JDC Group AG (JDC) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, and a warm welcome to today's earnings call for the JDC Group following the publication of the Q3 figures of 2025. The CEO, Dr. Sebastian Grabmaier; the CFO, Ralph Konrad; and the COO, Dr. Ramona Evens, will speak in a moment and guide us through the presentation and the results. After the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be able to ask your questions. And with this being said, I'm happy to hand over to you, Sebastian.

Yes. Thank you very much, Mara. Yes, a very warm welcome also from all of the Board of JDC Group. And we're happy to present to you the 9 months figures. And my name is Sebastian, Co-Founder of JDC Group 24 years ago together with my partner, Ralph, who is the CFO. Yes, welcome, Ralph. Okay. You're not -- you're speaking later enough on...

A lot of text today, so no introduction necessary.

You might be knowing Ralph. Ramona is with us for more than a year now. And so yes, we welcome Ramona in this circle also.

Very happy to be here.

And we don't have a picture of him, but yes, the important -- most important part of the company mostly is the sales, and this is why Marcus is here. So welcome, Marcus.

Thank you, Sebastian. Warm welcome from my side. And as Sebastian mentioned, I'm responsible for sales, marketing and product management. And yes, glad to be here.

All right. So we jump into the text and see that, well, one introductory slide. As always, we're a platform company, as you might know. So we take in the data of all the insurance companies in Germany. There's more than 220 insurance groups, all the asset management platforms and the alternative product providers, the mortgaging bank, we process the data, standardize it first and then we make it visible in our visualizing systems, either our own or we load the data up via an API to the systems of our clients, and that's all kinds of intermediaries. That's 16,000 individual brokers and tied agents, but also more and more the banks, the insurance companies themselves, other fintech companies, intertech companies or exclusive sales organizations. Right now, we have about 6.4 million data sets on the platform corresponding to almost 3 million contracts. So our -- yes, it's -- our value comes mostly from our JDC tech stack that's leading, and we still win almost all of these pitches out there when it comes to the choice of a processing systems for third-party insurance contracts. On the next slide, we show you we have a resilient business model. You see no matter what crisis you could imagine in the past, COVID or all kinds of financial crisis in the markets, our CAGR in revenue growth is up 12.2% year-over-year-over-year and the growth is also growing. You see our guidance now at EUR 260 million to EUR 280 million. And in revenue and also EBITDA as the platform is scaling up is growing even steeper. So we are now at a 31.4% EBITDA CAGR in the past years. And also this growth is growing. And with the acquisition of FMK, we speed up our earnings growth as well. And what you can see on the right-hand side is that our EBITDA margin also gradually goes up, and we are now standing at 8% always to the top line, so earnings to top line. But as you know, we pay out 75% on average to our intermediaries. So as a software company, you would just look at the relative figures compared to the gross margin line. Having said that, yes, we are happy to look back on a very successful quarter as we could close the acquisition of FMK. But you can see that also growth is not as steep as you might use to, okay? We are at record highs, obviously, as we are going from one record high to the other and now stand at more than EUR 175 million in turnover, which is a growth of 11.2% in the first 9 months of 2025. And earnings are up considerably higher. It depends whether we take in the one-offs or not. As you see when we look at the guidance, Ralph will explain later, we will have to report without one-offs. So EBITDA growth is at 19.9%, so almost 20%. But if you take out the one-offs that we have quite a bit for the acquisition is 35.5% with a very nice earnings growth. So yes, so if we deduct the one-off costs, I think it's a very, very nice development. Yes, and you can see that's part of the problem here. We always tell you that all our figures are always have one little disclaimer, and that's the -- yes, the development of the overall economic situation. Obviously, we're not that dependent on the overall economy, but definitely on the consumer confidence. And what we could see that there was a lot of hope into the new government, but as you can deduct from all the news that you're taking now, the actual government, that's a conservative and Social Democrat coalition government is now at a worse situation than these traffic light government in the past. Now we can see that, yes, the overall business figures, Germany is in a recession for now 3 quarters. It seems to be ending, but growth is still very weak and now unemployment is exceeding. This has a lot of impact on the occupational pension schemes that are not gone, but they're basically postponed to the next year. So you have a lot of big companies that do not see any benefit in spending money for employees because the labor market is quite in a better position as you can find employees again. But all these sentiment indicators, consumer confidence is a record low. And this is what we feel that people postpone the investment decisions, their pension planning decisions. And after a very, very strong third quarter in '24, we now see a very normal quarter third quarter in '25. This means that our growth is not as strong in the third quarter as we expected. But obviously, we see already the figures for Q4, which we see much, much better than Q3. But yes, that's the lowest consumer move since our new Chancellor Friedrich Merz took office, and that's a little bit the backdrop of our very good performance of our company herself. Ralph?

Okay. Yes, we have 2 effects on the figures, which I would like to explain before we go into the figures. The first is the environment. What does that mean for us in concrete terms? On the one hand, we are seeing a slight slowdown in new business development in the area of retirement provision, especially in life insurance as Sebastian mentioned, but keep in mind, we are comparing an extraordinary -- we are comparing to an extraordinary strong Q3 2024. I will show you this later on. And secondly, we are seeing a slight increase in cancellation rates. Cancellation rates are always calculated in relation to new business. And if new business goes down slightly, then cancellation rates are higher, and this reduces the reported net revenue in the third quarter. But to answer this question in advance, we don't see this as a trend. It's just a description of the current environment. We know from discussions with our competitors and insurance that this is an industry-wide situation. And let me add this, we have seen this several times in the past. There are weaker weeks and weaker months but we have always seen subsequent rebound effects. And why is this the case? It's the case because people don't buy retirement products for fun, but they buy it because they need it. And if you don't buy them today, you probably have to buy them tomorrow. So this is not a very nice quarter, but normal business. The internal effects in the third quarter come from 2 sides. The first is what you know. We have reorganize the companies and the liability umbrella. And the second one is we had relevant M&A effects in the third quarter. And I will give you some figures on this before we dive into the figures. It's better to understand this before. Adjustment one is the elimination of the reorganization of the segments necessary to observe the development of the segments and compare apples-to-apples. To remind you, we had 3 liability umbrellas, and we now have 1 liability umbrella that saves us around EUR 250,000 a year. And as a result of the -- in the first 9 months of the year, EUR 8.5 million of turnover and EUR 0.1 million of EBITDA are now allocated in the Advisory segment and not in the Advisortech segment, but that doesn't have any effect on the bottom line, it's just between the segments. And the second effect adjustment two is the elimination of the M&A one-offs. The M&A costs have added up to a very significant amount. F&A -- the FMK Group was not only our biggest transaction, but also the most expensive one in terms of M&A costs. The M&A costs consist of due diligence costs for legal, tax and financial due diligence. We have legal costs for the SPA negotiation. We had notary costs, which were very high because of the size of the transaction, and we had to pay the W&I insurance premium. For those who are not familiar with the M&A business, W&I insurance, it's a warranty and indemnity insurance, and that's an insurance that is usually paid by the acquirer, means by JDC, and it bears the cost of warranty violations and incorrect indemnities for the acquirer. This is now a standard practice in professional and bigger M&A transactions and in the meantime, precondition to take part in an auction. So this all sums up to EUR 0.9 million in the third quarter. And over the year, it's a relevant amount of EUR 1.4 million. Okay. So now let's go into the figures. The revenue rose slightly by 5.6% in the third quarter and 11.2% for the year as a whole. The Advisortech segments group pro forma adjusted for adjustment 1 means the liability umbrella by 5% in Q3 and 11.5% for the full year. The pro forma EBITDA adjusted for adjustment 2 means the M&A costs rose by 50% from EUR 2.3 million to EUR 3.5 million in the third quarter and by 35.5% to EUR 12.5 million for the full year and pro forma EBIT rose by more than 100% in the third quarter. To be completely transparent to you, we would also like to show on the next slides what Q3 would have looked like if the FMK transaction had not taken place. That question is obvious. And for the sake of simplicity, we have also taken adjustment bond means the internal liability umbrella reorganization into account here. And I will show you this now. But before let's go into the development by quarter, that's what I said before. It's important to understand what happened in the third quarter. You can see here that usually the third quarter is in turnover like 6% to 8% weaker than the second quarter of the year. We had in the last 5 years, 2 exemptions. The first was 2021. There, the third quarter was the rebound of the first German-wide COVID-19 lockdown, so not comparable. And the second exemption was last year. We had there are no external effects, no one that I know of but we just had a very strong life insurance business in the third quarter 2024. So there are 2 ways to look on this third quarter. The first is to view on it in the course of the year. And then we can see it's a very normal intra-year development. But if you compare to the previous year, then you compare with a very strong third quarter 2024. So having said this, let's go into the figures without the FMK Group, including the internal reorganization, this would have resulted in the following picture. Total revenue would have grown by 0.6%. The slight decline in revenue in the Advisortech segment would have been more than offset by the growth in the Advisory segment. EBITDA would have risen by 5.4% to EUR 2.4 million or by 19% to EUR 2.9 million for the year as a whole. Sebastian? You're muted Sebastian.

Yes, sorry. You can see that we have good growth in all product groups. We are -- investment is up 9%, obviously. And you might think why is this just 9%? It's because most of our funds are denominated in U.S. dollars. And as compared to the euros, there is about a 10% exchange rate change. And this is what makes these investment figures just grow almost 10%. Insurance, you can see we're still at a double-digit growth with plus 10%. But as Ralph said, in spite of -- or against the backdrop of a very, very good life insurance business last year with plus 30%. This year, life insurance is quite flat. And this means the other -- this is basically the transfer of contracts figures, they contribute to the growth, but not life insurance, but we will see better times in Q4, where we can see, especially in the health insurance, a strong increase. And the other product groups, which is a small addition is basically up because we can see that the real estate business is back, the mortgaging business following the real estate business and all kinds of other revenues are up quite considerably. So all in all, we have to be content with the growth of all these product groups. And on the next slide, you can see how this breaks up among the different sales channels. And you can see that also here, the green figures again are after -- basically the pro forma figures as if these internal reallocations would not have taken place. And you can see that the breadth of the IFA business is not as strong this time with plus 7%. And the reason are the ones -- or the reasons are the ones Ralph pointed out, especially in the life insurance section, there is like a slowdown and there's no impact of a normally growing occupational pension platform business. Yes, major customers, they are up 18%. This is due to there is more customers coming to the platform. As we pointed out, many are in a rollout or ramping up or rollout phase. So there's more growth coming from this side. And then new section is FMK Group. And as Ralph said, EUR 2.6 million in turnover is a nice addition to the platform. And this is also a good point. Ramona will tell you -- tell us more, like going now also in the direct customer segments, then this means that we have the lever in our own hand. We are not as dependent on our intermediaries for growth. And Advisory, as I said, a tremendous growth after the reallocation of the liability umbrella business, but also just in a natural growth with plus 12%. It's a very nice development. And so on the right side, you can see that turnover split with a faster-growing major customer business, that's already now at 30% of all of our turnover.

****** Okay. The following slides are divided into 3 sections. On the left hand, you can see the reported figures. In the middle, you see the figures corrected by the adjustments that I have explained before. And on the right side, you can see 2 graphs comparing the reported figures with the adjusted figures. To make this a little bit easier to understand, I will focus on the adjusted figures in the following slides. Having said this, let's come to the third quarter. In the Advisortech segment, the turnover grew, including 1 month's turnover of FMK, as Sebastian mentioned, EUR 2.6 million. And compared to a very strong previous quarter by 5%, gross profit increased by 13%, leading to an EBITDA plus of 30% and an EBIT plus of a very nice 50%. One comment on the purchase price allocation of FMK Group. This is important to understand the forward-looking figures. When we buy a company, we have to do a so-called PPA purchase price allocation. That means we have to allocate the purchase price on the customer base, on the assets and the rest on goodwill. It's a little bit more complex, but let keep it that simple. Customer base and assets have to be written down over a period of time and the goodwill is not written down, but has to be tested yearly in the so-called impairment test. And if we look at the FMK Group, then you can see that in the past, FMK didn't produce a customer base. They just produce leads and sold the leads. And as it is a very small company, there are not a lot of fixed assets. So the vast majority of the purchase price will be allocated or is allocated on the goodwill, and that's a good news because that means that in the future, we will see almost no depreciation on the earnings coming from the FMK transaction. Okay. When we look at the first 9 months as a whole, the picture is as follows: pro forma revenues rose by 11.5% to EUR 148 million. The costs remained relatively stable. EBITDA rose by 21.5% to EUR 11.8 million and EBIT by 33.4% to EUR 8.3 million. Now let's go to the Advisory segment and look at the third quarter in an isolated look. Here, we see pro forma revenue of EUR 13.8 million, which is a plus of 14.6%. Gross profit only increased by 5.8%. That's also a result of the -- and related to the reclassification of our liability umbrella. The costs were very stable besides the depreciation and amortization. This has risen significantly. And the reason is the expansion of our rental space in Vienna. As you know, under the IFRS 16 lease payments, including the rental costs must be removed from the expenses and must be capitalized in lease liabilities and then amortized over a period of time. That's what we see here. That's the reason why depreciation and amortization is up more than 30%. It's just a new office. In total, this development leads to an improvement in EBITDA of 28.4% and an increase in EBIT of 23.3%. If we look at the first 9 months of the Advisory division, we see a positive development. Pro forma revenue rose by 12% to EUR 40.6 million. And except for the depreciation effect that I described some seconds ago, we have a very stable cost development, which led to an increase in EBITDA of 43.3% and an EBIT of 52.7%. Let's come to the cash flow statement. This has been significantly influenced by the FMK transaction and the associated financing in the third quarter. Operating cash flow is at previous year's level. And the reason is that the additional profits were almost entirely offset by the transaction costs by the one-off costs. The cash flow from investment activities relates almost exclusively to the FMK transaction, EUR 66 million of this EUR 68 million. And the cash flow from financing is somewhat more complex to explain, but I give it a try. We have acquired FMK. Closing was the 16th of September and the date of first consolidation was the 1st of September. So the first consolidation was before the closing. And this is the reason for this development. At the time of the initial consolidation means the 1st of September, FMK had a cash of EUR 16 million on its account and approximately EUR 14 million means EUR 13.9 million of this where prior year profits that we didn't buy, but they were distributed to the sellers before the closing. So after the first data fresh consolidation and before closing, and this is the reason why you don't see EUR 70 million cash flow from financing activities, but only EUR 55 million, and you see another EUR 14 million in the next line. This is the change in cash and cash equivalents due to consolidation scope. Admittedly, it's a little bit complex, but we coordinated all this with our auditor beforehand to be here on the safe side. Cash at the end of the period was EUR 33.5 million, including EUR 2.8 million FMK cash. And the good news here is cash on hand last Friday was a very strong EUR 38.8 million, plus another EUR 4 million of the FMK Group. So in total, we had the first time cash on hand of more than EUR 42 million. So there's no news on the old bond volume EUR 20 million. Still, we have still the first call option 1st November of 2026, and we have not decided how to proceed here. On the right side, this is our new Nordic Bonds issued with EUR 70 million, possibly up to EUR 160 million. The coupon is 6.5%, but I would like to remind you, it's a rolling coupon. It's Euribor plus 450 basis points. The bond is due at the 28th of August in 2029. And there, we also have call options. The first call option starts -- or the call option starts at the 28th of August in 2027 and from there on can be called every day, starting at a price of 102.25% and declining to 100.45%. Yes, share price yesterday close was EUR 28.60. Today, we are a little bit lower, unfortunately. So market cap is below EUR 390 million right now. To remind you, we have approximately 150,000 treasury shares that we bought for EUR 19.89 per share. And in the shareholder structure on the right side, there are no changes, still same situation, Great-West Management, Provinzial and Versicherungskammer Bayern as the biggest shareholders. So that was -- they were the figures from my side. A lot of text today. I apologize, but there was a little bit more to explain. So I hand over to Ramona.

Thank you, Ralph. So I'll give you a little update on FMK. It has been 2 months since the closing of the FMK acquisition. We had a very quick ramp-up after the transaction and the collaboration between FMK and JDC works very smoothly, and we have achieved quite a lot in the past 8 weeks. So first of all, all the legal and the financial requirements are all on track and almost completed. That includes, for example, the integration of the accounting or also the negotiation of the intercompany contracts as well as all the requirements of the Nordic Bond, for example, the collateral agreements or also the setup of the ongoing bond reporting. That's from the legal and the financial side. From the business side, we already went live with the lead generations for the first insurance products. We picked 2 pilot products with 2 different sales approaches. The first sales approach is like the classical self-service approach online. So that means the end customer can buy the product online without the help of an adviser. And we picked at the pet insurance as a pilot for this section because it's highly profitable and it has a strong demand online right now. And second product that is already live is the work disability insurance. It has a different sales approach. It's a product that usually requires an adviser to help the client pick an insurance product. And in this case, FMK's provides JDC with the interested clients. And we -- JDC as a broker provides this advice internally. This would be the second pillar, Ralph, if you could quickly jump to the next page. So both products are already online. Here is an example for the Tierkrankenversicherung, the pet insurance. And the big difference between the previous business model of FMK is that they used to get only paid one-off for a lead or a sale. Now that we went into the value chain as a broker, we profit not only from a one-off commission, but also yearly from the recurring commissions. So for example, if FMK got EUR 100 one-off for the sale of in pet insurance in the past, now we get the same amount annually as long as the contract is going. So in 2026, we will roll out further products. And also, we already signed key hires to build up the new direct sales unit starting in January. And as Sebastian earlier mentioned, this is also a way to push growth ourselves, and we are a little less dependent on our intermediaries.

Maybe, Ramona, just one figure to add. In the last year, FMK made roughly EUR 1 million in commission for pet insurance, click-out model one-off. And if we keep this speed in the future, we will do EUR 1 million, but recurring year-over-year. So EUR 1 million this year, EUR 2 million next year, EUR 3 million the following year. So that's a very attractive progress for us, Ramona.

Could jump back one slide, please.

One slide back.

So right now, we are testing and learning with JDC as a broker for the end customer. This is, of course, very profitable because we keep a 100% of the commission. However, and this is the third pillar, we are also planning on distributing leads to our brokers. So that means we are building the infrastructure to channel the leads into our broker platform and brokers will be able to buy the leads from there. And in this scenario, JDC profits from selling the lead as well as receiving part of the commissions for providing the services as a broker pool like in our regular business model. So this is a very large infrastructure project, which we are currently setting up, and we are expecting to go live in 2026. And then if you could go 2 slides ahead. What also might be interesting for you that FMK operates the subdomains for Handelsblatt and WirtschaftsWoche for comparison of financial and insurance products. For those who are not German Handelsblatt and WirtschaftsWoche are German newspapers. So FMK operates these sub domains, and they can decide on what kind of articles are being released. They can also add advertisement links in the articles. So this is another source of trust building and also lead generation for our new business model. That's on FMK. Back to you, Ralph.

Thanks, Ramona. Yes, as always, we show you the platform activity -- yes, numbers of orders is a little bit down like in the last quarters, decreased by 1.4%. But as Sebastian mentioned, growth comes mainly from contract transfers. Here, we are up 30%, starting from already very, very high base. The assets under the administration also increased very nicely by 11.4% by, in the meantime, approximately EUR 8 billion. We are nearer at EUR 8 billion than at EUR 7.5 billion. And which is really amazing is the development of the net premium, which has -- net insurance premium, which has increased by almost 18% within the last 12 months. That's a very amazing number, and we're now heading for EUR 1.5 billion in annual net premium. So this was the last figure for today besides the guidance, and I hand over to Sebastian.

Yes. We introduced a slide showing you how resilient our growth is. So we used to go through a lot of multi-crisis environments in the past. And you can see no matter whether it was the COVID-19 pandemic or all the turnaround in interest rates or now Liberation Day, which we took quite well. And also now we have this consumer confidence crisis, as we call it now. And still growth is up and growth is growing. So we are not afraid of what's coming ahead. On the contrary, I think together with FMK, we are in a very strong position to profit from the circumstances because more and more of our business is happening online. It's also happening on a consumer beneficial environment. So yes, we're looking ahead with quite some confidence for Q4. And having said that, we give you the slide of the guidance. You already know we put up our guidance in August after the acquisition of FMK. We think now our turnover will be EUR 260 million to EUR 280 million in turnover and EBITDA will be EUR 20.5 million to EUR 22.5 million. This is what we learned, although we are so on the stock exchange for such a long time that we have to give you guidance without the one-offs, and that's the good news here. We think we reached this guidance also if we do not have a pro forma view as to the one-offs. So we think we are in a very good condition here to exceed our old guidance by quite a bit that we showed until end of July. So also, all our goals in 2025 are on a very good road. We are integrating Morgan & Morgan platform more to the platform. So we have very good outlooks here for future customers. Our asset management platform, DFP was again rated top 20 in Germany. Now we are at #14. So with only EUR 2 billion in assets under management, we're one of the biggest portfolio management companies in the country. Also, Summitas grows profitably and M&A works like one broker a months. And also our IT platform will be scaled using quite some AI to bring down costs and enhance our efficiency. And this is what we see that the cost per contract are reduced step by step by step. But in the end, it's quite a considerable effect here. So yes, we -- that's also our caveat. That's what we said in the beginning. Yes, our business performance is very good. But on the other hand, it's still develop -- it's still dependent on the development of the global national economic environment. And if you look at all the news in Europe and Germany, especially, we could wish for more. We could wish for a government that knows what it's doing and not quarrelling about now the pension system because this has quite some impact on consumer confidence. But again, as Ralph said, it's just going in waves. So whatever business we don't do in Q3, we might do in Q4 or Q1 next year. So a lot of investment decisions are just postponed. That's what we see now. And as I said, especially in occupational pension schemes. So we have a very good outlook for Q4 and then also a very promising outlook for '26. And so we will repeat that next year, together with FMK before minorities, there will be at least at EBITDA of EUR 35 million. And I think that's quite some nice earnings growth, which brings us in a very good situation. So thank you very much until now. Before we answer your questions and again, an invitation for next Monday, because JDC Group is now on the stock exchange in Frankfurt for 20 years. So that's quite some anniversary. And we invited most of you. I hope we didn't forget many. So whoever is still a latecomer, this will be like a nice -- yes, like whatever it's a party on the stock exchange, there will bell ringing, there will be nice pictures, and there will also be a good dinner after. So whoever is late. Welcome. Yes, thank you very much for your attention, and happy to take your questions now. Mara?

Yes. Thank you very much for your presentation. We will now move on to the Q&A session. For a dynamic conversation we recommend to ask few questions in person via audio line [Operator Instructions]. And with that said, we have received some questions in our chat box. The first one is, after 2 months, do you expect higher or lower growth due to the FMK acquisition compared to your due diligence, do you generate even new ideas? How to generate growth via FMK?

Maybe I can take this question. If you buy a company, then of course, the business plans presented are very optimistic because the sellers want you to pay very high purchase price but it's not the first company that we saw and it's not the first diligence that we made. So we are in line with our expectations with the FMK transaction and the success. What I can say is, what Ramona said that the cooperation is very compelling, very smart guys, the 3 ones and a lot of ideas that have to be shaped for the future, and we are absolutely convinced that this is -- yes, will be one of our best transaction we ever made.

Thank you so much for your question. Another question that we received is what revenue are you planning for 2026?

Yes, we're still in the planning process. I don't know, Ralph, can you say something already as it's a little bit early there?

Yes, it's a little bit early. We will see a big plus, definitely beyond EUR 300 million, but the rest we will show you with the guidance for the next year.

All right. Thank you so much. We received a rather long question. So just to understand guidance, you guide for EUR 9.5 million to 11.5 million in EBITDA in Q4 or almost up 100% Y-o-Y compared to a strong Q4 2025. You are almost half into Q4 already. So I assume you have good visibility into this. What is the main driver for this strong Q4 outside FMK, et cetera?

We expected this question, Ralph.

Yes, you were very fast with your famous last words. Otherwise, I would have answered the question before. When FMK performs as it performed the last months and if JDC performs not better than last year, but on the same level of last year and the Advisory business is doing as it does, then we will end up as we announced at the lower -- what's the little in English or in the lower 1/3 -- sorry, in the lower 1/3 of our guidance. But then you have to add the one-offs to see a realistic view. And with these one-offs, we think we will end at the upper 1/3 of our guidance. So the answer is, yes, we have a good visibility. And yes, we have a good reason why we said we keep the guidance.

Thank you so much for your question to answer. So far, we have 3 more questions. The first one of those is, did you lose tenders? Are you bidding for contracts of significant size? Can we expect other significant news like acquisitions over the next few months?

Yes, Marcus, I will give the next question to you. I just answered the tender question. Yes, so we -- basically, we have not lost a real tender, but there was one that passed us basically. We didn't get it because we're not really invited to take part. And that's Zurich Insurance, not a very big one, but we have one in mind now, had to come at some point. And yes, we take part in other tenders, but maybe Marcus, you will take the [ R+V ] question, which is next. Marcus?

Yes. So we have a pipeline with a lot of targets and significant targets. So we are still in dialogue with them. We make the offers and starting some small projects. I'm very hopeful that we will see next year some new tender, higher tenders. And then we can talk more if there is -- if the contract is signed, but I'm very hopeful that we have next year's good announcement.

And obviously, for M&A targets, we cannot answer the question because it's signed when it's signed. And before that, it's just smoke.

Thank you. We have another question from the same person. How is the progress with R+V Versicherungskammer Bayern and the new European insurance company announced August 5, 2024. I was expecting even higher growth in the Advisortech segment due to onboarding of contracts. Will the rate of onboarding increase?

Marcus, maybe you want to answer this as well.

Yes. So as we know, [indiscernible] is more in the bank field, and we know that banks are not so pushy in case of insurances. So it costs a little bit more time, more time as we expected. But for the next 2 years, they planned also to have more grip in the bank branches, and then we expect more insurance businesses for this. And for the big European insurance company, we started with the pilot phase and now we went up, opened to more customers. We see the first contract coming. And so we will do it step by step, but we are still on track with our expectations in this case.

Thank you so much. We have received a risen hand by [ Mr. Jong ].