 million customers with more than 400 employees we have basically every financial product in the market that has some quality available on the platform and obviously now we are quite engaged for the last two and a half years to have more and more ai tools supporting our intermediary clients and also our end clients via our allesmains app so you can see that obviously the economic environment in germany is still challenging you can see that especially the consumer climate is not up again we have some bad disappointments that we live through in germany by our government i think it's from all democracy in the world still the least loved government with like 16 support rate and more than 75 percent now are are not content with the work of the government so this means that the atmosphere uh the political surrounding is not really positive for consumer business and you see some effects of the de-industrialization of germany in the labor market so you see that uh it's it's still on a very high uh so so employment is still on a very high level and still record level but still the uh the quotas of the unemployed that goes up a little bit and also the macroeconomic environment is not really giving us tailwinds inflation is still up due to high energy prices so uh yeah and the insurance market capital markets are rather are flattish even if we saw some record highs also in the german ducks so geopolitics are a burden and that's always interesting and that's the very famous german angst that wars wherever they are are first hitting german economy more than any other even of countries that are closer so overall the environment is quite difficult but still we're very positive that we could deliver very good results against the backdrop of these factors yeah you can see on the broker platform uh there is there was some pressure on new orders we show you that we could have a turnaround here from minus figures in new orders we are now at positive figures we show you in a minute but still the high volume business is not really back in the market so especially life insurance and pension planning there is a little delay and we see that this will go up by q4 at the latest but right now it's still quite low and this is always corresponding in higher cancellation rates as obviously the cancellations of the past come to lower standards or volumes this year and this is also then having some impact on the turnover figures as we always reporting net figures and also the investment assets they go up and up that's still volatile but this is rather a positive impact right now. And on the lead platform, we see that the surge volume for financial products is at a historical low. Even if the overall surge volume is going up, financial products are not in favor of the consumers right now. And also this means that the acquisition costs for contracts is increasing. So leads are becoming more expensive. And this means also that there's some pressure on the lead markets as well. And obviously then the marketing appetite for financial institutions is quite low and but i think this will turn around especially uh we'll talk more about the alters for so the new pension regulation of the german government that will start january 1st and will lead to a big wave of marketing euros spent starting after the summer break so against this backdrop again i think we're doing quite fine on the platform so the number of orders that we had to report the first time in many years a minus in cube one we had the turnaround so over the first half year we're now at a plus five percent so that's coming back but again not the high volume orders but a lot of pnc orders here on the number of contact could be misleading the reason for this little minus here is we did some quality measures that means we have a new filter that we use to bring down the number of revocations so basically the customer he initiates a transfer of contract and then he has a withdrawal period and these revocations hurt the insurance companies as obviously it's quite an effort and then if the client revokes it then the transfer has to be reversed so we put in some filters in here that we just passed through contracts with a very high probability of being transferred in the end to the insurance companies and this does not have an economic effect in the end because we lose the transfers that are revoked anyway so this economic is rather a flat number and but very very good for the long-term view is that the number these figures that we show on the volume of the assets under management it's up 18 percent that means the trader fees we receive on investment will be up considerably in the next quarters to come. And also the annual net premium, which is a direct KPI for all the recurring revenue that we are receiving in the next quarters is up 11%. So now we're quite proud as a management team that we can show that all the little slag or downturn or pothole in the new business, we can more than compensate by the recurring income that is also promising more income in the future and then you can see this is a new record half year it's not only the best first half year we ever had it's also topping the second half year in 2025 so turnover is up 18.7 percent and then And Ralph will in a minute explain the proforma figures that we're showing because we did a little different. Yeah, we basically treating the accruals by performance fees a little bit different this year than last year. So there's four million effect there. But Ralph will go into detail here. And also EBDA is up almost 70 percent. So very good numbers. but obviously development is mostly driven by FMK. So FMK just performs as it should. We have very nice figures also not only in turnover, but also in EBT just as planned. So we're happy here. And also even if our platform is still suffering, as I said, from this crisis environment, yeah, we are at a very good path to develop the platform further.

And again, new business will be back into four. so we're really happy uh that we also can stay at our guidance as you're used to now i explained what sebastian explained a minute ago when our customers our brokers go to their customers they can arrange contracts asset management contracts with performance fees means that the customer pays a performance fee if the performance of the depot is more than x or y or better than hurdle z we calculate these performance fees we we manage that we process that we pay that out so it's part of our pnl and in the first half year we had accruals for this performance fee of 4 million euros first of year 2025 and 600 000 euros in in ebitda and although the market develops very good you see the line is msi development and we expect that the performance fees will be higher than in 2025 we nevertheless decided not to do this accruals in this year because as sebastian mentioned we have this geopolitical uncertainties and performance fees payday is the 31st of december and yeah this was our decision for cautious reasons and that's the reason why we show the figures pro forma we just deduct in 2025 4 million euros in turnover and 600 000 euros in ebda having said this let's go into the numbers um the turnover grew by 25.5 percent to 68.6 million euros in the second quarter 22.8 percent uh in the first half year uh 230 uh 143.5 million euros you can see here what sebastian mentioned that new business is coming back the growth is increasing a growth in the second quarter is better than in the first quarter and better than in the total first half of the year especially in advisor tech segment we grew by 30.6 percent to 58.3 million euros 26.1 percent 224 million euros in the first half year leading us to a gross profit growth of 29 percent in the second quarter and 26.7 percent in the first half year ebda development is very nice from our point of view a plus of more than 100 percent in the second quarter from 2.9 to 6.4 million euros and the development in the first half year is with 82.7 percent also nice from 7.9 to 14.5 million euros if you are interested in the contribution of fmk here we want to be transparent on this it's a turnover in q2 of 12 million euros and an ebitda contribution of three and a half and in the first half year it's in turnover contribution of 22 million euros and an EBITDA contribution of around 7 million euros okay let's look at the development by quarter and what we can see here is that 2026 shows a very normal seasonal pattern so far we starting with a good q1 this was a record q1 as you remember then even as the Q2 is also the strongest Q2 in JDC's history it's weaker than the first quarter now we are in the summer season we expect a weaker Q3 than Q4 and in this year especially a very good fourth quarter for two reasons the first is that as already mentioned new business is coming back and the second reason is that we expect relevant effects from the regulation on both the broker platform and fmk and ramona will give you some more detail on this later on yeah how is the composition of turnover growth the 120.9 million euros It became 143.5 million euros. The main contribution was our new segment rating comparison lead business by 22.6 million euros. And thereof, the majority, of course, FMK advisory contributed 8%. The major customers contributed 9%. And we have still a weaker IFA business, better than in the first quarter, but still uh weaker than in the previous year with a minus of four percent and if you look at the turnover split um 51 now um is coming from the ifa business um more than 25 from major customers uh and in the meantime more than 20 percent um by uh or a new um uh um yeah segment rating comparison and lead business let's go into the advisor tech numbers advisor tech grew by 30.6 percent in the second quarters to 58.3 million euros which is a growth of 26.1 percent over the first half years both first half year and second quarter are record high numbers as mentioned the gross profit increased by approximately 40 percent which is a very good development to 14.8 million euros in in q2 and in the first half year by 34.7 percent to 31.8 million euros the costs are up a little bit um four percent in depreciation five percent in personal and uh um 13 in um um 13 in uh um in other operating expenses then um and the reason is uh mainly that we invest a lot in i.t um the depreciation is increasing because of the cost of it platform personal expenses are up mainly because of the development in our it team the ai team and it's the same with other operating expenses there we have a a second issue and that that is that we increased the spendings marketing spendings for the promotion of the jdc platform in the broker market yeah ebitda was up 100 from 2.4 to 5.9 million euros um in the second quarter and by 90 percent um from 7.4 to 14.1 million euros um in the first six months yeah um advisory um shows also uh stable development good development um revenue grew by 9.4 percent um in the first and second quarter and in the first half year by eight percent from 26.7 to 28.8 million euros the cross profit developed in the same direction leading us to an ebitda development of 11.9 in the second quarter from 1.3 to 1.5 million euros and from 2.5 to 2.7 million euros in the first six months which is a growth of 6.3 percent yeah let's come to the cash flow statement which is next i think yes we started the year with a cash of 36 million euros we could show very good development in operational cash flow in the first half year with 8.5 million euros 2 million euros more than in the previous year driven by the operational ebitda development we had a very small investment activities with minus 1.2 million euros which is 1.4 million euros less than in the previous year but we had a high negative cash flow from financing activities with 8.4 million euros And the reason is that, two reasons, the first is you might remember, we had this tender offer where we bought back 220,000 shares or 222,000 shares for in total 5 million euros. That's part of this number. And the second is we issued our Nordic bond with a size of 70 million euros in August 2025. So the interest payments for the Nordic bond are included in the first half year, 2026, but not included in the first half year, 2025. And then we ended up at a cash balance of 35 million euros. And when I looked at it, I thought that's not a very high number. But the reason is for if you look at the liquidity curve of JDC, end of June is the low point over the year because the trailer fees for the second quarter, they start in July and August. and as of today i just looked into the accounts two hours ago we are at like 45 million euros cash on hand in the group yeah we have no changes in our bond structure we still have our german mittelstands bond that is due 2028 and the nordic bond that is due 2029 um the middle chance bond has a coupon of seven percent uh and the nordic bond has a coupon of now six point six nine percent is it's a rolling uh coupon it's uribor plus uh plus uh 450 basis points and as uribor has increased a little bit uh our coupon has increased a little bit uh if you compare this to uh to previous um calls that we that we showed you we have call options on both bonds but no decisions made there yet yeah the development of the share price on law on the long term i think we can say it's still a long-term positive trend we are not so happy with the development of the share price over the last 20 months or 24 months because share price did not follow the um uh the operational performance of um of the group now we saw a little turnaround um at the uh price of 20 share price going up again um yeah we're working uh um hard on um on operational performance and i hope that um that will show um up in the share price as well the shareholder base is um still stable um no changes um management has 11 percent provincial vkp um six percent uh great west 27 percent um what we now know is that teslin added some shares um and are now at more than seven percent um so that's new uh for us so we will change the um the chart here um and we hold 369 000 treasury shares on our hand thank you raf and a very warm welcome also from my side here and building on the financial results you've just seen i'd like to share three operational highlights that help bring those numbers to life and hopefully they also provide some perspectives on the opportunities we have

ahead first topic is that we believe oh just go one back yeah the first topic um is that we think that we are very well positioned for the altars for the depot that's germany's and new state subsidized private retirement account it's very in german a lot easier to say um second is that fmk is becoming a visibility asset in ai driven search environments and we brought some numbers to illustrate that for you and the third spotlight that we like to share to you with you today is ai and i guess operational excellence remains a key driver of our scalability we have achieved significant efficiency improvement through ai over the last years and we would like to share some examples with you about that no jim our next one thank you So Altersvorsorge Depot. For our non-German audience, the Altersvorsorge Depot is the new state-subsidized private retirement account in Germany. It's launching on January 1st of next year and it's going to replace the old Riesda pension. And there are two broad groups of product providers that offer solutions for this. It's on the one side the insurance carriers and on the other side banks and especially also the new neo-banks. And the good news is, regardless of which route the customer takes, JDC stands to benefit. So in Germany, the traditional way of building retirement savings is going through insurance products, because they also cover the longevity risk. And if a customer decides to go that route and work with a broker, that's just our bread and butter business. So there's nothing new there for us, really. but if the customer decides to take out a brokerage account with a bank which he can do in this new scheme then we can benefit through our subsidiary fmk as banks and especially new banks are among its largest customers so that's the good news is that as a company we are in a unique position to win in both scenarios and then let's just shed some let's just shed some light on how how we support our brokers to become ready for DAVD. We are doing a lot of trainings right now to educate our brokers and those trainings are in very high demand. Our head of broker sales just wrote me a couple of hours ago that the last training yesterday had 400 attendants. It's a very long time that we have trainings that were so much in demand as this one. So the entire market is really discussing this topic and everybody is getting ready for this and as well we also provide tools for the brokers to compare on the one side like what's more attractive Teresa or the new RVD so for some people it makes sense to close and in retirement plan this year before the new RVD comes into place but it also helps to decide should I switch plans or is it reasonable for me to take out a new plan So we have built some sophisticated tools to help the broker to really give a good consultation to the end customers. So, but that's just a little bit business as usual. And the second part is new to us, Gmail. so now we also have fmk in our group and um fmk is also uh already ready um for the um for the for the demand um all the uh all the websites they're already live um so even if you can buy the product only in january now you can get all the informations you need um all the contents on all the websites is already live and starting next month there will also be an educated calculator available on all their websites so fmk is prepared as well and the market potential is clearly substantial as you can see also on the left side and of course our ambition is to capture the largest possible share of this opportunity so again insurance and banks and jdc stands to profit in both ways we cannot we cannot really tell the customer which way to go the customer decides in the end but in this scenario we are in a pretty unique position in the market to benefit either way so that's about the rvd the next highlight i would like to share with you are the developments in the ai driven searches and now with the help of external providers we are able to bring greater transparency to fmk's visibility in the large language model based searches we all know that fmk is already highly successful in the traditional zia environment and now we can also see that fmk is very well positioned in the emerging ai driven ecosystems so and for personal finance related prompts in chat gbt and google ai And in 70% of the answers, one of FMK portals appears as the cited source. It's a very impressive result and puts FMK also very well ahead of the competitors, as you can see here, compared to Finance Tip or even Check24. And there are several reasons for this, and just let me highlight two of them. The first of them is that FMK provides the financial comparison content for major media brands such as Handelsblatt and Antifa, etc. And these brands, of course, have built like journalistic credibility over decades. So they are very well presented in the training of the ecosystems of Google and OpenAI, so FMK is recognized as an expert and not as an advertiser and I guess that's very difficult to replicate. That's the one reason for why FMK is so successful in the AI tools and the second one is also that FMK has developed a fully AI ready content infrastructure that makes it very easy for these LLMs to access, understand and process its content. So of course the tools like the content of fmk so right now in germany um yeah jim i went back right now in germany um the llm tombs are not getting monetized yet so there is no advertisement so we expect this going to be changed with chat gbt over the next couple of years years weeks so we expect chat gbt to be the first one in germany to launch advertisements And I guess FMK will also be here in the position to be one of the first partners who are able to get that volume in the market. Thank you. And the third spotlight is on AI. And over the last couple of earnings call we have presented AI tools especially designed for brokers. and today i would like to show you how ai is also helping us to scale our core platform business i brought two examples um and to my the first example is contract transfers and in 2020 in 2023 we processed fewer than 400 000 transfers and this year we are expecting about 720 000 uh transfers in other words we are processing almost twice as many transactions as before and not only has the team managed this without any additional staff but we even have reduced the number of ftes by about 15 so and overall um as a result our personal cost per unit have declined by almost 50 so i will spare you the technical details um on how we did this but one One important thing is that whenever we use AI solutions, they are not standalone tools in the back end. They are fully integrated. And I guess this is also why they deliver tangible results. That's about the contract transfer. In general, the next topic that I brought with you is also something very nice. It's the rate of straight through processing or dark processing or let's call it in it's a little bit the holy grail of the operations so that means that from end to end there is no manual interference the entire process is completely done in a fully automated way so when in 2023 our processing ratio was with documents 88 percent which is already a very high number and now and in just a few years we have raised this to 94 and obviously you can imagine moving from zero to 20 percent automation is relatively straightforward but improving from improving from 88 to 94 is a completely different challenge as every additional percentage point requires a very high level of sophistication in the automation capabilities So we are very proud about that development and happy to proceed further in the next couple of years. So before I hand back to you, Sebastian, I'd like to thank our colleagues across the entire group because behind every number we have presented today are people who work very hard and very diligent and embrace all the new technologies that we have and a new way of working. So thank you guys very much for your work and it's a pleasure to work with you.

Now back to you, Sebastian. yeah thank you very much ramona as everybody can hear she's not only a chief operating officer but also head of hr thank you ramona yeah coming to the guidance obviously uh we have an ambitious guidance out there as we still expect turnover to reach 300 to 330 million euros and therefore ebitda to grow to 35 to 38 millions i think we are still on track especially against the backdrop that we see this rebound at a new business we see that yeah quarter to a quarter we will have more new business and then in q4 when all the marketing euros come in not only will this profit or benefit fmk directly we expect that their best months to come especially november december when all these marketing campaigns are in full force but also this will have a positive effect on the rest of our sales channels especially the broker channel because the overall um the appetite for financial products especially retirement planning products will come back if this is in the in the news in all kind of advertising campaigns people think about their pension plans especially in the months which are focused to these topics especially november december so we think that especially this drive towards return-oriented investment in ETF products will give all these retirement markets a strong boost. And even if some of the market share goes to standard products, as you might know, the state made a regulation that for every kind of product, there has to be a standard product with a very low commission rate. But this is only like the start of the advice or advisory job because then obviously as Ramona pointed out the client has to decide whether the old Rista regime is better for him or the new AVD regime is better for him that depends mostly on the number of kids you're subsidizing but then also then the standard product is very simple and basic and basically ties you into a very low-key investment product as compared to other products that give you also cover for longevity risk where the the payments do not just stop at 85 years but give you payments over until your lifetime for example or give you a guarantee on your payments that you pay into the system so we think there's a lot of demand for advice ahead and this will benefit all kinds of sales channels especially the also the broker channel so this is why we think um we can stay with this guidance uh and we just like uh yeah run through these uh a little bit drought times that we see now and then we're looking forward to have a really uh good and thriving year in business 2026. right now we're at the end of our presentation but we're happy to take all questions that you might have and i could see uh amara that there were some first questions already yes there are there are also a lot of risen hands right now

so first of all thank you very much for your presentation um and ladies and gentlemen now it's your turn we are opening the q and a session um i would if you would like to ask questions in person via audio line um you can click on the raise hand button below additionally we are all you are also welcome to post your questions in our chat and i will read them out loud for you i would say we are starting with mr hinke i just sent you an invite to unmute yourself so you may do so now i can see that you have unmuted yourself can you please say something

because we cannot hear you at the moment can you hear me now yes hello ah fantastic thank you very much um yeah i have a couple of questions if i may um first of all um i would like to discuss a little bit uh the contribution of fmk is my interpretation correct that um the new uh segment rating comparison and um business lead business is that is that the contribution of fmk then in the first half of the year or is it not not totally but uh um most of it yes we have some some other uh the turnover of mong and morgan and our software fees that we

are also included but as mentioned in the first half year we have around 22 million euros of turnover from fmk can you also say something on the EBITDA contribution yes I did it during the presentation but again EBITDA contribution in the first half year is around 7 million euros And in Q2, turnover contribution was 12 million euros and EBITDA was three and a half million euros.

Perfect. Thank you. Then I admit I have a little bit of difficulties to understand the guidance. So you say that it will probably be at the lower bound of the guided corridor. at the same time you say and i think with with all good right that you expect a positive effect from the government uh government sponsored retirement product um is that because of these uh accruals that you um will not book this year that you ex that you lowered the guidance a little bit or is it really that you see here the risk of of um of as you as you alluded to the macroeconomic climate etc so the question would be is it because of the accrual so a more technical item or is because of a world climate etc i think the important part is that we did not lower the guidance.

It's just that we give the expectation that we can see this little bit slow down in the new business. But as you said, we do hope that the performance fees come in. And there's a very strong now, yes, also sentiment that this will all go right here. So if the world capital markets stay as they are there will be a a higher single digit number in of millions coming in as turnover and also almost a million in uh in ebta from what we see right now but obviously right i don't want to hear end of the year if something goes wrong that how could you book it in in the first half year if it was not a done deal right so it's just a number of uh yeah just a question of precaution as ralph said and um we'll get there eventually and also we think that um yeah the new business will come back as we said um due to the regulation um so yeah happy to keep the guidance as it is

but obviously like if we have now 143 out of uh 300 to 330 right then we want to be cautious and say like well it might not be in the upper end but maybe sebastian let me add to the question that if you calculate very easy with the rule of three it's the best the best rule and you use the pro forma figures 2025 so on the deduction of the 4 million euros turnover and then 600 000 ebda you'll end up within the guidance so there was another question in the in the chat if we think that it would be now more difficult to reach the guidance we are still confident to reach the guidance because of this easy calculation of course and the effects that we explained the first is we see new businesses coming back we have this big altars forzorger depot thing at the end of the year that will drive the business and we have all these uh possible performance fee that we did not accrue uh um now in the first half year and that's the reason why we still keep the guidance that's understood thank you very much and my last two questions were probably for ramona

the the um the first one on avd on the avd product um you outlined two scenarios where how customers can get to this product. Which scenario would be the better one for JDC? The traditional broker model or the one over the banks and then using FMK for this route to the market? Second question on that, the strong performance of the FMA portals in AI searches. how sustainable would you think that is i mean um we learned from the search machines google etc that this can change very quickly how sustainable is now the this very strong performance of fmk and ai portals thanks yeah thank you very much for your questions as i said we are very open to both lines of business and um it very much depends on let's say on the marketing budgets of the large neobanks we think that they are going to invest a

lot of they are going to invest a lot to get the entire like first wave of AVDs into their portfolio so it's not really like for us it's both sides it's okay because both sides are one-off business in the insurance as well as in the banking uh segment so i'm uh i'm actually very uh i don't have a strong preference on what the customer decides to do and in the end it's also um it's it's very hard to steer a customer towards a certain channel check 24 that has tried to do that in for a very long time and still like less than 10 percent of german insurance um business is online so in my if you ask me what i think is going to happen is that the customer behavior is very steady in germany and um and customers are afraid that they live longer than they have money and that's one of the big pluses for the insurance company side so i don't think that customer behavior will change drastically so i feel that the majority of the business will probably go to the insurance business and the banking business is an add-on but we will see in the future how the customer decides that's for your first question and the other one how sustainable is the ai progress right now the llm business is a little bit like zeo so of course there can be changes however i don't think that the advance the progress and the advanced stage that fmk is in right now it's not very easy to to go there and as i said fmk is operating under brands like 100 blood and ntv and they have a very long journalistic reputation and it's very hard for a newcomer to you know get the same reputation as the largest economic newspapers

in germany so i'm pretty sure that they do have an an advantage here and it's i'm very difficult for uh for any other newcomer to get into the business uh in that in that way and but and if i may mona if i may add it's important to understand that disadvantage is not capitalized yet yeah because chat gpt does not offer advertisement in germany lllm advertising is now beginning all over the world and we hope someday in the future maybe this year the chat gpt will open the advertising in in germany and then fmk will be there and the the high ratio of being the source with 70 percent uh will be the reason um that we will make relevant turnovers there okay thank you very much thank you so much thank you much we have another risen hand by mr for back i just sent you an invitation to unmute yourself yeah i hope you can hear me yes perfectly hello great um hi another question on guidance please um you mentioned that the performance fees that you have not accrued for in age one but uh can you clarify whether those are already included in your guidance and by how much um good question yes they are included in the guidance um and uh they um i think we calculated in in the business planning uh um at a comparable level uh um of the last year no no no no we have calculated them lower but i'm not uh i'm i'm not sure sorry marius i i have to deliver this afterwards i can give you the uh the detailed numbers later on no worries um second question on the abd as well uh i also see a big shift here

when it comes to pension savings and you mentioned that you probably will see a lot of it going to insurances. Do you have already an idea on monetization from those AVD accounts that we will see? Do you think that you will get a one-off fee once a customer signs a contract?

Do you plan to participate in the ongoing payments or what is your view on that it's it's also the it's very hard to tell as basically the market is marveling what's going to happen i think there will be some market share for all the new brokers and the new banks especially the younger clients obviously right so because they are uh agnostic whether they buy insurance or or a capital markets product and they will rather turn to ETFs but that's not a client yet so I think that's rather as Ramona said an add-on to the existing business so it does not really matter with if insurance companies cannot conquer a lot of these new clients businesses and then if you look at the insurance side then the big question is how much will be covered by the standard product that is really low in cost and therefore does not give you big one-offs we rather think that as Ramona pointed out that people want to go if they want to go to insurance products they do not want to the payments to end at age 85 i think that's a threat to especially a lot of female clients because obviously if you're young today you you can expect to live 90 plus and it it's it's it would be very hard to have a pension system that cuts you off when you need it most when you have the most expense for your health bills. So I think that people will rather go to one guaranteed or 80% guaranteed products and then longevity products that also pay 85 plus. And these products, and that's important to know, the commission is not capped or limited or the costs are not limited. Therefore, we expect that on the advisory side and the broker side, maybe 75 to 80% of all business will go into quite conservative or similar products as we see in the markets today. And only like a small portion will go to standard products and a small portion will go to capital markets or sold capital markets products. But obviously, all these views are very difficult as they are far out in the future. We will see how it comes out. But on the other hand, we talked about this. We are not expecting this huge big party where turnover triples next year. We don't see this either. But in the end, having more market, because there's more consumers asking for retirement plans and have a little bit lower market share, I think this will give like a decent plus development for the broker markets.

Sebastian, could you shortly state on commission issues regarding the R4D? There was a question in the chat that commissions, are they going down with the R4D or not?

Yeah, so we expect that obviously the standard state product has a lower cost base, right? And if you see a 1% cap per year in the cost base, there's not much one-off for commissions left. But obviously, in an advisory world where most of the products are not the standard product, but are products that are, let's say, more modern life insurance products, we expect the commission rates to go down a little bit, let's say 15 to 20%. but then there will be a lot of more market that overcompensates for a little bit lower commission. That's our best guess here.

All right. And do you expect this to be a more recurring fee or a one-off fee?

It will also... So what we could learn from the last reforms is that especially the broker market is very lazy to change. and this is what also the insurance companies learned and now what in their talks we have with them what they offer is that the the model is quite the same only that the commission rates are slightly lower and that's also what we're expecting so that means basically a one-off slightly lower but still high that's important yes okay maybe one last question from my side when I look at AUMs and the premium volumes they are up double digit whereas organic revenues grew only like single digit could you explain this gap and when should we expect this to close or more precisely should we expect revenues to pick up speed accordingly to the operating development in AUM and premium volumes yeah so obviously this this this this little gap in the new business and as we said we expect new business to be back in q4 right so it's uh summer will still be rather okay-ish but uh but then in q4 we will see a pickup and then the the picture will normalize if you want and but again we like this increases in the base for our recurring business especially the insurance premiums and the the volumes of the assets because that's the income of the future on top, right? So it's, yes, one-offs are important for this year and this quarter, but the future lies in all these recurring payments that we are aggregating.

Great, thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Vorberg. We have another risen hand by Mr. De Jong. I just sent you an invite to unmute yourself. Can you hear us?

Can you hear me? Yes, okay, hello. Hello, good afternoon, gentlemen, and Ramona, of course. Yeah, just a clarification on the AVD side. Should I assume that that is completely new clients? In contrast, let's head to the increasing new business that you expect also in the second half of the year, which is probably existing clients. Is that right to assume?

Well, the first important thing to know is there's about 12 million clients that have a RISTA contract, right? And they need a checkup whether RISTA is still the best system for them or whether they should change in AVD starting January. And on the other hand, as Ramona pointed out, there will be new clients for RISTA also because now it comes clear that the regime is changing. And as I said, if you have many kids and you have to expect a lot of subsidies from the state, then you should still go into a RISTA client. Although the AVD is the new thing and so much better, as everybody says, you should still go and reach the contract. So, yes, there is a lot of advisory demand on the existing client base. But then, obviously, the AVD tries to capture all these ETF-driven investment new kind of clients on top that come on top of the insurance clients that insurance would capture anyways.

Thanks.

And Ramona, if you look at the LLM space, what are the competition doing? What's BlauDirect doing? What's Netfons doing? Are they also active in that field? Or is there any competition coming for FMK?

Or how should we see that? um like the competition that that uh that fmk with its current business model had i i like competitors like finance model uh finance tip or checkpoint 20 track 24 are the ones that i show to you on the slide but they are not nearly as far as uh yes they are not nearly as successful as fmk and so i have to ask again you mentioned two or three names i like just acoustically i didn't i didn't get them i think they're blood direct in the net ones ah okay i don't think that they are in any way near a a similar business model please correct me raf or sebastian if

no they are not not and they are of course also active in generating leads for their customers but not in the size that fmk is able to and regarding the ai efforts of course all our competitors as well invest a lot into ai to improve the internal processes and make the work more easy for the brokers so that's we are we are all very active in this space okay and then finally uh on on the 20 million bonds uh so you have call option this year later this year what would be the considerations to let's say to redeem or to call it depending on on cash situation how many cash do we generate this year and And I personally don't think that it makes sense to redeem it with the 7% and pay 101.5% and then refinance it with a Nordic bond, with a rolling interest rate, which could be more than 7%, must not be, but could be. I don't think that will happen. If we have enough cash on hand and it makes sense to redeem it, then we will do it uh if not i don't think that we we will refinance it with the uh i'm not equal thank you welcome thank you very much mr leon we have a couple of questions in our chat box left the first would be is the major customers revenue purely contract transfers of large customers existing contracts to the platform would it be fair to say that evita is no longer a good proxy for fcf that's the second question uh let's go to the first question um yes it's only from the large customers but no it's not only contract transfers it's also a new business from the large customers and that's the major customer business and the second question is is it fair to say that ebitda is no longer a good proxy for fcf for free free cash flow i don't think it's fair to say that but what we can observe is with the improving relevance of fmk the the cash flow profile of the group changed a little bit because they don't receive the commissions before they pay them out they at first have to invest into google marketing and then get the money from from their customers on the one hand and the second reason is that we have to cash we have tax losses carried forward and fmk pays taxes so that are the two reasons why it's different and yes it changes a little bit but i think we have to work on jesper that was your question to make this more clear and give you maybe better guidance on how EBITDA and cash flow work together plus interest that we pay now but obviously yeah and the next question of Jesper was the expected tax rate for 26 and 27 thanks to the back office I can answer it and our expected tax rate for this year is around 15 percent and for the next year the answer was hard to say between 15 and 20 percent so i think if you collect a little bit above this 15 16 percent then you're on the right side thank you very much another question would be i understood onboarding of rnv versicherungskammer bayern and allianz is still slow what can you do that the

relevant people have more motivation to move to your platform well it's very individual right so obviously we don't want to answer into questions for individual client groups but we can say that we're happy about the other allianz project that picks up speed and and so we get a quite good integration into their titan agent network so we're happy with that but obviously you're right as provincial develops quite nicely uh is laying back a little bit and also rnv could be much faster that's true what can we do we talking to the project groups we talk to the board members and that's the interesting part that that the client is more happy than the service provider and the service provider like uh pushes the project more than the client but this is something we have to live on it's it's it's intrinsic to our b2b2c model the good thing is obviously the customers coming for free but the speed is um is uh decided by our clients uh intermediate clients and this is also one of the reasons why we bought fmk to have the lever in our own hands right so um yeah but but but fine it's to put it positively there's a long highway for growth all right i just saw that we have another risen hand um due to time i would say we do the risen

hand and then maybe go back to the questions i don't know how your time allows it we can go on maybe we do a like a crash on the on on the other questions uh maybe yes but right you said that you said the costs have risen quite a lot uh in recent quarters uh we don't think so ralph right so yes they grew but not as fast as the earnings grew or yeah if the company grows of course the cost uh um grow and if you then have a temporary uh weakness uh in a new business which is a turnover today and not over the next years, then it might seem that the costs grow faster than they should. But that's indeed not the fact. But we have seen this as well. And we have started cost reduction programs in the advisor tech and in the advisory segment.

And i think um at least let's say one and a half or two million euros uh um costs will be saved for the next year so um we are um diligently observing this everyone next person for you i guess uh how's it going with the fmk jdc plus project short answer it's going very smoothly we are um we are everything is according to plan we have seven digit validation sums and six digit commission sums that we have already gained and last earnings call i went into a little bit of detail that the infrastructure that we built up in the past six months and now we are of course they're in the loop of of enhancing and optimizing the business on the infrastructure and also on the personal side so here everything is on track Thomas has a question on capital allocation.

We learned a lot in the last share buyback that the tender was very interesting, that it was misunderstood by one of the other investors. So I think the range is one, we want to take the opportunities in the market for the M&A. There's interesting targets out there and that's the best use of our free cash flow and also the money that we have in the bank obviously right now yeah and share buyback second and dividends last and same goes for the payback of the outstanding bond as ralph said right so that that's not the wisest thing to do with our money actually so that was a short answer but happy to get more direct and also is there any news to sumitas not really are we very happy with the development we're buying uh brokers like every second month uh and uh the first initial commitment should be invested in the course of this year uh and then we'll see whether we we add

up here so amari i think we can take the risen hand if it's still there too yes so miss martin please you may unmute yourself now i just sent you an invite to do so can you hear us and i just sent you an invite again sometimes it takes a couple of clicks so if this is anna martin she's one of our employees so maybe that was just a handwritten by mistake that happens maybe maybe good okay so i would say um with no further questions we will come to the end of today's earnings call um thank you very much for your interest in jdc group ag and also big thank you to the management board for your presentation and the time you took to answer all of those questions should you have any further questions at a later time please feel free to contact investor relations and i wish you all a successful day and i'm handing over to you once more dr gapmaier once again for your closing remarks yes thank you mara and thank you again for your taking part here in this earnings call yeah and also thank you for trust as our shareholders

We think we have better times ahead. Obviously, there's great parts or parts of the figures are really great. We're really happy about the acquisition of FMK. As you can see, that's a great contribution to our growth, to our EBTA growth. And also, we are very confident that the platform business will be coming back, especially against the backdrop of the new regulation in Q4. There will be direct effects for FMK that we're looking forward to, but also to the entire broker and advisory market. So, yeah, we are very confident that the guidance we gave you beginning of the year still holds and that we see good times ahead. Thank you for your attention and thank you for your trust.