B3 SA Brasil Bolsa Balcao

BOVESPA:B3SA3

Earnings Call Transcript 2020-Q1

[Operator]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the audio conference call about the earning results of B3 for the first quarter of 2020. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded and broadcast live by webcast. The replay will be available after the event is concluded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Daniel Sonder, Chief Financial Officer of B3.

[Daniel Sonder, executive]

Hello, everyone. Good morning. I'm sorry for being a few minutes late. We were just making sure that everyone was connected to the call. And I just want to start by wishing and hoping that everyone is safe and sound and taking care of yourselves and your families. And thank you for staying connected and keeping up the coverage of our company.

We are doing a slightly different format this quarter for the discussion on our results. As you saw last night, we also released an audio version of our earnings release. And so this call is going to be shorter and have some special guests that have kindly joined us in this discussion. And we will also have, hopefully, a longer Q&A period. So feel free to send your questions our way.

I just wanted to open with 2 main messages. One, is respecting the main focus of the company in the last quarter, in the first quarter of 2020. As you will hear in more detail from my colleagues in a moment, the priority for B3 was to really be available as a platform for our clients to perform all of their businesses, to be the resilient place where investors and brokers and banks and regulators could look to. I think we performed that to a very satisfactory level. And this was where most of our attention was focused. We are happy that the investments that we have made over the last many, many years were put to good use and that it works not only when we are expanding our business and thinking about exciting times and creating new products and so forth but also when a completely surprising crisis hit us, and we have to deal with the volumes that we dealt with. The -- in parallel, obviously, we had to change our working habits. And I need to, again, mention how competent and committed our team was in making all that possible.

The second theme that I just wanted to highlight, and hopefully, we can discuss that further, is that this is a very atypical and unusual quarter in terms of the financial results for the company. The completely surprising volumes that we dealt with obviously turned into high revenues, and the operating leverage that we have makes that become high profits.

It's important, however, to look forward and to be cautious and realistic about what's ahead. If you look line-by-line in our businesses, there are reasons for concern, both on the equity side with lower valuations and lower offerings; on the derivative side, with a potential lower risk appetite from investors; on the fixed income side, with possible investments being postponed by companies and their funding needs being less ambitious over the next few quarters; and obviously, also in the financing unit, which has to do with consumer confidence and maybe hit -- or is already being hit by the lower level of economic activity.

So in general, we're doing well. The company is very stable. We have a robust balance sheet. And we are extremely focused and committed to our clients and to the stability of the financial system.

And now I'm going to ask my colleague, Marcela Bretas, to go through some of the numbers. And I just want to take a chance to thank all the IR team and the communications teams for putting together all the materials that you guys have in front of you. Thank you.

[Marcela Bretas, executive]

Thank you, Daniel. Hello, everyone. Good morning. Hope everyone is safe and well during this challenging time. I will walk you through some of our operating and financial highlights for the quarter. First, total revenues reached BRL 2.1 billion, which was 39% higher than in the first quarter of 2019. The listed segment was -- delivered BRL 1.5 billion in revenues with ADTV of 72% and ADV of 60%.

In the OTC segment, volumes increased close to 20%, but revenues remained flattish due to the pricing schedule change we implemented in January, where we shared some of the -- our operating leverage with our clients and transferred some of the volume-linked revenues to our technology and assets revenue line.

In the infrastructure of our financing business, as Daniel mentioned, we started to feel the negative impacts of the coronavirus crisis with the number of vehicles financed decreasing 20% over the fourth quarter of 2019 and the number of additions to the Contracts System decreasing 16% over the fourth quarter of '19. Adjusted expenses grew 18% driven by upgrades in our IT infrastructure, salary adjustments and inflation, new hires as well as the addition of our 2 new subsidiaries, BLK and Portal de Documentos. Our EBITDA reached BRL 1.6 billion in the quarter, and recurring net income reached EUR 1.15 billion. Referring to this capital distribution, we paid BRL 293 million in interest on noncapital relating to the first quarter of '20 and BRL 650 million related to an extraordinary dividend related to 2019.

Now I'm going to invite Cícero Vieira, our COO, to share some of the operating highlights of the quarter at B3. Cícero, please.

[Cícero Neto, executive]

Thank you, Marcela. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today. So as you know, in March 2020, B3 faced a huge operation compression. It was a true stress test for its systems and risk management processes for several reasons. First, because we had the highest volatility in the Brazilian stock market ever. The Brazilian circuit breaker was created in 1997 by Bovespa and since then has been used 23 times. In March, we had 6 circuit breakers in the same month, a record. We almost reached 7. Since on March 12, we had a 10% following the Ibovespa in a 30-minute break then a 15% following a 60-minute break. And then we almost had, for the first time, a 20% circuit breaker when the Ibovespa reached minus 19.6% seconds before the Fed made an announcement that brought some relief to the market. Besides the huge price volatility, there was an exponential growth in the number of trades, which stress tested the capacity of our IT systems.

Until the beginning of February, the peak number of trades was about 6 million per day, and the average was about 5 million. During the Carnival holiday, international markets started to react more strongly to coronavirus news. When markets reopened in Brazil after Carnival, we reached 10 million trades per day, a 66% increase when compared to the previous peak. This level became the new normal. And in March, we reached 12 million trades per day, a 100% increase. This has never happened before.

At the same time that the volatility and the number of trades were the highest in our history, 90% of the company has to start working remotely. These 3 factors combined, extreme volatility, peak number of trades and remote working meant the biggest operational and resiliency stress test ever faced by the company. Fortunately, everything worked out quite well.

Initially, let me talk about CCP credit risk. During the whole crisis, variation margin was fully paid and collateral was deposited always on time. There was no clearing member delay or default. There was no clearing member requests to liquidate institutional customer collateral. There was only a marginal increase in the number of retail investor defaults with very small sizes and no systemic impacts. There are no doubt that the investments made in previous years in our risk systems were very important for achieving these results.

There are some investments that I would like to highlight: the initial margin calculation system core, which adopts a 99.96% confidence level and is based on fast-stated probability distributions, something very relevant in a severe crisis like this one; the model used to control position limits at investor level, which avoids excessive concentration in derivative markets; the free trade risk system line, which controls the inflow of orders in our matching engine; the dynamic price bands used by the matching engine, which trigger price auctions whenever there is excessive price fluctuation; as well as other tools used by the trading system to mitigate the risk of fast fingers and algorithm malfunction.

The second point is IT processing capacity. During the crisis, B3 critical systems performed quite well. There was no additional latency in the matching engine due to the exceptionally large number of trades, and post-trade systems were also able to cope with additional volume. Nardoni will talk a little bit more about this later.

Finally, I would like to say that remote working has performed better than expected. We have about 90% of the company working remotely and about 10% divided amongst different buildings and respecting a minimum distance between people. Employees can access B3 systems via secure VPN connection and interact with each other using different IT applications. We hope that the infection will be contained as soon as possible. But if it's necessary, the company will be able to work in remote mode for an extended period of time.

So with that, I would like to ask Nardoni to continue the presentation. Thank you.

[Rodrigo Antonio Gonçales, executive]

Thank you, Cícero. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Daniel and Marcela. I appreciate the invitation for this conference. And I hope everyone is safe and in good health. Taking a risk of being quite repetitive with what Cícero just said, I just wanted to emphasize that in the last few months, we have experienced high volatility and a sharp growth in the amount of trades, mainly in the listed segment. And at the same time, the market participants and B3 were pushed to adopt it to remote working for the majority of the fees, something we have never faced before. This combination has been very challenging. And in this scenario, the strength of the technology and of our platforms like resiliency, availability, flexibility and security, all B3 technology infrastructure in most of the systems has been stress tested, along with the process and the capacity of B3 to respond to the market and the regulators' demands and needs.

The market is together with us in this scenario, and the market has been very responsive to the new way of working. The infrastructure prepared to support the remote working. The newest piece in our puzzle has also been hard tested and has been producing good results, making it possible for our team to work properly outside B3 wherever they are. Some special procedures have been timely structured to make it feasible, like providing extra monitor to those people who really need the device to perform their daily activity. And our tech team is well prepared for that.

Besides all of that, all the services provided by B3 in all segments were maintained without restrictions, and the protection and technology capacity mechanism has been responding properly to ensure the market functioning in this unique moment.

And also, probably as Cícero mentioned, in order to have a Brazilian government to restructure initiatives to help the market to pass through the pandemic crisis, B3 has developed and delivered new financial instruments in the OTC platform, proving our capability to run new projects and delivery solutions even in a diverse scenario.

Finally, I can say that B3 technology platform and processes are very well prepared to face the challenge imposed by the pandemic crisis. Thank you very much.

Daniel, Marcela, I think that I can hand over to you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Mr. Thomas Peredo from BTG Pactual.

[Thomas Peredo, analyst]

Congrats for the strong performance and how the company handled with such increasing volumes at the same time. The impact from COVID forced all of us to move to home office. I have 2 questions, if I may. The first one is if you could give a bit more of detail on how has been the behavior of individual investors during the crisis. Differently from the past, we have a much lower interest rate this time. So there is not a safe harbor investment as we saw in 2015 and other crisis. And mainly the number of the investors, they continue as net buyers in March and May. And just wanted to get a sense of how the different profile of investors are behaving, how you are seeing the net new money if the investors that onboard the exchange last year continue to bring net new money or if you are seeing a higher flow from new investors as well. Which one is more significant? And also how has been the performance of the day traders? Do they continue to increase their volumes in equities in many futures? Is this new individuals that became day traders or individuals that were already acting as day traders before the crisis? And in a sense, which one of these different profiles has been more significant for the increase in the ADTV? That's the first question. Sorry for the long question.

And the second one is how we can imagine the payout going forward. Eventually, the payout of the year would be close to the history -- to the historical that you have been paying. But how could we imagine is its distribution throughout the quarters as we can imagine that the coming quarters will be much -- we will see eventually lower pretax earnings and eventually the benefits will decrease throughout the quarters?

[Daniel Sonder, executive]

Thank you for the questions. I'm going to give you a few comments on individual investors, and then Marcela can help me out because she has some numbers with her as well. I just wanted to mention that it's a, I think, happy development for the Brazilian capital markets that we have a stable and growing base of individual investors that are committed to a diversified portfolio, which includes stocks. This is something that obviously has to do with low interest rates, but I think also it has to do with the good job that over the last few years, the brokerage sector has done in terms of education and staying close to the clients through their network of financial advisers.

I think that these things, they don't have just one reason. They all come together. The fact that there is a number of good companies and good liquidity, that people have platforms through which they can access the exchange and put their orders through and that they have good advice and good education as well as the fact that there is a low interest rate. I think all these things come together to deliver what we have seen, which is growth in retail even during these tough times of asset price adjustments.

It is our view for a very long time that to have a healthy, balanced capital markets, you need to have different types of investors well represented within our liquidity and our ADTV partners, institutional -- foreign institutional investors, local institutional investors, treasury and also retail and proprietary trading firms/high-frequency traders. So I think all of this is a very positive development.

Maybe Marcela can help us with some of the breakdown, and then I'll go back and talk about payout.

[Marcela Bretas, executive]

So Thomas, just to give a little bit more color on what Sonder just said. Individual investors, retail investors were -- actually increased the amount outstanding in our depository in the first quarter when we compare to the fourth quarter. The foreign investors were the ones that -- they pulled out more money. So at the end of the fourth quarter, they had an outstanding amount of BRL 1.1 trillion in our depository, and that number fell to BRL 970 billion in the first quarter of '20. But foreign investors still represent 41% of the outstanding balance in our depository for cash equities.

[Daniel Sonder, executive]

So just to go back to the payout question, the company still showing a very strong cash generation. We have some, let's say, financing needs over the next few months, but we believe that we can access different markets for that over the remaining of the year so that we can keep our payout. The payout target is -- for the fiscal year is a payout related to the fiscal year of 2020, but we may make some of these distributions in 2021, just like we recently paid out dividends related to 2019.

So I think that, again, having a strong balance sheet and having a strong cash generation are the key pillars. And this would allow us to continue to make significant payouts to our investors, and we'll do that prudently over time as well as long as we can access good sources of debt to basically bring our debt level up again to the desired capital structure for the company. But we'll do it gradually and with prudence as the markets permit.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Mr. Marco Calvi from Itaú BBA.

[Marco Calvi, analyst]

So if I may take advantage of the presence of Cícero in the call, I would like to hear about the regulation of the short selling. We have been observing some changes in the regulations in short selling outside Brazil. So if you could share your view on if there is an intention of a change in regulation on this. And if not, what you can share about this topic.

[Cícero Neto, executive]

Okay. Marco, thank you for the question. So first, we're not planning any change in the cycle engine markets or the short-selling system in Brazil. But as you know, there were some restrictions, some changes in Italy, France, Spain, some measures related to short-sale bans in those jurisdictions. There were some questions in Brazil, some discussions. But I would like to explain some of the background on how we see it.

First, it's important to notice that cycle engine in Brazil is cleared via a CCP, which is not the case in other countries where cycle engine is cleared bilaterally. And this has many implications in terms of risk management and how cycle engine in short positions affect the market. First, when you have a CCP, as you know, the credit risk of those trades is mitigated by collateral deposits by the borrower. So according to the Brazilian model, the borrower has to deposit about 125% of the notional value of the transaction as collateral. That's because there is a principal risk, the value of the stock and volatility risk, the price -- the potential price fluctuation.

But I would say that on top of that, it's also important to note is that in the CCP model, there are position limits for each stock that is borrowed by investor and for all investors together. These position limits are set as a fraction of the free float of the stock and also as a fraction of the liquidity of each stock. It is very important to avoid excessive leverage in the market.

One key element is that if you -- if the market does not use a CCP in such centralized limits to control positions, borrowed positions could, in theory, exceed 100% of the free float, which is the case when it's not centrally cleared but bilaterally triggers. And the reason for this is that while the same stock can be borrowed and then sold and then borrowed again and then sold, and this chain can repeat itself several times until you could see potentially more than 100% of the free floats borrowed in the market.

This is not the case in the Brazilian infrastructure, as I explained, because of the position limits established by the CCP. I guess that's -- one final point is that we were analyzing this point in the last month, and there are some numbers that perhaps I can share with you all. So in March 2020, considering all stocks borrowed in our system, the average was 3% of the free float for each stock. So that's relatively low. Considering only more volatile stocks, the average was 7% of the free float, not a huge amount.

So in a nutshell, in our view, I would say that the Brazilian stock lending system is working quite well. It helps to improve price discovery and market liquidity. So it means that we do not see a reason for any type of short-sell ban or change in the model. And based on discussions that we had with regulators, we believe that they see things in the same way as we do.

[Marco Calvi, analyst]

Very clear. If I may make a second question to Rodrigo. Rodrigo, should we expect an increase in investments, a focus on IT, given the expansion in the number of methods we have recently?

[Rodrigo Antonio Gonçales, executive]

Thank you for the question. At B3, we constantly test and review the capacity of our platforms. And also, we invest every year to modernize the technology to ensure that we will be able to handle the volumes growth. Normally, we work based on historical data plus expectations derived from the market CapEx, and we review our plans and investments. Of course, some adjustments can be done regarding the new context, the sharp growth in trade volume but nothing, how can I say, expressed. So it's just a root review for our investments, as I said, something that we are used to doing every year.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Carlos Gomez from HSBC.

[Carlos Gomez-Lopez, analyst]

First, congratulations for the very good results. Two simple questions. First, where do you see velocity for stock trading going after this initial increase in the crisis? Where do you think it might stabilize in the coming 1 or 2 years?

Second, in the past, you have been able to use market disruptions and opportunities to invest in other exchanges, not necessarily as a controller but as a minority partner. Is that something that you are considering at this point? Or you prefer to continue paying out as you have recently?

[Daniel Sonder, executive]

Thank you, Carlos. So regarding velocity, what I can say is that we did have an unusual quarter. These periods of volatility are demonstrated by a lot of, let's say, different opinions in the market and a very, let's say, intense desire of investors to move their positions. And that is why in very short periods of time, days or weeks, you have some very intense and unusual activity, which in the calculation will obviously boost up our trading velocity.

I think it's unlikely that we should see that going forward the same level that we saw in the first quarter. I think it's hard to say that -- how this will perform over the next 2 years. However, we have been seeing a trend that even in periods of less tension in volatility is an upward trending line for Brazil in terms of velocity. I think that has to do with the health of the Brazilian capital markets, with the diversity of types of investors, with new companies coming on board, with companies deciding to make more of their stock available to investors and that is either through controlling shareholders divestitures or change from dual-class structure into Novo Mercado or from the process of privatization/divestments from government positions, either in private companies or state-owned companies.

So I think all these things compound, and we hope that continues to be the case. We have a strategy of promoting products that also bring this type of additional velocity. So ETFs contribute to velocity and trading between futures and single stocks and baskets and so forth, all these things add to velocity and permit arbitrage, which I think, again, is a good thing for investors ultimately.

The second point you made was related to investments in other exchanges. That's not a priority for B3 at this point in our strategy. We have a lot of work to do in Brazil and so not one of the main things that we're looking at, at this point in terms of investing in other exchanges outside of Brazil.

Our M&A strategy, however, does include looking at selective opportunities in Brazil adjacent to our business in things that we consider that would add value to our clients. So as we announced last year 2 transactions, we continue to look at things that are not transformational, but here and there, could add something to our product portfolio and increase the profile and the position of the company in the future.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Felipe Salomao from Citibank.

[Felipe Salomao, analyst]

Would it be possible to share with us some color on the pipeline for IPOs and follow-ons? I know that, I mean, the market has been very volatile. But I mean, at the same time, the risk by index is close to 80,000 points, which is not that far from what it was on late 2018, early 2019, when some deals were already kind of taking place. And I mean I suspect that some companies might also face kind of a liquidity constraint, which would possibly -- and these companies would possibly need to access capital markets. So how are you seeing the pipeline of IPOs and follow-ons for the next couple of months?

[Daniel Sonder, executive]

Thank you, Felipe. We had -- before the onset of the COVID crisis, we had about 25 companies that were publicly announced that they were going to access the equity markets. Some of these companies have pulled their deals, and others have kind of maintained the documentation and are still, let's say, officially working on it. So I don't have a precise number at this point to give you like the temperature. But what I -- what we've been hearing from our clients, from the investment banks as well as for the corporate, is that we're still very much in the middle of the fog, and it's hard to have much visibility.

It seems like some of the companies will have their business disrupted. So I think that their priorities are possibly now going to be internally in terms of fixing their expenses or revenue-generating capacity in the face of this crisis, which may be prolonged in terms of the macroeconomic impacts and the hit on consumer confidence and so forth. I think -- so maybe they won't be as determined to access the market. Maybe their growth plans are not going to be as ambitious as they were before.

The other side of this equation is obviously the valuation discussion. I think you're absolutely correct to mention that drop in the Bovespa just brings us back to 2018. But once people have seen the valuations that they were discussing before, some issuers may consider that they are not willing to go to market at these new prices.

Having said that, I think you bring up an interesting point, which is that the need for capital might be there as -- in terms of refinancing or restructuring balance sheets post the crisis. So you might see some people even that were not on the radar for equity issuances looking at the market as a source for capital infusion and so forth.

We are very pleased that this morning -- or 2 days ago, we had the pricing of a small IPO. We just -- it started trading this morning in a fully online virtual ceremony with the ring of the bell done through computers. But I think it's a good sign. It's a good sign that some people took the step of bringing a new company public and doing that in a way that attracted a diversified pool of investors.

So we remain active. We remain ready. We remain in close touch with our client issuers. And we hope that this will resume at some point. But it's still very early to give you, let's say, a concrete number and say, this is what we expect to see in the next 6 or 12 months.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from the webcast, and it's from Otávio Tanganelli from Crédit Suisse. He wrote, "Congratulations on results. I wanted to know if we have any updates on the public consultation of CVM related to competition multiple exchanges? Do you think very high volumes recently increased the incentive for another exchange to start operations?"

[Daniel Sonder, executive]

Thank you, Otávio. The public hearing is going on. We -- the CVM was kind enough to postpone the deadline for turning in the answers by the market. So this is expected to be done by the end of June. We are obviously working hard in the company to prepare our answers. I think the CVM brought up some interesting points for discussion in the market, some of which we were already familiar with, some of which came more in the form of questions and, let's say, ideas that they wanted to float to see how the market reacted.

So we are working on this. We know that other markets players are also working, that the buy-side and the sell-side community are looking at some of the market structure ideas that the regulator brought and that we're going to have some -- I think, a healthy, interesting debate. I think that the -- what just took place actually is, I think, a demonstration over the last few months of the healthy state of the Brazilian capital markets infrastructure, right? When you're hit by such a sudden and intense shock and are able to deal with it and everybody

[Audio Gap]

in the market, not only for trading but also the whole clearing and settlement infrastructure works very, very well. I think that's a good sign. Obviously, the merits of the discussion of fragmentation, we all know. And we trust that the regulator is going to take all these points into consideration when they review.

In terms of new players, we don't have any news that we can share that are different from what has been already reported and known. We have a player that has been discussing setting up an exchange in Brazil for quite some time. We had a pending issue with them that was negotiated and settled through remediation over the course of the last quarter of 2019. So that page has been turned, and I assume that they continue to work. And eventually, they -- if they're ready and they have support from market participants and so forth, they will submit their request to the regulators.

We stand ready in B3 to provide trading services, depository services as we have announced and have committed formally to the regulators. So we are ready, and our strategy is to be the platform of choice for our clients, for investors and continue to prove the value of B3 in the future, whether there are competitors or not.

[Operator]

This concludes today's question-and-answer session. I would like now to invite Mr. Daniel Sonder to proceed with the closing statements. Please, Mr. Daniel.

[Daniel Sonder, executive]

Thank you very much. Thanks for following. And please send us your feedback. We again changed slightly the format of this conversation and also introduced a new media format last night. So please let us know if you like it, and especially if you don't like it, because we need to get your feedback so we can move forward. Thanks a lot, and have a great day.

[Operator]

That does conclude the B3 audio conference for today. Thank you very much for your participation. Have a good morning, and thank you for using Chorus Call.