Good morning, and welcome to the Grupo Supervielle Second Quarter 2019 Earnings Call. A slide presentation will accompany today's webcast, which is available in the Investors section of Grupo Supervielle's Investor Relations website, www.gruposupervielle.com. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Ana Bartesaghi, Treasurer and IRO. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Speaking today's call will be Patricio Supervielle, our Chairman of the Board of Directors, who will discuss the overall banking environment; and Jorge Ramirez, our Chief Executive Officer and Vice Chairman of the Board, who will review our results for the quarter. Also joining us is Alejandra Naughton, Chief Financial Officer; and Alejandro Stengel, Chief Operating Officer of the Bank. All will be available for the Q&A session. Before we proceed, I would like to make the following safe harbor statements. Today's call will contain forward-looking statements, and I refer you to the forward-looking statement section of our earnings release and recent filings with the SEC. We assume no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect new or changed events or circumstances. I'd now like to turn the call over to our Chairman, Patricio Supervielle.

Thank you, Ana. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. If you're following the presentation, please turn to Slide 3. I will begin my presentation this morning touching on the key highlights of the second quarter results. We are planning to spend time updating you on our digital initiatives on this call. Given recent political events, we will focus on our performance and leave more time for Q&A. The resiliency and flexibility of our business model was evidenced in results for the quarter. Overall credit demand remains weak as we are conducting business in an ongoing challenging macro environment. Against this backdrop, pretax income more than doubled. Additional with the leverage were good revenue generation and increase in our NPL coverage to almost 108%. Becoming a leaner and more efficient organization is a key strategic focus for us -- of ours. And although we are making progress, some of this has been upset by weaker performance in Consumer Finance and wage inflation. Jorge will discuss this in greater detail in a moment. We delivered solid results in the quarter, but we remain cautious through the remainder of the year as interest rates remain consistently high and weak economic activity has been impacting several key industry sectors. As a result, we continue to closely monitor our loan portfolio. While we are facing challenging times in the near term, we do have a long track record of operating in uncertain environments. It is important for us to continue to make the necessary investments to operate in a changing capital and banking world and to do so efficiently. Moving on to the macro on Slide 4. Macroeconomic imbalances have been trending towards normalization over the past quarters. While historically, Argentina has been characterized by chronic governmental spending and consequent deficits, we're…

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from the line of Gabriel Nóbrega with Citi. Gabriel Nóbrega: I would just like to know how has the bank prepared itself ahead of the elections on Sunday. And while I know it might be too early to understand the impacts from the market movements that we saw yesterday, could you just remind us if you were net long or short dollars? And also making it in parallel with the peso depreciation that we saw in 2018, what could be possible read-through for your net financial margin in the coming quarters? And I'll ask a second question afterwards. Jorge Ramírez: Regarding your -- the first part of your question, we had a neutral position. We closed all of our positions on Friday. We took advantage of the Friday upward market and closed down. So we remained neutral for the election weekend, which was in hindsight the right thing to do given the high uncertainty we had on Friday. No pollster anticipated the results of -- this Sunday and definitely not the difference between the 2 candidates. So we decided the more cautious approach given the uncertainty was to remain neutral. In terms of the second part of your question, it's a very different environment, 2019 and the second half of the year to what we experienced in 2018, essentially because when we had the major devaluations at the beginning of last year, second quarter of last year, we still had the LEBACs in place. And the Central Bank had several problems in terms of renewing the LEBACs every 35 days. So clearly, we're facing a very different balance sheet in which loans to assets is 49% of total assets. So it's substantially lower than what it was last year. We have -- even though…

Our next question comes from the line of Jason Mollin with Scotiabank.

You talk about your liquidity and the asset composition with loans decreasing in importance. We've seen, on the other hand, a very substantial increase in the exposure to Leliq and government securities, which at the end of the second quarter represented about 27% of assets. If we look last year, taking into consideration the LEBACs and the government securities, I think it was probably about half of that or about 14% of assets. How do you feel about your exposure to government securities and the Central Bank notes? And is that something that you would consider adjusting given the current environment? Jorge Ramírez: I mean this is part of the flexibilization strategy that we've been putting in place. And it was also discussed a couple of weeks ago in New York that clearly loan demand has been particularly nonexistent. And our loans in pesos have been flat year-on-year with a cumulative inflation rate over 50%, closer to 60%, for that same period. So we have had a sharp increase in liquidity. The whole industry has had that as a result of the unwinding of the whole LEBACs program. And the big difference we have now is that the Leliqs are -- only banks can invest in Leliqs. So these are tools that the Central Bank uses for -- to maintain and manage liquidity for the overall system. So unless there is a massive run in deposits systematically against the peso deposits, there is no place that can go over the LEBACs -- over the Leliqs. So we don't feel worried about it. If even mentioned in dollar terms, the percentage of the Leliqs is substantially lower than what the LEBACs were at their peak. Yesterday, the evaluation had even [indiscernible] the outstanding in U.S. dollars. The Central Bank still has plenty of reserves and is being very cautious and is showing to be very cautious in terms of how they're using them. So clearly, this is not the type of business we'd like to run. But this is the right kind of asset composition and balance sheet composition we need to have given the current circumstances and the current environment that we're facing.

That's helpful. Maybe just some comments on the FX and what you're seeing, the intervention on behalf of the Central Bank and how your bank is managing FX for clients? What kind of spreads are you offering them for buying and selling pesos in the current environment? Jorge Ramírez: Well, the bid and offer yesterday were really very, very wide because it was a highly uncertain day and highly volatile day. So it's only now that it has been in line with what the regional banking industry has been doing. In terms of our overall exposure, we're neutral as I explained earlier. And we've been using our dollar loan portfolio measured in its original currency as well as with corporates. So we don't expect to have a major impact coming from that.

[Operator Instructions]. Our next question comes from the line of Yuri Fernandes with JPMorgan.

I have a question regarding Alberto Fernández. If you can comment any kind of proposal he has for banks like if you had heard anything in particular that it's worth flagging? I recall he was a critic of Leliqs in the past of this high-yield interest rate. So if you can also discuss what would be the impact for your bank? And I think like this could be a consent for the market, right? As the previous questions, you have a big exposure to government secured. And what would happen if there is a material change there? So if you can comment on the whole of public banks, the whole of Leliqs, any kind of past regulations such as subsidizing loans for West and East, I don't know. Anything you can provide colors that maybe Fernández had been commenting would be nice. Jorge Ramírez: Yes. I mean Alberto Fernández and the Frente para Todos haven't been still very outspoken in terms of what they're going -- in terms of the economic policies. Yesterday, he's starting to -- or started to try to bring some calm to the market, saying that they're not thinking in terms of any foreign central problems, that they don't -- that they want to -- that they will honor Argentina's debts, that they might sit down with the IMF to renegotiate terms and conditions, but that they will -- that they have the willingness to meet all of Argentina's obligations. And they haven't been any more specific than that so far. I think we're going to have a little more clarity in the next couple of weeks or in the next month, 1.5 months. Regarding his comments about Leliqs, I think that was part of -- I mean that was in the middle of the campaign.…

We have no further questions at this time. Ms. Bartesaghi, I would now like to turn the floor back over to you for closing comments.

Joining us today, we appreciate your interest in our company. We look forward to meeting more of you over the coming months and providing financial and business updates next quarter. In the interim, we remain available to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you, and enjoy the rest of your day.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation, and have a wonderful day.