Good morning, and welcome to the Grupo Supervielle First Quarter 2019 Earnings Call. A slide presentation will accompany today's webcast, which is available in the Investor section of Grupo Supervielle's Investor Relations website at www.gruposupervielle.com. [Operator instructions] 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 thanks for joining us today. Speaking during today's call will be Patricio Supervielle, our Chairman of the Board of Directors, who will discuss the overall macro 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 statement. Today's call will contain forward-looking statements, and they refer you to a forward-looking statement section of our 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 would now like to turn the call over to our Chairman, Patricio Supervielle.

Thank you, Ana. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. If you're following the presentation, please turn to Slide 3. During the quarter, we delivered results that tracked in line with our expectations for the year. When we spoke last quarter, we provided annual guidance that anticipated a slower first half of 2019, basically mirroring what was happening in the economy. The flexibility and resilience of our franchise is helping us to navigate a macro scenario of low credit demand and economic challenges. In this context, we achieved higher revenue generation despite tough loan demand and against a seasonally strong fourth quarter and expanded our deposit base above market growth. This excess liquidity is being invested in short-term into Central Bank securities. Profitability, however, was impacted by one corporate loan that was fully provisioned, maintaining 100% coverage, and we will discuss this in more detail shortly. In any event, this was anticipated in our 2019 guidance. Excluding this specific situation, attributable net income would have increased 30% Q-on-Q and 32% year-on-year. We continue to closely monitor our loan portfolio and to maintain a cautious approach in this challenging and volatile environment. As we anticipated in our previous call, we expect system NPLs to peak on or around the second quarter of the year, which could also impact our business. However, we are not anticipating situations of this magnitude we saw this quarter considering the composition of our portfolio. A key strategic initiative for us is to create a more efficient organization. An important component of this was to create a leaner and more agile management structure that facilitates synergies across the platform. Following last year's reorganization of our consumer finance division, we have completed a similar process at the bank's subsidiary early April. At the same time,…

Thank you, Patricio. Good day, everyone. Turning to Slide 6. Total assets were up 16% sequentially and nearly 70% year-on-year. This was mainly driven by larger holdings in high-margin seven-day Leliq securities issued by the Central Bank, which almost tripled quarter-on-quarter. Peso assets now represent 72% of total assets, up 2 percentage points from fourth quarter '18 levels. Now please turn to Slide 7. Weaker loan demand, together with a cautious approach in a recessionary environment, resulted in low single-digit sequential declines, both in peso-denominated loans and foreign currency loans measured in U.S. dollars. In this challenging context, we continued to reduce our exposure to the consumer finance segment. At this time last year, we began tightening credit scoring standards as we saw the economy began to weaken. Now at 9% over the portfolio, the share of consumer finance loans are down 100 basis points sequentially and 300 basis points year-on-year. The share of corporate loans remained at 50%, reflecting from the impact from the Argentine peso depreciation on U.S. dollar-denominated corporate loans, together with the reduction of this portfolio measured in its currency of origin as we further adjust our risk appetite. The combination of these two factors resulted in higher share of larger corporate loans. January and February saw some increased for loans in the retail segments, particularly senior citizens. However, this weakened during March. For the full year, we maintain our loan guidance range of 21% to 31% for 2019. Moving on to Slide 8. The corporate loan book contracted 2% sequentially, reflecting lower loan demand from both peso- and U.S. dollar-denominated loans. In currency of origin, peso loans were down 14%, while our U.S. dollar denominated declined 4.5%. As shown in the middle chart, retail loan growth has continued to decelerate, increasing slightly less than 1%…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Marlon Medina with JPMorgan.

My question comes in terms of asset quality. I know you're keeping your guidance, but are using any potential problematic cases in the following quarters? And also, I have a question on margins. How are you thinking on margins for the rest of the year?

Before answering your question, just let me make a clarification. I may have made a mistake in one of the percentages growth. When we look at loan loss provisions, they increased 37% sequentially due to the large voluntary provisioning we did in order to maintain 100% coverage. Going to your questions, in terms of asset quality, we -- as I mentioned here in the call, we believe that the bulk of the provisioning coming from the corporate portfolio was done in this quarter as a result of this large loan that we have to do the voluntary provisioning. The mandatory provisions are 25% of the loan. But in order to maintain 100% coverage, we increased voluntary provisions by 75%, the remainder 75% of the loan. When we look at the composition of the rest of the portfolio and the type of companies and the situation they have, we have been proactive in many cases in terms of helping companies that have had a tighter financial situation or might have some difficulties in terms of facing large interest rate payments given the current high interest rate environment by helping them restructure and increasing collateralization. In many cases, we did inflation adjusted plus loans midterm or long term in order to help them navigate this difficult environment. So we've been very, very proactive in terms of how we've been tackling our portfolio. So we're not expecting any further surprises of this magnitude going forward, and we're working in terms of trying to work out this large credit. Talking about margins, we're still maintaining our NIM guidance for the full year. Remember that given the composition of our loan portfolio, which is different to what some of our competitors have, we have a larger proportion of personal loans. So if -- even if we expect to see some reductions in interest rates going forward, the bulk of our retail portfolio's margins should actually tend to increase as we are slowly repricing it at the new interest rate levels. So when interest rates drop, we should capture higher spreads there, and that should more than compensate any impact we may see in terms of reduction of margins in our Central Bank securities portfolio or in our corporate loan, which reprices substantially faster than the rest of our portfolio. So in sum, we're maintaining our guidance for the rest of the year between 18.5% and 20.5% in NIM.

[Operator Instructions] Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. And I would like to turn the call back to Ana Bartesaghi for closing remarks.

Thanks for 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.

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.