Banco Santander-Chile (BSAC) Q3 2025 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'd like to welcome you to Banco Santander-Chile's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call on the 5th of November 2025. [Operator Instructions] So with this, I would now like to pass the line to Patricia Perez, the Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Banco Santander-Chile's Third Quarter 2025 Results Webcast and Conference Call. This is Patricia Perez, CFO, and I'm joined today by Cristian Vicuña, Head of Strategy and IR; and Lorena Palomeque, our Economist. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today for the review of our performance and results in the third quarter. Today, Lorena will start with an overview of the economic environment, and then Cristian will go through the key strategy points and the results of the bank in the third quarter of the year. After that, we will have a Q&A session where we will be happy to answer your questions. So let me hand over to Lorena.

Thanks, Patricia. During the third quarter of 2025, we observed positive economic indicators in the Chilean economy. Preliminary market figures suggest GDP grew around 2% year-on-year in Q2 or almost 3% when excluding mining. While we await the full national accounts report on November 18, which will also include Q1 and Q2 revisions, we estimate GDP growth of 2.4% by the end of this year and close to 2% for next year. We are now just a few days away from the presidential and congressional elections in Chile. Also, the outcome is still uncertain, polls suggest that a change in the government administration with an opposition candidate is the most likely scenario, which could generate stronger tailwinds for the economy next year. In terms of inflation, also moderation is already evident, it remains above the 3 target -- the 3% target with core inflation now below 4%. Limited second round effects, anchor expectations and a narrow output gap will allow inflation to converge to below 4% by the end of this year. We expect this inflation process to continue given the softer demand environment, both globally and domestically. In this context, we maintain our forecast for the U.S. of 3.6% for the end of this year, converging to 3% next year. Regarding the monetary policy rate, during the third quarter, the Central Bank of Chile maintaining the policy rate at 4.75%, responding to an inflation environment that continues to ease. Nevertheless, the bank will emphasize that it will closely monitor the evolution of core inflation, which remains higher than expected as well as domestic demand before considering a new rate cut. We expect another reduction in the last quarter of the year, bringing the rate to 4.5% by year-end and followed by an additional cut during the course of next year. On Slide 5, we present recent developments in the regulatory framework. Regarding the mortgage subsidy law, which was approved in May of this year, its implementation has continued within the framework of the allocation of the funds awarded in the first auction held in June. Under the law, 50,000 subsidies will be provided with almost 18,000 already authorized by banks. This has provided some momentum to the housing sector, whose growth is expected to become increasingly evident in the coming months. With respect to the interchange fee, the second rate cap reduction remains on hold and under review by the commission, and we are awaiting further updates on this matter. Open Finance system of FinTech law established an implementation schedule that begins with a collateral submission of information that banks and payment card issuers must share in July 2026. However, the system's technical definition remains under consultation, while costs and other operation details are still pending. This has prompted calls to review the implementation time lines, a request the [ FMC ] is currently analyzing. During September, the framework law on sectoral authorization for permits related to productive, energy and mining initiatives was approved. This will enable the development of tools for the simultaneous processing of permits streamlining the approval of low-risk projects, which should in turn accelerate investment in these sectors. As we mentioned before, there are only a few days left until the presidential and congressional elections in Chile, which will be held on November 16 with a potential runoff on December 14. According to the latest current polls, left wing candidate, Jeannette Jara leads the presidential race with 27% support, followed by right candidate, Jose Antonio Kast with 20%. While the presidential race has gained visibility, we must not overlook the parliamentary elections where the entire Lower House and nearly half of the senate, 23 out of 50 seats will be renewed. Polls show that Chileans remain highly concerned with crime, security and the economic growth. Simulation suggests that right wing candidates may gain ground in Congress, driven by local campaigns emphasizing security. This implies that even if the left wing candidate wins the presidency, Congress could lean right, potentially moderating more vital policy initiatives. As such, while some [ electoral ] related volatility is likely in the near term, we believe the longer-term market impact will be limited. And with that, I will now pass over to Cristian.

Thanks, Lorena. On Slide 7, we show our value creation strategy for our stakeholders through our vision to become a digital bank with Work/Café. Our focus is on attracting and activating new clients, understanding their needs and deepening engagement. We aim to surpass 5 million clients by 2026 while continuing to grow our base of active customers. Next, we are building a global platform that leverages artificial intelligence and process automation to scale efficiently. It's about reducing the cost per active client and driving operational excellence. Our target is to maintain an efficiency ratio in the mid-30s or better, a reflection of a bank that is both digital and disciplined. We are focusing on broadening transactional and noncredit fee-generating services. Through this, we aim to grow our fee generation in double digits and ensuring best-in-class in recurrence, our income fees divided by our structural operating expenses. Our growing client base means more activity, and we are seeing increasing transactional volumes, especially in payments. Our digital ecosystem encourages clients to transact more frequently and seamlessly, driving engagement and loyalty. Finally, this is underpinned by strong CET1 levels, ensuring that our expansions remain sound, responsible and aligned with regulatory expectations. All of this leads to a strategy where we are capable of attracting value creation with ROEs above 20% and a dividend payout of 60% to 70%. On Slide 8, we can already see how our strategy over the last few years has succeeded in changing our income mix and creating a more efficient and profitable bank. Our key measure of value creation has been the strong growth in ROE achieved while maintaining solid capital ratios during the implementation of Basel III. Our ROE has increased more than 6 percentage points, more than double the increase in the rest of the industry. This has been supported by a 5 percentage point improvement in our efficiency versus a 2% improvement in the industry, demonstrating our consistent cost control and the success in the implementation of our digital transformation. We are particularly proud of successfully migrating our legacy mainframe systems to the cloud earlier this year under Project Gravity. On the other hand, we have been transforming the composition of our income revenue streams with fee generation increasing from 15% of our revenues to 20%, reflecting the success of the expansion of our client base and noncredit-related services through our digital accounts and card payments as well as other services such as asset management, brokerage and our acquiring business. Meanwhile, the composition of the industry revenues has remained stable. This mix is driving our revenues ratio to the best-in-class in the industry. This ratio, which shows how much of our costs are paid by our fee generation now stands at above 60%, far above for the rest of the industry. We are very proud of the success of our strategy has had so far. And as you will see later on, we are enthusiastic about the evolution of our results in the coming year. Now in Slide 10, we will take a closer look at the results this year. As of September, the bank generated a net income of CLP 798 billion, a 37% year-over-year increase resulting in a return on average equity of 24% and an efficiency of 35.9%. Growth was supported by an 8% rise in fee income and a 19% increase in financial transactions. Mutual funds grew 15%, and our recurrence ratio reached 62% year-to-date. Our net interest income, which includes our readjustment income increased 17% year-over-year, and our net interest margin remained at 4%. Furthermore, currently, we are provisioning a dividend payout of 60% of this year's income to be paid in April next year. This year, we have also been highly recognized on several fronts. We are proud to have been recognized by several institutions. Euromoney named us Best Bank in Chile, Latin Finance recognized us as Best Bank and Global Finance awarded as the Best Bank for SMEs. This year, we have improved our sustainability rankings with our MSCI ESG rating improving from A to AA and our Sustainalytics grade improving to 15.4 points. On Slide 11, we can see the evolution of our quarterly return over equity, where we can see that we have maintained our ROEs above 21% even in quarters with lower inflation such as this recent quarter, where the UF Variation was 0.56%, and we reached an ROE of 21.8%. On a yearly basis, our NII has improved 16.6% with a strong increase from net interest income as a result of a lower cost of funding, which improved some 100 basis points year-over-year. With this, our year-to-date NIM reached 4%. And given our current macro expectations, we expect our NIMs to stay around the 4% area for what is left of 2025. On Slide 12, we can see how our rapidly expanding client base is leading to a higher fee generation. We currently have 4.6 million clients, of which around 59% actively engaged with us and some 2.3 million are digital accessing the online platforms on a monthly basis. The number of current accounts is increasing 10% year-on-year, driving the 5% and 4% growth of our active clients and digital clients, respectively. The growing client base has led to a 12% annual increase in credit card transactions and a 15% rise in mutual fund volumes that we brokered. Overall, our clients maintain high satisfaction levels with the bank and our product offering. Furthermore, we continue to expand our footprint among companies, where we have increased the number of business current accounts by 23% in the last 12 months. This is explained by the simple business accounts we offer to smaller companies and the integrated payments offered through Getnet. As we can see in the table on the right, the increase in our client base and product usage is translating into high fees and results from financial transactions, growing 11.5% year-over-year. Our main products such as cards, Getnet, account fees and mutual fund fees continue to show strong trends, with cards and account fees registering a higher expense in the quarter related to certain campaigns in our loyalty programs during the quarter. On Slide 13, we can see how our recovery of income generation and tight cost control has improved our key performance metrics. Our efficiency ratio reached 35.9%, the best in the Chilean industry in 2025 so far, and our recurrence ratio reached 62%, meaning that over 60% of our expenses were financed by our fee generation. In early 2025, operating expenses rose temporarily due to the cloud migration costs, mainly reflected in higher administrative expenses during the first quarter. However, overall, our operating costs grew below inflation in the year so far. In the quarter, our total core expenses decreased 3.4%, mainly due to lower personnel expenses related to the seasonality caused by the winter holidays and national holidays in September. Overall, we have maintained our best-in-class levels of efficiency and recurrence compared to our peers. Furthermore, we continue to innovate in our branch network to align with our Work/Café format, improving both efficiency and customer experience. It is thanks to these adjustments to our contact points with clients along with the evolution of our digital platforms that we have been able to achieve these impressive levels of operating performance. On Slide 14, we show an overview of our cost of risk and asset quality. As in prior quarters, cost of credit has remained above historical average, reflecting elevated nonperforming loans earlier in the year. From the graphs, you can see that our NPL and impaired portfolio have shown some improvement in recent quarters with a slight pickup in September due to some seasonality related to collections in the month caused by the national holidays. However, our initial data for October is showing better performance. And over the last few months, we have seen tangible improvements in our asset quality that we expect these trends to continue in the coming quarters. On Slide 15, we can see that the CET1 ratio reached 10.8% in September '25, far above our minimum requirement of 9.08% for December 2025 and demonstrating some 45 basis points of capital creation since December 2024. This was driven by our income generation in 2025 and considers a 60% dividend provision for our 2025 profits accumulated so far and a 4% increase in risk-weighted assets. As noted in our previous call, we have a 25 basis point Pillar 2 capital charge, of which 50% was made by June 2025, in line with regulatory requirements. So on Slide 16, we show our guidance for what's left of 2025 and our initial guidance for 2026. Regarding our 2025 forecast, we are well on track to meeting our guidance with NIMs around 4% and efficiency in the mid-30s. Overall, we expect ROE to finish the year slightly above 23%. For next year, we're expecting GDP growth of 2% with a UF variation just below 2.9% and an average monetary policy rate of around 4.4%. With the upcoming elections in just 2 weeks, we expect a more favorable business environment next year, supporting mid-single-digit loan growth. Despite the slightly lower inflation, the loan growth and slightly lower rates should help to sustain our NIMs around 4%, while our fees on financial transactions should grow mid- to high single digits. This does not include any impact for a further interchange fee reduction, which is yet to be defined by the interchange fee commission. Our efficiencies should remain around the mid-30s, while our cost of credit should continue to improve gradually to reach around 1.3% for the year. With all of this, our initial expectations for 2026 are for an ROE within the range of 22% to 24%, underscoring the high ROE potential of Santander-Chile. With this, I finish my presentation, and we can start the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Lindsey Shema from Goldman Sachs.

Congrats on the results. Looking ahead to 2026, it seems like ROE might be a little better, a little worse, but somewhat the same. Just wondering here on our end, what are the main upside and downside risks for your ROE estimate? And then on that note, does it factor in an unfavorable election result? Or could there be further downside there?

Well, so thank you for the question, Lindsey. I'm going to hand over the first part because we assess that some of the most beneficial potential scenarios of next year are related to the change in political cycle. And we are not actually considering most of those effects into our guidance -- our current guidance.

[indiscernible]

Well, to provide some perspective, we are not considering in the potential scenario of growth for next year, the benefits of a political change that could trigger further growth in the commercial part of the loan portfolio. So we are thinking of mid-single digits, but a more benign scenario will probably make the commercial portfolio of the middle market companies grow stronger than this, maybe even going to figures of 7% to 8%, probably very skewed to the second part of next year and more into 2027 because of the delay of some projects to get approved and passed through to the practical part of the investment. So that's one of the things that's not actually considered on our guidance. The main risks that we have seen so far this year and next year are coming from the external part of the macro scenario. You have seen the volatility in terms of assets and commodity prices and all the effects that have come from all the discussions from international trade effects of the U.S. policies and the consequences of this. So that's a source of uncertainty that's also not considered in the central part of our scenario. But all in all, I think that we are favorable of the upcoming quarters in 2026 and that in general terms the more adverse scenarios are considered within our guidance.

Yes. And maybe to complement the answer, our base case scenario considers a lower inflation, but partially offset by a lower monetary policy rate on average for next year. And also offset by better growth dynamics in terms of loans. So that could be better -- even better depending on the political landscape for next year. And we think for both scenarios, we are well prepared in our targets and guidance.

Our next question is from Daniel Mora Ardila from CrediCorp.

I have 2 questions. The first one is regarding loan growth. Can you provide further color of what do you expect about loan growth in 2026 by segment? If we can have the guidance by segment would be great. And I would like also to know if you can comment about the competitive pressures in loan growth, especially considering that there is one key competitor that is showing very high figures of loan growth in Chile. I would like to know if you feel the pressures, especially in the commercial segment. That will be my first question. And the second one is regarding NPLs and cost of risk. I would like to know, considering the slight deterioration of NPL in the consumer segment and mortgage segment, what will be the path or the evolution of asset quality indicators in 2026, given that you are guiding for a reduction of the cost of risk next year?

Thanks, Daniel, for your questions. I will take the first one and Cristian will take the second one. So regarding the composition of loan growth for next year, we are seeing like a quite homogenic growth composition [ in segments ]. So regarding consumer loans, we continue to see growing at a healthy pace in that product. Regarding the mortgage portfolio, we also -- during this last quarter, we are seeing better dynamics leveraged by the government support or stimulus coming from the subsidies. So we are seeing good dynamics for next year as well. And regarding the commercial loans, that will be like the question mark, but we are also seeing better dynamics for next year, especially leveraged by the political landscape, right? And if we have the right changes in the regulation that we have already seen as part of the transition we will have growth in our guidance for next year.

So within the commercial portfolio, to give you a little more flavor, we are expecting for the retail part, SMEs to grow mid-single digits as within our general guidance. But as I mentioned earlier, the question mark is what will happen with the large corporates and the investment decisions that they might trigger because of the political landscape. This is what we are not seeing yet in terms of market dynamics. And it's probably related to the part of your question about the competitive pressure, right? So I think that in terms of the commercial part of the portfolio, we are seeing some players growing, but we don't assess it on the local part of the portfolio. And we believe that this is set to improve by the second half of next year. And turning to your credit cost of risk and risk in general performance. So, so far this year, we are showing closer to 1.4% cost of risk year-to-date. We have some seasonal effects on September in terms of the absolute movements of the portfolio, especially in the NPL part, we are seeing it's pretty stable. Most of the increase in cost of risk is coming from the improvement that we have been displaying in the commercial NPLs. So these commercial NPLs are coming down from levels of 4.1% 12 months ago to levels of 3.4%. So we've been doing some write-offs of some nonperforming loans there, and that's explaining most of the pickup that we are seeing in terms of cost of risk. We know that's not going to continue for the upcoming quarters. So that's what makes us believe that the total cost of risk is set to improve in the next periods.

Our next question is from Neha Agarwala from HSBC.

My first question is on the interchange fee. Could you remind us what are the current levels for the interchange fee? And what is the risk that the second caps actually go through next year? What is your expectation in that regard?

So just a reminder, like we had a committee that was in charge of assessing the rate fees for the card business in general. So they implemented the first part of their reduction from levels of around 1.4% in credit to levels of 1.14%, which is the current rate and from levels of 0.6% in debit to levels of 0.5%, which is the current rate. So the second rate cut, which was suspended, it was set to decrease credit fees to levels of around 0.8% and debit to levels of around 0.35% and prepaid also to levels of around -- similar to credit of 0.8%. So that's the part of the decision that's being reviewed. The committee is expected to come to a decision by the final months of this year or early next year. Our initial assessment was that the total reform will mean an impact in our credit card fees of around $50 million, half and half in both impacts. So the second part is expected to come next year. We don't know. But the impact will be in the neighborhood of the $20 million in fees in the card impact if the committee comes to the decision to implement the second cut.

Very clear. So if the second cut actually happens, which is not in your guidance, the impact would be between $20 million to $25 million for 2026.

Yes.

Super. And my second question is, again, going back to the cost of risk. I know you talked about it. But this year was -- we saw the NPLs coming down. You had to do some write-offs, there were one-off cases. But 2026, the asset quality should perform better than what we had this year. So why isn't cost of risk coming down, even more in the initial targets?

I think 10 basis points, it's a good range to start because we are still not seeing the full effects of the projects that we've been implementing to improve the collection cycle. So we are still -- and I agree with you, which might sound a little conservative, but we are comfortable guiding some conservative improvements and leaving some room there.

[Operator Instructions] Okay. It looks like we have no further questions. I will now hand it back to the Santander-Chile team for the closing remarks.

Thank you all very much for taking the time to participate in today's call, and we look forward to speaking with you again very soon.

That concludes the call for today. Thank you, and have a nice day.