Intercorp Financial Services Inc. (NYSE:IFS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Luis Felipe Castellanos: Let’s see. Do we expect to continue growing credit cards? Yes, we do expect to continue growing both in our consumer book. Obviously, at a more moderate pace that we’ve witnessed during the last year because part of the growth of last year was a re-composition of our whole book customers that because of the situation during COVID, just decrease their outstanding balances, and we’ve been recouping that. Actually, as you are aware, we’ve been more disciplined in terms of cutting, underwriting or improving underwriting standards. And that has a toll in growth, especially for the second half of the year, and we expect that to continue. So probably, we’ll continue growing as a guidance provided by Michela, low double digits in terms of that.

And the guidance on cost of risk is there. We do expect, given the situation, cost of risk improvement bit and also NPLs following that path as well. For the second part of your question, let me pass it on to Gonzalo so he can talk about annuities.

Gonzalo Basadre: Sure, thanks. Okay. Regarding annuities, first of all, let’s remember that right now, since €“ in the last five years, most of annuities are related to the disability and survival benefits, kind of annuities. Retirement annuities are practically nonexistent after the 95.5 low, which allow people to withdraw their funds from the AFP when they reach retirement. So right now, it’s mostly disability or survival benefits. What happened in 2020 and 2021 was that that market increased significantly because of the increase in death rates in the country due to COVID. So, what we’re seeing this year is that the annuities market is going down back to normal to what we had in 2019. So, we expect a level similar to what we had in that year.

Now right now, it’s been discussed the further retirements from the AFPs. We are not sure yet how this might impact or if it’s going to impact the disability or survivor benefits insurance. But again, because we already have no annuities sold for retirement, that part of the business is not impacted. Now, with our other products, life insurance, bank assurance and digital products, they are €“ we expect to continue very high growth that we have seen last year. We’re talking about our digit growth, and we expect that to continue. We haven’t found any de-acceleration in any of those products.

Luis Felipe Castellanos: Great. Thank you, Gonzalo.

Rafael Borja: At this time, I’m showing no further questions. So, I would like to turn the call over to the operator.

Operator: There appears to be no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the floor back over to Mrs. Casassa for any closing remarks.

Michela Casassa: Okay. Just to thank you again, everybody, for participating to this call, and we will see each other again on our first quarter 2023 conference call. Bye. Stay well.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.

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