PagSeguro Digital Ltd. (NYSE:PAGS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 3 of 13

So, we had a decrease in revenues related to credit, and that’s why the revenues went down BRL10 million in PagBank in Q4, compared to Q3. So, we cannot correlate that, Bryan, because we are seeing people using more and more bank account. That’s why you see deposits are growing so. So, making this math as a percent of TPV doesn’t mean too much, to be honest.

Bryan Keane: Got it. Got it. And my second question is just on the rates and the financial expenses. Obviously, that higher rates pressured the profitability all year. Can you talk a little bit about how much additional pressure you expect in the financial expenses this year that could pressure net income margin? And then secondly, you mentioned the possibility of cutting rates if rates dropped and not actually keeping the benefit from a rate drop. Can you just make sure you can explain how you guys would go about doing that? Because I was under the assumption that you guys would be able to benefit from lower rates into the profitability would improve. Thanks.

Ricardo Dutra: Hi, Bryan. This is Ricardo. I will start with the second question, and then Artur can help us with the first part of the question as it relates to financial expenses and the rates. If the interest rates goes down, our financial expenses will go down. And we do not expect to decrease prices automatically. The dynamics or the moving parts here will be the following: In longtail, we had the same rates since 2016. I mean the past years is exactly the same rates, the prepayment, MDR and so on. So, if the rates €“ the interest rate goes down, we’re going to recover margins in longtail in the next business day. In the SMBs, we will not decrease price automatically. We’ll try to keep advantage of this decrease in cost and keep the same levels of MDRs and prepayment so that we can have a better margin in SMBs as well.

Of course, there will be some clients that will contact us asking if they could have a better condition or a better price, and some clients will not do that. So, the same dynamic that we had when the interest rates went up and we weighted a little bit to increase prices, we’re going to have the opposite movement at this point. The interest rates go down, and we will not decrease the price automatically for SMBs. So, on average, we should have some benefits in the SMBs as well because not everyone will decrease prices in the next business day. It’s going to take a while, and some of the clients probably will not even decrease the price for a long time. So, in longtail, we’re going to receive the benefit automatically. And in SMBs, we’ll try to have the benefits as much as we can.

Of course, it depends on competition, depends on many variables, but there could be some advantages. That’s for sure. Because when you have 7 million clients who have everything. You have clients that we call in the next business day and clients that don’t even pay attention to that in detail. And Artur can help us in the financial expenses for 2023.

Artur Schunck: Yes. Bryan, regarding to financial expenses, we will see in 2023 the expenses higher than 2022 because of two reasons: The first one is the volume growth of our prepayment business. And the second point is related to average interest rate for the country that in 2022 was 12.5%. And in 2023, we are expecting at this point that we will be stable during the year at 13.75%. So, based on those two things, the expenses that we are expecting for 2022 will be higher in nominal terms versus 2022.

Bryan Keane: That’s helpful. Just a quick one. Is there still repricing benefit you will see positively in fiscal year 2023 or did that benefit in Slide 16, the , was that just a fiscal year 2022 phenomenon and you won’t see a benefit of repricing in fiscal year 2023?

Page 3 of 13