Guilherme Marques do Lago
Analyst
Sure, Jorge. Look, 2 things on this. So first on the revenue and then on the cost. I think on the revenue side, we have seen the growth being kind of more heavily weighted into less risky assets, not only asset classes per se. For example, you can see that if you go to Slide 12, you can see that, for example, secured lending has outpaced the rest of the portfolio. Secured assets has no everything else constant, lower kind of yield levels. But even within lending and within credit card, Jorge, we are seeing kind of a faster growth on a balanced basis. towards less risky customers that would have, all else equal, kind of lower yields. So that is one of the things that would justify, but you correctly pointed out that we have also seen an increase in interest expenses, and that has come entirely from Brazil. So our average funding cost in Brazil has gone up and the average funding cost in Mexico and Colombia have been coming down. When we look at the average funding cost that we published on Slide 14, you will see kind of the -- what we call the cost of deposits as a percentage of the interbank rate going from 91% to 89%. And they may call the question, why, how do I kind of connect the dots, right? If you are lowering the cost of funding as a percent -- expressed as a percentage of interbank rates, how can your cost of funding expressed in dollars be going up? It's because the piece that is going up is the piece denominated in Brazilian reais, which is subject to the nominally higher interest rates of SELIC of 15%. So the weighted average cost of fund expressed as a percentage of the interbank deposit rate, which is what you see here on Slide 14, has come down. But the overall interest expenses, dollar-wise, has gone up a little bit. So the combination of lower asset yield because of the mix with a slightly more expensive funding base in Brazil has compressed net interest margins in the quarter, which is what you see on Slide 15 that has gone from 17.7% to 17.3%. What I would, however, point out is, when you're taking into account the asset quality or the cost of risk, you actually see an expansion in margin. And that is what is shown on the subsequent slide, which is Slide 16. Our risk-adjusted margin has actually gone up from 9.2% to 9.9%, which goes to show that even though we have kind of increased the growth towards less risky assets that has come at the expense of slightly lower asset yield. This has been more than offset by much lower cost of risk, which has led to the expansion of risk-adjusted NIMs.