Operator: Good day. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the VEF 2Q 2026 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone. You will hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, David Nangle, CEO. Please go ahead.
David Nangle: Thank you very much. Good morning, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome as usual to our results conference call, which follows the release of our 2Q results earlier today. On the call with myself, Dave Nangle, I'm CEO. With me is Alexis Koumoudos, our CIO and partner since pretty much inception at VEF. I'll start. Alexis will come in. I'll round up. We'll open up happily for questions after about 15 minutes of presentation, as per usual. Just to kick off on slide two, some of the key events of the quarter. We'll go through some of these in a bit more detail in the presentation itself. The headline NAV itself was broadly flat quarter-on-quarter, albeit up 8%+ year-on-year. That's in dollar terms, slightly higher in SEK. From a NAV point of view, there's a lot of detail below that, really valuation multiples compressed in some of our key markets. That was offset by the underlying performance. Strong performance, robust from the portfolio itself, which continues to be in a good state of health. Specifically, Creditas we always focus on in these events, given its size and importance to VEF. Another strong quarter for Creditas in Q1 2026, with the last official numbers out, with growth now in the company loan book top line exceeding 20% and compounding faster quarter-on-quarter and improving in efficiency gains as it goes and something I'll definitely double-click on. A lot of those efficiency gains are actually coming through from its engagement with AI. We spend a lot of time on our portfolio and its engagement with AI. We're actually starting to see real benefits. We use Creditas as a casebook example this quarter, both in the management letter but also in this presentation to touch on some of the key aspects that Creditas is using and the positive implications that we're seeing, not in theory, but already for operational efficiency costs, but also on widening TAM and growth, which is key on both sides of the fence. From a personality point of view, we freshened up, strengthened our board. For a company now that's 11 years old, there's always going to be turnover in the board at this juncture. We're very happy to have Will Pruett from Fidelity Investments, formerly of Fidelity Investments, and Torun Litzén from Kinnevik in Sweden. Two very high-profile individuals with deep expertise across a number of areas which are very important to VEF as a listed investment company in emerging market fintech. Finally, our strategy remains very much focused on long-term value creation and compounding growth in our portfolio. We spend a lot of time talking about our portfolio because it is everything. Around that, what we can control is the exits we've been delivering, how we put that capital to work to strengthen our balance sheet, paying down our debt, moving on to our shares which trade at a discount, we can buy them back and obviously create value for all as we go. I'll double-click on that. Moving on to slide three, just a couple of numbers. Quarter-on-quarter, the headline itself made it feel like a quiet quarter, albeit a lot happening below the hood. Year-on-year, a bit more tenure to it. On a dollar point of view from an NAV up 8.4% year-on-year, and from a SEK per share up 11.6% year-on-year. From here, let's move over to Alexis, I'll pass you on, Alexis, for slide five plus so you can get a bit more into actually what happened in the quarter from a financial NAV key trends point of view.
Alexis Koumoudos: Hi, everyone. As we look at the portfolio in the second quarter of this year, there's been no change in the split on the quarter of 70% of the portfolio's value that relates to transaction and 30% Mark-to-Model. That is unchanged quarter-on-quarter. Our two largest holdings both carry the marks of very recent and sizable transactions. Creditas is held at its $108 million Series G at its $50 million Series D follow-on in January, priced at our secondary sale in that round. Both marks are unchanged quarter-on-quarter, both companies continue to deliver strongly post-raise. We bench check both against traded comps every quarter. Today, 70% of our NAV is anchored by third-party transactions closed within the last seven months. Within the Mark-to-Model book, Konfio was marked down around 6% in the quarter. This is purely a comp story. The listed LATAM fintech and financials names that drive our peer medians came under pressure through the quarter. Underneath that, Konfio continued to deliver in line with plan. As in the first quarter, the markdown is a symptom of market moves rather than anything company related. Encouragingly, the rest of the Mark-to-Model book moved higher on delivery. Solfácil, Abhi, Nibo were all marked up in the quarter with Abhi stood up around 25% quarter-on-quarter as the business continues to compound at pace, Dave will spend more time on Abhi later in the presentation. Moving on to slide six. Here we show our regular quarterly NAV evolution and the breakdown of the moving parts. The headline is this quarter has been a quiet or stable NAV bridge. The NAV at the end of the second quarter ended at $406 million, as Dave mentioned, down $2.5 million, or 0.6% in dollars, and up 8.4% year-on-year. Within the 30% of the holdings valued Mark-to-Model, the underlying portfolio performance added $5 million, and FX added a further $3 million, with the Mexican peso up 30% and the real up 1% against the dollar over the quarter. Against that, multiple compression across our traded comps took off $8 million. Delivery and currency largely absorbed the compression. On the 70% of the holdings that were valued at latest transaction, that was unchanged. At the corporate level, cash was reduced by $3 million, which is our ongoing OpEx and coupon payments in a quarter with no exit proceeds. There was $1 million of positive translation effect on the bond. Net net, the NAV is broadly flat on the quarter with robust underlying portfolio performance and FX tailwinds offsetting market volatility. Moving to slide seven. On this slide, we want to reiterate we continue to feel confident in the high-quality portfolio and its ability to compound from here. Over 90% of the portfolio has achieved self-sustaining cash flow profiles, and all of our top three holdings are there. We see the portfolio growing 20%-30% over the next 12 months on a revenue basis and 30% on a gross profit basis with our large late-stage top three holdings driving much of this. Dave will talk a bit more about Creditas, but Creditas is that really strong proof point where we've had eight straight quarters of annual quarterly growth and seeing record originations up 29% year-on-year. On fresh capital, our companies are well capitalized across the board, Creditas and Juspay, the latest standout fundraisers. We remain encouraged by deal activity across our geographies and by our company's ability to keep attracting fresh capital at strong marks, which drives real value growth and creates liquidity options over time. With that, I'll hand back to Dave to go through a bit more detail on Creditas and Abhi.
David Nangle: Super. Thanks, [inaudible]. There's a few topics I want to touch on before I wrap up and open it up to any questions. First is portfolio on a micro level as opposed to a macro. Creditas itself, we are very happy with Creditas at this point in its cycle, and we've been with the company for coming up to 10 years in a couple of years. It's in the best operational health we've seen it. One is the growth aspect of the story, and this comes through on slide eight, and it's just clear in the slides and the charts we see with the loan portfolio evolutions, the revenue evolution. We were talking a lot about Creditas reigniting growth back in early 2024 when it was theory. What we have seen is quarter-on-quarter-on-quarter, when we look at the year-on-year growth, it has gone from single digit to low double digit, and now we are north of 20% in Q1. That goes for both the loan book and also the top-line revenue. We are looking at Q2 numbers as we speak in-house. I sit on the board of Creditas, and what we are seeing is that improving yet again in Q2. There is a signal of growth at Creditas compounding again inside of our portfolio is happening and is very visible through the data that they are producing. As important, less well flagged or predicted, was the operational efficiency, the cost evolution that we are seeing at Creditas, which is a real positive. A lot of this is AI driven, which I will talk about in a second. We are seeing great operational leverage at Creditas at this point in its cycle as the top line of the business just grows at a pace much higher than the OpEx base. We are seeing CAC at all-time low. Customer acquisition fell below 10% for the incremental loan for the first time ever in Q1 and falling. A lot of that is down to the headcount evolution of the business. I will talk about that now. This is AI. This is a thing that we at VEF did not overly amplify when AI was coming through 12, 18, 24 months ago. We have waited, we have worked with the tools, we have worked with our companies until we were at a point where they are actually starting to make a difference from a real point of view, from a numbers point of view, from a business point of view. Now we are starting to highlight and show some of those examples. There is nothing better for us than showing through the prism of Creditas, our biggest company. It is having a real impact on their business. Sergio joined Keith Richman recently on a podcast. He is a board member of [inaudible], a sister company. In that, he went through a lot. He talked a lot about this with the board at Creditas and the key shareholders. What we have seen is that agents are now a big part of the business, working along with humans. The better humans are becoming more like air traffic controllers in the business. AI tools and agents are coming through from customer acquisition, onboarding, communication, collections into scoring. What we are seeing then from a maths, from an Excel, from a classic analytical point of view, is that the employee count is falling. They were 4,000, remember, over 18 months ago. They are below 1,800 today. They are above 2,000 at the start of the year. It is really starting to compound down. At a time when we are getting our growth in the loan book coming through, and it is improving in terms of pace, we are actually seeing a real operational leverage story as the AI tools and implementation of them are really hitting headcounts and operating expenses. To add to that, once you've got lower operating expenses, you can do better pricing, better cost to serve, actually AI then enables a bigger TAM for Creditas to sell its products into. I think we're still very early days on this with Creditas and many of our other companies. We've got many other examples to play out there, but we're actually seeing tangible benefits in the Creditas efficiency gains, increasing TAM, operating expenses, which just adds to that top-line growth story I was talking about on the previous slide. Also wanted to talk about something beyond the top three this quarter, because we do have a number of our companies coming through, albeit smaller in scale, less impactful on NAV today, but can be more impactful on them tomorrow. It's just a reminder, we'd like to remind the market that we, on average, do pick winners to get into the portfolio. We do nurture them through to maturity and do create a lot of value for our shareholders over time. Abhi is one of those rising stars in our portfolio, this is a seed investment. We don't generally go that early at VEF these days, we're more in the growth stage when we do invest. Abhi was a seed investment. It's a fintech company in Pakistan that's since expanded to the Middle East. It really has scaled at pace in a very disciplined manner. They've managed to balance organic growth, which is classic fintech, game-changing M&A, when they bought a microfinance bank and got regulated and licensed in Pakistan and also partnered to a similar degree in the Middle East. Middle East really is growing the expansion, because Pakistan were quite a sizable entity, even after just five years. What I'd say from a numbers point of view, it's exactly what we're trying to do. This is a company that's got now a $200 million loan book. It's got $260 million of deposits, real banking, mainly in Pakistan, these numbers. $85 million of run rate revenues at the top line and $20+ million of EBITDA. This is a company from inception, us backing a founder in key scale emerging markets, mainly in digital banking. We're starting with one product, earned wage access into SME lending, it's become a much broader financial product platform. I also have an interview with the founder of that company, Omair Ansari, on our website. We did that recently, we're very excited about where Abhi's going. I'd say watch this space. There's a lot more to come from this company in terms of size, shape, compounding, and value. It can become one of those ones that are breaking out from the general part of the portfolio into the top three to start making a real impact on our NAV and compounding going forward. Beyond the portfolio on a micro level, always want to talk about our cash and balance sheet. It's key. We are at a position of $24.7 million of debt, which is falling due by year-end. Our cash position today is slightly below $22 million. We're continuing with the communication. The plan is to pay down our debt, ideally by year-end. If not, we will be directionally positive, as in reducing our debt. We've done that since we kind of peaked at a $50 million debt ticket. We've brought that down half already and more to go as we deliver exits. The exits are coming. We did one in Q1, nothing in Q2. We're very confident there will be more coming in the coming quarters or next 18 months, and very focused on a number of opportunities on that front. Always looking to take the best opportunity at the right time at the right price. There's no pressure on us to do the wrong thing. Reducing our debt with this capital allocation ideology is key. It's very hard for us to look beyond our shares, which I'll talk about, which trade at a deep discount, and that's the highest IRR opportunity that we see with excess capital as we start to get beyond the debt hurdle, which is in front of us. Directionally positive, strengthening our balance sheet, logical capital allocation, and that's key to driving future value for VEF and our shareholders. Couple more slides. One is I wanted to bring back up the share price and the discount to NAV, just to remind the market, our shareholders, of which we are some, that we have not forgotten. We're very focused on this. We are not happy with this. We talk a very strong game about what is happening under the hood at VEF, and that's our portfolio, the trends, the exits we're delivering, the compounding growth. That's all good in its pocket. At the same time, we have to be very cognizant of the share price and where it's at. It's something we're not happy about. We believe we have a playbook of delivery, and that delivery of the playbook with a performing portfolio and the right use of excess capital as it comes back in capital allocation from debt into equity is the right way and tools to close that discount and improve the share price over time. It's a kind of hand-in-hand approach of the portfolio, and then the right use of capital allocation over time fixes this and makes it directionally positive as it was in the past. Before I close up, very happy to talk about our new board members. This is something we have been working on for a while. We want to surround ourselves and have the right people in the room for long-term value creation. We want to have the right people helping us in EM, fintech investing, and questioning us on corporate governance, capital allocation. Will Pruett joined the board recently. Will is a phenomenal individual, very experienced, ex-Fidelity for EM, emerging markets financials, but also in Latin America, and he's on the board of four listed Latin American fintech companies. He's very much in the wheelhouse of what we do day to day. He's more on the public side, historically. We're on the private side. He's got great experience and great insight, and we talk to him a lot. He's hit the ground running. Also, Torun, who joined us, ex-Kinnevik. What we like about her is the fact that she's been through cycle with Kinnevik, up, down, volatility. She has seen everything from the inside of an investment company, riding high, going through headwinds, and she just brings a lot of honest insight to us and our story around just lessons learned, what happened where, and the implications of different decisions and movements. Two fresh additions, fresh mindsets, fresh energy to the board, and we had our first board meeting with them after the AGM in May, and it was a very positive event, and very happy to have them on board. Just to close off, I think that our message to the market continues to be, one, we're very happy with everything that's under the hood at VEF. There's a lot of controllables, and we believe we're controlling them well. A lot of the focus is the portfolio, which self-sustaining cash flow profiles are not needing those cash that it did maybe in the past. Growing now starts to compound at a faster pace. Creditas is a great case in point, and attractive enough to be raising fresh capital from the market, which is great for us to see, and new marks and capital in. The exits, they don't happen every quarter, but we've proven out with a number of exits over the last 18 months, and clear guidance for more over the next 18 months. You look at capital allocation and what we've done with them. We're very clear we want to be rid of our debt, and we're very clear that our shares trade at a discount that makes them too enticing not to be buying with excess capital. It's happy to see the portfolio compounding in value feeding through to NAV, and then very focused on the controllables around capital in, and capital allocation to add value as we go. Operator, I will stop there, and we can open the floor to Q&A from anybody, please.
Operator: Thank you. Once again, to ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Our first question comes from the line of Stefan Knutsson from Redeye. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Stefan Knutsson: Hello, Dave and Alexis. Thank you for taking my questions. First off is regarding the exit progress. You talk a lot about Creditas and the impressive AI development that they've had. At the same time, we have seen some LATAM fintech having a hard time in the public market. My question is really regarding how flexible you can be with the bond refinancing coming up, if you can wait to do exits to get a better price. Can you talk about that development, please?
David Nangle: Hey, Stefan. I think you've touched on a few different aspects there. I think Creditas on a micro level is doing very well. We're very transparent. They're very transparent. Numbers are coming through, and the information is being shared both from a growth top line, operational efficiency, AI. Very happy to sing when we're winning with Creditas, and it's in a very good place. You did allude to Latin America. A lot of our markets and markets in general do blow hot and cold on a quarterly, half-year basis. Last year, 2025 was very strong for Latin America. Latin American equities, they compounded a very healthy clip. Year to date, they've been less positive. While U.S. markets have been rallying hard, LATAM markets with some of the peers to the likes of Creditas, Konfio, have come off highs. That said, we have a tailwind of the currency, so there's many moving parts and valuation, but we're very happy to true cycle. Once we got the right companies, we will be able to exit them at the right point in the cycle, and we try not to get too caught up in markets up, markets down in any given quarter in our markets. The same with currencies, as tends to happen. Bringing it all back to exits. What I'd say, Creditas is one of our companies. We have more than 10. We have a number of work streams around exits to get cash in. Creditas obviously is a big one. There's a longer-term playbook on Creditas where the founder is very clear. He plans to IPO, and that business is definitely going in that direction. We're working with him towards that. Not today, but we're hoping in the next couple of years. Outside of that, there's always potential for secondary shares and sales, the right price, right opportunity. These things go across the portfolio. As you've seen with Juspay, we did some top slicing twice in the last 12-18 months, and we've done M&A and IPOs within our name. It's not just all about Creditas. I want to say from a bond point of view, I think we're $400 million of NAV, $25 million of debt. Not to be blasé, but I think we're in a comfortable debt leverage position. Direction of travel, what we've told our board and shareholders is we want it to be constantly down and ideally gone. That will be a function, obviously, of delivering exits, and what we can do, but we believe we can. Outside of that, you've other tools beyond simple bond. You got revolving credit facilities, et cetera, where you can bring down the actually exposed number of debt by using other tools at your disposal from a capital markets point of view. We have a goal in mind. We have a lot of moving parts in that, but direction of travel is lower debt irrespective of the quantum of exits that we get in the next two or three quarters.
Stefan Knutsson: Very good. Secondly, on Konfio, was the NAV write-down mainly multiple driven, or does the business face any challenges of late?
David Nangle: No, it's multiples. To allude to your first question, it was multiples on the headwind. It was FX and company performance on the tailwind. The multiples were the bigger force this quarter. It's always an interesting one. At the moment in time, it's at the date at the end of the quarter that you do your calculation for your NAV. If the FX skews one way or multiples skew the other, the lowest beta part of it is actually your company forecasts. Everything else can skew and spike one way or the other. We think we know the NAV is coming into quarter end. Numbers can move left and right. Q2 was heavy in terms of LATAM multiples, and that fed through to Konfio.
Stefan Knutsson: Okay. Thank you very much.
Operator: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time, I'll hand the call back to David for closing remarks.
David Nangle: Super. Thank you very much. Everybody, thank you very much for your time and for your interest in following us, as always. I think we're quite clear with our message. We are happy but working hard on everything that's under the hood at VEF. There's a lot to be happy with in terms of the portfolio, the nature of its compounding value, and what we're looking to do on the exit front and capital allocation. As management, as shareholders, we are not happy with the share price, we believe we've got the strategy in place with everything I said on the portfolio and capital allocation to put that right in accordance with time. Thank you very much for your time and interest again today, and we'll see you again next quarter.
Operator: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Speakers, please stand by.