Société Générale Société anonyme (GLE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to all. It is a pleasure for me to introduce the presentation of our mid-term strategy on Global Banking and Investor Solutions. As you know, this business is a key pillar of our diversified banking model. While it was challenged by the extreme market conditions in 2020, it has rebounded strongly as illustrated in our first quarter 2021 results. Given the importance of these activities, I thought it was important to take a step back. Let me share with you some key elements of my strategic thinking. Banks are experiencing a formidable disruption of their business models, particularly in retail activities, and we can anticipate an acceleration of the process following the pandemic. Retail is, of course, essential in our business model to ensure our balanced and long-term resilience, and we are proud to serve millions of clients in different geographies. Last year, we presented our strategic road map for our French retail activities, highlighting the combination of our 2 networks and the acceleration of the development of Boursorama. We also presented the road map of our Czech retail activities. I am convinced we have taken the right strategic decisions to ensure sustainable growth and acceptable profitability for our retail businesses, having in mind the challenges of low interest rates, the development of new market standards established by numerous fintechs and the potential long-term disintermediation coming from the GAFAs. However, I believe that the story is different for wholesale activities because the business fundamentally relies on different dynamics. First, it is a business relying on risk-sharing and management. The wholesale business will not concentrate in a handful of mega balance sheets of U.S. banks. The concentration of risks would be too significant and unacceptable for managed stakeholders. And the clients, as much as the public authorities, are willing to be able to rely on a few competitive, loyal and capable European banks. Société Générale is one of them. Second, this B2B or B2B2C businesses require sophisticated expertise and have high barriers to entry. I believe they will be less sensitive to the disruption of fintechs and of the GAFAs. Third, structural trends might be even more positive in the coming years than after the financial crisis, in particular with the energy transition, the need for more infrastructure in the world to boost economic growth and the dynamism of alternative investments. All in all, wholesale activities are actually at the heart of our DNA. And I take comfort in all the transformations implemented during the last 10 years to make our wholesale activities more client-centric. We enjoy long-term relationships with our strategic clients that generate a strong commercial revenue base of approximately EUR 8 billion per year. And wholesale is also fully integrated in our group and synergetic with many of our other activities. It is involved in around 65% of the revenue synergies generated within the group, which also represent nearly EUR 8 billion per year. We have strong expertise acquired over many years that is well recognized worldwide. We are a leader in many areas like structured finance and renewable energy, where we are well equipped to accompany our clients in their own transition. We also have leading expertise in areas like equity derivatives. This beginning of the year confirms that we quickly and successfully adapted our market activities that are now on track to deliver a significant contribution to net income on a recurring basis. We have, in front of us, a promising trajectory with a double-digit return on capital, combining selective allocation of capital to grow sustainably and a relentless focus on efficiency. We will, of course, maintain a strict management of our risks. To conclude, our ambition is to remain a top-tier European leader in wholesale. It is with this clear statement in mind that I had decided last year to entrust this task to Slawomir Krupa in whom I have complete confidence. Polish by background, French by education and international by his experience, Slawomir is an energetic and seasoned executive. He has held several different leadership positions within GBIS and took responsibility for our activities in the Americas, where he spent more than 5 highly successful years working directly with the most sophisticated clients and markets. I am happy to have the opportunity to introduce Slawomir to you. I now let him take the floor to present with his team our strategic road map in more detail, and I will be pleased to answer your questions afterwards. Slawomir, the floor is yours.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us today for this event dedicated to our Global Banking and Investor Solutions business. I wish we were able to host an in-person event, but we will have opportunities to meet in the future. By way of introduction, I am Slawomir Krupa, Head of GBIS. I joined the bank 25 years ago, and I spent the past 14 years within GBIS in various jobs across client and product responsibilities within structured finance, credit, emerging markets and most recently, as CEO for the Americas, a large global markets and global banking business of ours. In the late '90s, I also tried myself as an entrepreneur, but I came back to banking in 2002 to witness an exuberant but unsustainable growth of our industry. From those years, I retained a strong sense of the power of entrepreneurship and innovation. Yet, from the subsequent crisis, which I helped manage, I simply know that they need to be firmly anchored in strong client rationale, a strategic risk management approach and a high sense of responsibility. We designed this event as an opportunity for us to share our vision quite briefly, so that you can interact with us in an extensive Q&A session. Frederic laid out the broader context of our GBIS business, its future and how it is core to the value creation within the group. I would like to continue first with a look at who we are and what we see as our key challenges. We are a client business. All of our value creation starts with revenue flows stemming from a large and stable client base, from which we draw a particularly resilient revenue stream. We commit capital to these relationships, but the true value creation happens because we leverage this commitment through our expertise in chosen sectors, geographies, advisory services, products and through synergies. Our innovation capabilities are also a key ingredient in this value creation process, and this is not just a generic statement. This is the cornerstone of who we are. This is simply our ability to generate resilient revenues in a competitive market at a high level of gross margin. It is measured easily in terms of the gross return on capital NBI over RWA ratio. And in this regard, because of our variability to be competitive in our markets, we rank consistently high against most of our peers across our entire GBIS business. Now the next question, of course, is how do we bridge this fact? Our objective ability to create value with clients with the fact that some of our past outcomes may have been at times falling short of expectations. We do indeed face 2 main challenges in the process of value creation, our suboptimal cost structure and our sensitivity to extreme shocks. To be direct, the extent of the impact of market dislocations on our performance. So while we were experiencing the consequences of both these challenges in recent years, an additional question arose. Can we sustain our ability to create value with clients while going through various layers of restructuring? And consequently, will we be able to capture growth in the future or simply, for instance, will we have the means to support our strong F&A business? Well, we have shown that our unique value creation capacity is intact, but we recognize that we have work to do to sustain it and to better the outcomes of our business model. Our road map is simple and so is our goal, delivering sustained profitability with a lower standard deviation of our performance through more balance in our revenue streams, more operating leverage in our model, less idiosyncratic risk on the downside while capturing our growth opportunities. In particular, taking advantage of the unique opportunity of the ESG imperative, which is transforming our world economy as well as of the digitalization trends at play. With this road map, we will deliver at least 10% of sustainable RONE by 2023, which mechanically translates into 12% when we exclude the temporary contribution to the European single resolution fund. And since we want to build further in the years to come, it makes sense to look at our foundation and check whether they will stand the test of time. Once again, like in any company, in any service industry, our strongest foundation is our client base. EUR 8 billion of client revenues balanced between corporate and financial institutions with a low revenue volatility. In fact, a single-digit historical year-on-year variability. And in addition to this, a low churn rate overall, minimal for strategic clients. Why such a sticky business? And why are these high-value customers so loyal to us? Because we have been delivering for them -- for some of them for 100 years a high value-added service, advice and products based on sectoral expertise across a complete spectrum of what they need. And this comes with a meaningful ability to service our clients all over the world. And this is key to maximize the ability to cross sell and optimize the capital return or margin really to increase loyalty by increasing the number of connections and the number of ties with our clients and which, in turn, reinforces our sectoral impact and innovation because both are often grounded in a global understanding of value chains and investment needs. The global people for our industry will remain stable with some rebalancing between regions of the world, but there are key trends at play that will provide us with meaningful growth opportunities, which we are well positioned to take advantage of and determined to capture. Infrastructure needs will benefit strongly from the focus of fiscal policies, from transformative energy transition investments all over the world, fueling consistent pockets of growth with our corporate and financial sponsor clients in energy, infrastructure and asset finance. Yes, globally, but in Asia and in the Americas in particular. We will benefit from the secular polarization between passive and alternative investments and from the growth of private credit and private equity over hedge funds and traditional active investors. We have the proven ability to provide products, solutions and assets, drawing from our own prime global position in structured finance origination in key industries for the buy side and from our credit risk track record. And against the same backdrop of changes in the asset management industry, growing retirement savings management needs will also require simpler structured products, providing protection and thematic exposure to bespoke indices and smart ESG content, core capabilities of ours. Again, as the innovators in this space, we have designed some of the best-selling products in the world. And lastly, in Europe, but also very much so in Asia and the Americas, with our effective international setup, we will participate in the economic recovery. We will support corporates in their growth or restructuring needs as much as offering investors access to all the assets that will emerge from the new macroeconomic cycle. So we are determined to take advantage of these positive trends. While doing so, we will gradually seek to further balance our business model. A well-balanced business mix ensures the ability to better capture growth while lowering concentration risk. And wholesale banking is, first, a risk management business. It's about taking, structuring, distributing and managing the risks, which derive from the very functioning of the world economy and of its financial markets. Being a relevant player in our market, we regard as fundamental both our ability to embrace the continuum of the value chain that runs from issuers to investors as well as our ability to reduce concentration risk by fostering meaningful business diversification. And therefore, we will increase gradually our focus on corporates versus financial institutions. And within the FI space, we will increase our business with real money investors and financial sponsors versus hedge funds and banks. And from a business perspective, logically, our incremental capital allocation will favor our financing and advisory business. At the same time, we will continue to invest in technology for our transaction banking business. Taking advantage of our profitable platforms in Asia and in the Americas, we will look to capture in our areas of focus the expected excess growth in these regions. Underlying this approach is a sustainable capital policy. We will benefit from a stable allocation of 1/3 of the group's capital after embedding the expected impact of the Basel IV requirements. One core objective: maintain our top-tier return on capital, which is a paramount marker of client relevance, competitiveness and, therefore, value creation. How? By increasing further our capital flexibility through distribution and risk transfers while we allocate the capital proactively only to generate accretive revenues. So balancing the business model means that we will favor, to some extent, our Financing & Advisory business over global markets in incremental capital allocation. And our RONE objectives take the expected regulatory inflation into account. So with our ability to sustain a reasonable level of disciplined and balanced growth at a high level of gross margin, we will continue making cost control and efficiency a permanent focus of our execution. Across the cycle and within GBIS overall, no outsized target in future revenue growth will ever lead us to break the fundamental principle of preserving our operating leverage and positive jaws. Conversely, the relative inelasticity of the fixed cost base for a business of our scale and scope warrants focusing our efforts on structural cost savings instead of seeking variable cost reduction through business attrition. And we designed our EUR 450 million cost-saving program with this principle in mind. And by 2023, excluding the SRF contribution, we will materially decrease our cost-to-income ratio. But let me insist on the fact that I will seek to infuse cost control and efficiency in the very fabric of our culture. We will track optimization opportunities constantly and beyond the cost reduction program. Also, while business attrition is not in and of itself a viable business management option, a proactive management of our cost base and of our business portfolio structure and profitability is conversely a must, and I will act on it. In wholesale banking, risk impacts are an overwhelming driver in the value creation process. We have always built our businesses on strong risk management principles and deep risk expertise. We are determined to maintain the highest standards in terms of counter-party risk management across all our global markets and in our prime services in particular. But it is also true of our market risks overall. Yet, there were important lessons to be learned in 2020 from a unique market dislocation. At a strategic level, the main lesson being that we had to lower our idiosyncratic risk profile stemming from an overconcentration in tail end dislocation risk. And in the spirit of seeking more balance in our value creation chain, we derisk both quantitatively and qualitatively our structured products business within a broader decision to lower our overall market risk appetite and seeking a better distribution of our returns on stress test as well as a more diversified risk profile. Of note, the quality of the strategic repositioning that we designed allowed us to reduce dramatically our risks while preserving most of our franchise beyond the exceptional market conditions of Q1, a simple testament to the strength and leadership of our equity derivatives franchise. Credit risk management equally impacts the outcomes of a banking business model, and we have a long-standing track record here, one of performing well across the cycle. This performance stems from diversification and expertise, decades of history and experience in our sectors, geographies and client segments of choice. Our strategy leads us to focus on structured and secured exposures and on a proactive management of our portfolio of risks. In 2020, stage 3 provisions were contained in the first acute phase of the crisis. And as evidenced by our 2021 Q1 performance, we expect the continued normalization of the cost of risk in our business as the economy recovers and as we continue to carry an adequate inventory of forward-looking provisions. I shared with you the pillars of our strategic thinking. We believe that our reasonable growth ambitions will be helped by 2 key enablers: ESG and technology. So ESG is a new story for many. It's an old story at Société Générale. We have 20 years of thought leadership, innovation and action behind us. We have made ambitious commitments, and we are delivering on them. In terms of capital committed to the energy transition, in terms of the reduction in absolute terms of our exposure to oil and gas extraction and in terms of our early and well advanced exit from coal, our stakeholders demand of us the highest standards in terms of business ethics, diversity and eventually expect us to maximize our positive impact on society through both our business and the way we conduct it. We embrace this responsibility with a philosophy and a plan that all our businesses will be ESG by design. 10 years from now, there will be nothing left without an ESG focus at its core. Fiscal policy, corporates, sell side, buy side will be profoundly transformed, and we have started to adjust the very mandate and objectives of our business to maximize the opportunity it represents. Our metals and mining team, for instance, pivoted its focus to the entire value chain of the electrified world and mobility, new industries while in core markets like French distribution, we already derived the majority of our revenues from investment products based on ESG content. This is very exciting for us as bankers and as citizens. And we'll have Hacina and Isabelle talk to you some more about it later. Technology is a risk, an opportunity and the enabler of most of our goals. We think about it through a threefold prism. One, enabling business retention like electronic flows, open ecosystems or client experience or business growth, like our 3-year EUR 500 million investment program in our global transaction banking systems. Two, improving efficiency as in reducing costs and increasing quality through automation. Technology is a major cost driver, and making sure we optimize our model from that standpoint is a key focus in our cost reduction program. Three, at the forefront of potential disruptions, we invest resolutely in innovative and entrepreneurial ventures, ventures which will harness the opportunities of asset digitalization and the possible revolution of the post-trade based on the distributed ledger. Our subsidiary, SG Forge, made remarkable inroads in creating standards in terms of the issuance and management of digital assets. We have landmark deals like -- that actually happened, the EIB digital bond denominated in digital central currency issued 2 weeks ago. It is positioned at the heart of what might as well be one of the most profound disruptions in the future of the issuer investor value chain. Everything I said until now translates ultimately into business and financial targets. So revenue-wise, as we favor the F&A business in terms of incremental resource allocation, we expect a consistent 3% CAGR between 2020 and 2023, and we expect to maintain high returns. In global markets, beyond the exceptional Q1, we will continue our gradual convergence to a longer-term EUR 4.5 billion run rate with a higher predictability while security services contribution will remain stable. So within the frame said by this revenue projection, thanks to the cost reduction achieved and the ones we will deliver, we will reach a 5.1% to 5.3% cost base, excluding the contribution to the SRF. And this would translate into a healthier target cost-to-income ratio between 65% and 68%. And finally, our road map is rooted in our strengths of entrepreneurship and innovation, coupled with a strong client rationale, a strategic risk management approach and a high sense of responsibility. Within the parameters of our macroeconomic scenario, one of consistent recovery and with a normalized cost of risk, we will deliver a sustainable RONE, above 10%. And as we get relief from 2024 onwards from the contribution to the SRF, we will mechanically exceed the 12% RONE target. I will now leave you with the senior members of the GBIS management, starting with Cécile Bartenieff, our Chief Operating Officer. And I'll join you at the end for a few words of conclusion.

Good morning. I'm Cécile Bartenieff, Chief Operating Officer of Global Banking and Investor Solutions, and I run our global operations and technology. Slawomir outlined the strategy, I'm now going to focus on how we are executing on it from an operational efficiency and technology standpoint. Driving operational efficiency throughout GBIS is and will remain our top priority. Between 2018 and 2023, we will have cut cost by almost EUR 1 billion, EUR 950 million exactly. As of today, we have already delivered EUR 0.5 billion in savings while, at the same time, integrating Commerzbank EMC and supporting the growth of our global finance business. To achieve this, GBIS made some adjustments across the front office with the rightsizing of a series of activities and partial exits, such as the commodities principal business. But more importantly, we launched an in-depth transformation plan to generate sustainable efficiencies, enhance client satisfaction and ultimately improve our ability to compete. We are executing on this plan, generating tangible savings across direct support functions in technology and operations. The success of this approach makes us confident in our ability to deliver on the remainder of this journey. At the same time, group transversal departments are now fully engaged. And after many years of layering regulatory-driven investments, they are ready to take a step back to optimize and streamline the systems and processes. Altogether, support and transversal functions will deliver the bulk of the EUR 450 million of planned savings with no impact on our NBI generation capabilities and, through our focus on efficiency, a positive impact on client experience and risk management. Let me now dig deeper and tell you concretely how we are doing this. First, we are optimizing our operating model. We have already made a great step forward with the merger of technology and operations into a single linear department aligned with our businesses. The results have been better than anticipated, creating efficiency and speeding up automation. This is an asset for the future. We continue to optimize our location model with increased offshoring and near-shoring of selected functions. We are changing the way we deliver IT, integrating together developer and producer teams and fully automating our delivery pipeline. Where this approach has already been deployed, we have 30% less IT managers and we are also delivering 20% faster. Together with my colleagues from transversal functions, this is what we will expand across the group. Second, we are accelerating in digitalization and IT modernization. We continue to automate our processes with an increased use of AI and machine learning. This is true for pre-trade, where, for example, most of our distribution clients already quote exotic products in self-care mode online. But this is also true for post-trade, with an objective to digitalize client confirmations and payments fully by 2023. In our business, IT modernization is a critical driver for savings, but also for our ability to compete. We are modernizing our IT infrastructure by decommissioning legacy applications. But more importantly, we are modernizing IT by migrating our systems to a less expensive, more efficient digital architecture and open state-of-the-art platform, API-based, shared by all our developers. Developers now code more efficiently in a cheaper way, leveraging open source and maximizing reuse. As you can see, we are talking here about a structural improvement which will continue beyond 2023. Not only will it generate efficiencies, but it will also reduce operational risk and improve client satisfaction. For instance, while we were cutting costs, our Q1 client NPS for post-trade services significantly increased to above 50, and most of our operation key risk indicators have improved significantly. Cost savings and investments to build the future go hand in hand. Investing in the right technology is key to meet market evolutions and to ensure our future ability to compete. I will focus on free access, client connectivity, technological disruptions and leveraging the tech ecosystem. So first, client connectivity. As a client-centric bank, we want to make our clients' interactions as efficient and valuable as possible, integrating Société Générale's services seamlessly into their ecosystems. The strategy is at the heart of our SG Markets platform, which connects directly and easily to the client financial journey. It is also the core platform for our investment in cash management and trade. Second, technological disruptions. Société Générale has a strong history of engineering excellence. We want to nurture this DNA to go full speed on technology and drive the next wave of innovation. We are investing in data, in AI, in public cloud. For example, we have opened our market-leading equity derivatives trading analytics to clients. We are offering them the best of Société Générale tools and experience to optimize their execution. We will continue to advance a distributed ledger technology. We have promising results with Forge at the forefront of financial asset digitalization, which Slawomir spoke about. We are also investing in cybersecurity to ensure the resilience of our business. Third, the tech ecosystem. We are convinced that partnering with others, leveraging the larger tech ecosystem, is and will be key to ensure our ability to compete. We are partnering with leading fintechs and supporting the emergence of new ones. We have several incubators managing active pipelines with good results. For instance, we launched new products using a climate risk score developed by Entelligent, a start-up we just incubated. We want to focus our engineering resources to build in areas where we bring a competitive advantage. For other areas, we are considering any opportunity to buy, partner or invest. A good recent example is a white lab link partnership we signed with Kyriba on the cash management side. As you can see, we are executing on our cost efficiency and transformation plan. The tangible results obtained are warrants of our ability to deliver the 2023 target cost reduction. To conclude, and on behalf of all my colleagues at the Société Générale management team, I would like to stress that we all see the lowering of our breakeven point in a responsible and sustainable way as a key strategic matter for the delivery of which we are accountable. And now I leave the floor to Pierre Palmieri.

Good morning. I am Pierre Palmieri, Head of Global Banking and Advisory. Financing and advisory covers a wide range of activities. I would like to spend a few seconds defining what this parameter covers because it can be different from one bank to another. Within SG, F&A includes investment banking, financing activities and transaction banking. F&A is also in charge of the coverage of the major wholesale clients for the group. There are 2 main business units in F&A, Global Banking & Advisory and Global Transaction & Payment Services. And these are the 2 business units we are going to cover today. So first, let's focus on Global Banking & Advisory. We have strong ambitions for this business. We believe it can generate profitable growth for the 3 years to come. First, we have an efficient business model. Second, we have delivered in the past. And third, we have a strategy adapted to the new environment. We have a business model that is based on bringing added value to our clients. To achieve this, there are different levers. First of all, we are advisory-driven. We are able to bring content to our clients, thanks to our industry expertise. For instance, in Project Finance, we were #1 in advisory in 2020 on a worldwide basis. We provide added value through our structuring capabilities, which enables us to take lead roles on deals, and therefore, to generate more fees compared to a pure participant. In addition, our business model is also distribution-driven, and we manage carefully our balance sheet. Finally, we have put ESG at the heart of our offering. This again enables us to bring more content to our clients in a new environment. We started very early on this. For instance, we positioned ourselves in renewable project finance 2 decades ago. And this is why we were ranked #2 worldwide in 2020. As a result, we are able to have leadership positions in our core markets. Why are we confident that we can deliver growth in the future? Because we have done it already. We have constantly delivered on our financial objectives over the past 3 strategic plans. We have demonstrated our capacity to grow significantly since 2013, with revenues increasing by more than 4% per year. And we will contribute to the average growth of F&A by 3% up to 2025. Global Banking & Advisory also brings stability to GBIS' top line, thanks to a good diversification and low volatility in revenues. This activity is profitable and accretive to the group. And by the way, our NBI on RWA ratio has constantly increased over the years and compares well with the industry. We are also resilient. Our net cost of risk remained, on average, below the expected loss over the last 10 years, which, as you know, includes several crisis. This is a good illustration of our strong risk management and expertise. Lastly, we'll continue to develop our distribution-led model to manage our balance sheet actively. Whilst a lot has already been done, we keep accelerating our approach to a broad range of solutions. Obviously, we distribute a significant portion of our production on the bond and loan markets, EUR 39 billion in 2020. On top of that, we have developed a comprehensive setup to optimize our capital consumption, both distribution on the secondary market and derisking tools. We have been investing in our distribution and engineering teams involved in this process and will continue to do so. Going forward, we are confident that we have the right strategy to deliver this growth. First, we will benefit from an environment that is conducive. Massive investments will be required, and liquidity will remain ample and broadly available. On top of this, in the context of the COVID crisis, many companies will have to recapitalize or review their strategy. This is already generating significant opportunities for our investment banking activities. There will certainly be some challenges, the regulatory impact being one of the most obvious. However, we are confident that we have the means to overcome these effects. How? We have the right business model. It is more a matter of bringing this business model to the next level, even more advisory, more distribution, more engineering and a strong operational efficiency. And of course, we will have to reallocate resources towards the businesses that are the most able to adapt to this new environment. To achieve this, we have looked at each business according to the following criteria: profitability over the cycle, business potential post crisis, relevance to the rest of the group, capacity to have a leadership position in its core markets, risk outlook in the years to come, capacity to adapt its business model to absorb Basel IV and compatibility with our ESG ambitions. As a consequence, we have set key priorities according to these criterias. In terms of regions, APAC, North America. In terms of sectors, TMT, health care, infrastructure, but also renewables to compensate for a lower activity in the oil and gas upstream. In terms of businesses, asset-backed product and asset finance. In terms of clients, a strong push on financial sponsors. Beyond Global Banking & Advisory, we will keep delivering significant synergies across the group. Today, our clients' revenues generate EUR 5.7 billion outside the Global Banking & Advisory business unit, and we will continue to develop this stream. Last, ESG is becoming more important than ever. We are going well beyond the classical renewable business, green bond, impact loans. ESG is at the heart of our strategy, and this for all our businesses. We are even going as far as adapting the mandate of our businesses in order for them to be totally ESG-oriented in the years to come. To conclude, as you can see, we have strong ambitions for this business with an objective to pursue a steady growth of revenues and to be in the top 5 positioning in our core markets. I now leave you with Alexandre.

Let's now talk about our success story and growth ambition on Global Transaction Banking. I am Alexandre Maymat, Head of Global Transaction Banking. GTB covers 4 businesses: cash management, trade finance, correspondent banking and fracturing. Through them, we operate our clients' daily flows and their short-term financing needs. This is why GTB businesses are a core on core of our relationship with our clients. They contribute to the strengthening of our intimacy with our clients. They drive long-term relationships. They are the basis of a deeper knowledge of our clients' business models and needs. This business are also highly synergetic, in particular with global banking, global markets and our retail banking networks in France and abroad. We have achieved tremendous progress over the past 4 years in GTB through a marked improvement of our staff expertise, IT capabilities and product franchises, in particular in Europe. This has translated into a better capacity to meet the sophisticated needs of our wholesale clients and contributed to a sharp increase in volume. It secured also our leadership position in France and improved our market shares in Europe. At the same time, we have been able to disseminate this growing expertise all over the group, in particular for the benefit of our retail banking franchises. In parallel, we have reviewed our business model and risk appetite to reduce capital consumption and cost of risk. All this has contributed to a significant increase in our revenues by 6% a year on average since 2015, largely above market trends. Total group NBI amounts to EUR 2.2 billion in 2020, of which GBIS operates directly only a portion. Profitability has also improved, with the RONE in excess of 20% at group level. Our ambition is to accelerate our profitable growth in the coming years. First, we will secure our Tier 1 positioning among European banks in the GTB businesses through our continued focus on execution from sales to operation and client experience. Second, we need to deploy efficiently our investment program of around EUR 500 million in the coming 5 years. We will overhaul our payment factory in Europe, targeting the best market standards. This will guarantee our capacity to absorb our growing volumes and keep our pioneer position in terms of innovation. We will also further develop our capabilities in the U.S. and in Asia, and we will support emerging business models around digital solutions, payment channels and data management. Third, we will continue to invest in our staff's expertise to meet the always growing needs of our clients in terms of instantaneity, security and transparency within an increasingly regulated environment. Lastly, we will accelerate the move towards a one bank approach to serve our clients the same way everywhere in the world, be it in their headquarters or in any of their other locations. It's a simple value proposition. We are investing in technology and in human capital to meet the fundamental and growing needs of our clients at the heart of what makes a long-term relationship. This is how our business will continue to grow at a high single-digit pace while retaining high returns.

Good morning. I am Jean-François Grégoire, Head of Global Markets. After quite a journey over the last 2 years, our market division is emerging leaner, stronger and more diversified. As announced 2 years ago, we have refocused our fixed income activities to be more competitive and relevant for clients. We have stayed close to our clients in difficult times and easier times, helping them navigate complex markets while, at the same time, improving our profitability. We have shifted our prime clearing business towards a capital-light model with great results. We remain across all asset classes, one of the most reliable partners for our clients during the crisis. We have also diversified towards listed products with the Commerzbank acquisition. Despite an adverse market, this integration was successfully completed a year ago. The activity is now booming, and it allows us to take full advantage of the favorable trends in retail markets. Finally, last year, impacts from a unique market dislocation led us to review the management of structured products, clearly too problematic in extreme market conditions. We quickly decided to derisk the book overall, the product offer and the value chain in terms of risk management and retain our innovation leadership. Seven months later, our new products, easier to manage, are already a success with our historical clients, and the derisking of our book is fully delivered. Our structured products tail risk profile is no longer the outlier it used to be, which makes our entire risk portfolio much more balanced. So where are we now? We kept our historical strength and developed new ones. Our clients, European and global corporates, global financial institutions, retail networks see us as a specialized house with value-added solutions, able to answer the hedging, financing and investment needs and reliable in all market conditions. We are relevant in many ways in structured products, indexation, listed products, rates derivatives, secured financing and our fixed income flow and prime clearing activities. The franchise is more diversified and stronger overall, as evidenced by our last 3 quarterly results. What's coming next? Perspective for market activities look more conducive than ever, and we are fully engaged to benefit from the positive trends across all businesses and regions. First, there are structurally increasing needs in saving management for an aging population. With our strong innovation mindset, leveraging on our best-in-class engineering capabilities, our renewed structured product offer is the perfect answer. Second, the massive debt issuances to come mean that perspective for fixed income flow improved greatly. Volumes and spreads will remain healthy for the foreseeable future. We'll continue to leverage on our digital and quantitative knowhow, which has allowed us to deliver strong value-added contents in 2020. In addition, we want to increase our footprint in the credit markets efficiently and in a capital-light mode. Starting with our U.S. platform, we'll develop a more integrated credit chain between Global Banking and Fixed Income with a unique select proposition where our investor clients will have one business line able to service all their credit needs no matter the underlying or the technology. Finally, we will keep expanding our global client relationships. With the Commerzbank integration, we have the opportunity to grow in the German markets not only on listed products, but across our entire offering. And we'll continue to invest in our strong sales presence in Asia to leverage the region's significant growth. Our U.S. platform will continue to grow its existing strategic relationships with world-leading buy side players. These are all sustainable and diversified revenue drivers, which we incur in client relationships and look to increase through an additional focus on sales performance. As a matter of policy, we will use our capital efficiently, absorbing the FRTB. And we have a clear strategy to reduce our breakeven point. As a result, global markets, a strategic asset of the group, will deliver positive jaws and a more predictable performance. I now hand over to Alexandre, who will focus on equities.

Good morning. I am Alexandre Fleury, Head of Equities. In 2020, we embarked on a major restructuring of our largest franchise, Structured Products, and we were very successful in doing so, increasing materially the risk-adjusted value creation. We managed to keep a world-leading position and, at the same time, reduce our risks by nearly 70%, as Slawomir explained earlier. So how did we manage to reinvent ourselves? Well, through discipline, long-lasting client relationships and innovation, which is our DNA. However, there is much more to our equities franchise than structured products, which represents roughly 1/3 of our business. We have a broad range of franchises, and most of them have world-class positioning. Let's start with Delta One products, which is one of our historical strengths. This is an area where we see increased client demand. For instance, we are providing exposure to thematic baskets, anticipating a post-COVID world. We are also providing exposure to quantitative and systematic strategies. Once again, by combining expertise innovation with increased commercial efforts, we are gaining market share in that space. Next, let's discuss flow on listed products. The integration of the Commerzbank franchise is an unqualified success, and we could not have done it at a better time. We are now at the forefront of the active retail investor market. And as you know, retail investing is one of the major themes of 2021 and a possible longer-term trend. There is one award that says it all. The Golden Bull Award for Best Certificate Issuer in Germany. Finally, our prime services and secured financing activities. Two years ago, we started a major transformation program in this area, and it is already delivering tangible results. First, we have achieved a much more efficient capital allocation mix at a cloud level. Second, we have delivered a brand-new front-to-back cloud-based system. This new tool, called Nuvo Prime, will be a significant competitive advantage for us in the years to come. It will be the basis for an improved level of service to our clients, and it will enable new business developments. One last thing, something that is bringing together all these equity businesses. We are focused now more than ever on delivering value-added content and data to our clients. And this is true, in particular, with respect to ESG teams where we are one step ahead of the competition. So to conclude, we have reduced our risks and diversified our business while protecting our franchise and retaining our revenue generation capacity. We are now well balanced, 1/3 on each business, which makes the overall equity business now much more robust, less correlated to market volatility and less prone to idiosyncratic underperformance. We are in a strong position to successfully capture major market trends and events and to continue helping our clients navigate through them as a reliable partner. Let me now hand over to Sylvain to talk about fixed income.

Good morning. I'm Sylvain Cartier out of fixed income. In 2019, we fully restructured our fixed income business. We focused on profitability over market share. We reinforced our trading performance management and risk management framework. We focused on areas of strength: rates, derivative, emerging markets. We improved execution to expanded quantitative trading capabilities. This restructuring bore tangible fruits, as evidenced by our solid fixed income results in 2020, but also on a more structural level by our much increased profitability. Now what's our ambition? First, we will focus on the high added value client advisory, financing and investment needs. Our role in making the link between issuers and investor valuable to clients will be key in an environment of disintermediation. This ability to bridge this need was instrumental in COVID crisis related to private placement transactions, but even post-COVID brings singular value into the issuer-investor relationship. It will be our point of focus, greater than [indiscernible] volume processing. We will leverage on the increasing need for risk management solution for corporate and financial institution where, once again, our expertise is sought after. Just to give you a sense, we advise and led the execution of a large FX hedging for an aircraft manufacturer following crisis-related adjustment. We led strategic contingent hedge related to cross-border acquisition, and we designed and execute the first sustainable-linked cross-currency swap in Italy, a first with an ultimate pricing link to environmental objectives. Similarly, in running our flow business, we focus on content-driving flow where we announce reciprocal value creation by providing specific advisory and insight on the back of our leading fixed income and cross-asset research. Finally, in fixed income, we will continue to benefit from a [indiscernible] investor base looking for yield enhancement product and a low rate environment. Second, we will continue to leverage the group footprint in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Africa. We are recognized as one of the key currency market makers across these regions, by which we source our quality flows and enhance the group relationship with the vast corporate client base in our international retail networks. Third, we will continue to capitalize on our strengths while building a further of our credit offering. We'll strength our position as a euro rates and derivative house. In partnership with global banking business, we are developing an integrated platform, which will provide interesting growth opportunities. We will invest in our technology, quickly changing markets with increasing level of electronification to provide digital solution to our clients. Overall, all 4 pay off, and our approach will remain balanced, client and value-focused. Without neither a massive presence in the U.S. nor a massive credit inventory, we delivered a solid performance in 2020. And our Q1 was encouraging on the back of the reflation team and increased rates volatility. We will remain focused on profitability over ranking, with a strong risk management ensuring sustainable performance with a specific focus on rates, global corporate derivative business with a euro overweight while we're developing gradually a relevant credit business. Now Hacina and Isabelle will take you to the ESG business opportunity.

Good morning. I am a Hacina Py, in charge of sustainable banking. And together with Isabelle Millat from our Global Markets division, we lead GBIS way in the ESG business. ESG is trending now, but Société Générale has been a pioneer in the field. We started 20 years ago and we have built over the years a strong expertise ever since. We are already very active in traditional ESG, so to speak, with world-leading positions in renewable energy, sustainable export finance, ESG equity research and in euro-denominated sustainability bonds. Our franchise is global and extends throughout the relevant value chains. In renewable energy, for example, our teams have financed projects all over the world across a wide range of technologies. This is how they reached the #1 position for advisory and project finance as clients seek their expertise to develop new projects in new territories. We are the go-to bank in the space, but in reality, ESG is much wider and holistic than the obvious green bonds and renewable energy financing. It offers a unique business opportunity, but not for all banking players, mostly for those who have a deep sectoral expertise and specific structuring and innovation skills. And you will see that we are best fit to generate value in this new paradigm.

Numbers speak for themselves when it comes to sizing the opportunity. Investment needs are expressed in trillions and growing at an unprecedented pace. The energy transition is, by far, the biggest wave, not only for renewables, but also for energy efficiency and clean mobility. It impacts all sectors and even changes the very business models for many players. Sustainable development in emerging markets is another major growth area. Again, it sparks the invention of new business models and bankable financing solutions. With most investors, ESG is by now quite simply a prerequisite. Assets in sustainable funds are booming. And well beyond these funds, managers must embed across-the-board ESG commitments in all portfolios, whilst competing for returns. To top it all off, new regulations mandate systematic engagement with investors on ESG priorities. In short, sustainable investing is becoming the essence of success in investment services.

ESG has become a must and companies feel pressure from all their stakeholders who have growing expectations. Failing to shift with the right speeds can have significant consequences as it may hamper company's market access or even drastically limit their license to operate. These trends create new needs from our clients, and we have a great opportunity to generate more added value through our advisory capabilities and our capacity to design relevant, often tailor-made, solutions. This is a new additional opportunity to up-tier our relationship with our strategic clients, increase proximity with them and gain access to additional mandates. The fact is that speaking about ESG is easy, but actual barriers to entry are high. You need deep sectoral understanding and technical knowledge to comprehend the new emerging value chains and to design the most relevant solutions. The European car industry is a perfect example, as clients have shifted from simple CapEx financing to complex interactions with the world of metals, the construction of battery factories, new risk-sharing schemes, new partners. This has allowed us to proactively design solutions for the different factors, already placing us as a relevant partner everywhere across this entire new value chain.

In turn, investors expect banks to act as connectors to shift capital flows towards the transition of the economy. It starts with state-of-the-art research. For 15 years, we have advised clients globally to solve the challenges of integrating sustainable goals into portfolios. This is how we collectively turn ESG talk into action. Also in fierce competition, investors seek our seasoned expertise in financial markets. Together, we optimize ESG investing strategies and their execution. And this is how we partner to do good, do well and even do better. Finally, we know firsthand that investors have multiple ESG priorities. So we offer scalable and agile financial innovation capabilities with access to all ESG data sources, and this is how we differentiate, with comprehensive and fully customizable solutions.

SG is best placed to take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity. As you have understood, our expertise is a huge asset. And it becomes even more powerful when combined with 2 of our unique strengths: our ability to innovate and our pioneering spirit. Being a pioneer and a thought leader means that our teams are already engaging in alliances with clients and bringing ideas to design new market standards and new business models to address the SDGs funding gap. This puts us in the driving seat and makes us the natural go-to bank for new frontiers discussions.

Superior ESG innovation is not achieved overnight. Credibility and leadership are the result of long-standing expertise. Success with investors requires live track record and constant innovation. A poster child is the stock selection of our ESG research. It has outperformed the European benchmark by 30% over 10 years. And again, in 2020, this team scored high with clients by being the very first to integrate ESG across all equity analysis. Our ESG index franchise, started in 2007, is another instrumental asset. It's driving more than 2/3 of the revenues of our cross-asset distribution business in France already, and it keeps breaking new frontiers and markets. This year, for instance, we partnered with a fintech and a U.S. insurer to deliver the very first U.S. index-based pension product that combines climate transition risk and financial risk control. Because we rely on long-standing franchises and combine them to service ESG investors, ESG innovation is also lean innovation. It grows our revenues rather than our costs.

It is now time for transformation and acceleration. We already have leadership positions. To keep these and to expand, we aim to embed ESG in each business. This requires shifting the whole organization, a journey that began in 2020 with an in-depth ESG trading program. We appointed over 100 ESG business leaders globally to spread the ESG knowledge, steer local road maps and foster origination capacities across the board. Eventually, our ambition is to double our already sizable ESG-linked revenues by 2025.

ESG is becoming the backbone of finance, well beyond a simple trend. It's no longer the matter of a few specialists. It's a must-have for all, and it will be native in each of our business strategies. In fact, in the near future, there will not be any business left without a core focus on ESG. Our edge in that space makes us the partner of choice for clients on a journey which is transforming profoundly the world economy and our industry.

Our story is simple, a valuable market to address, a large stable plant base to serve, high-return franchises to leverage, relevant pockets of meaningful growth to capture a lean global reach to boost synergies, a lower breakeven point to increase value creation and lower idiosyncratic risk to protect earnings. Its outcome is that we will deliver a measured, disciplined and sustainable growth with a lower standard deviation of our performance. Thank you for joining us today, and we look forward to the Q&A session.

Welcome to Société Générale Global Banking and Investor Solutions Strategy Event. [Operator Instructions] Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Société Générale Global Banking and Investor Solutions Strategy Event. Gentlemen, please go ahead.

Good morning to all of you. Thank you very much for having watched this film. We are really sorry not to have been able, of course, to meet with you physically. But still the constraints of the pandemic are there. I hope it will be soon possible to meet again. So we've tried in this video to present as clearly as possible our road map, our midterm targets. And now we are ready to answer your question. I am with William Kadouch, our CFO; Slawomir Krupa, Head of GBIS; and Sadia Ricke, our Chief Risk Officer, to answer your questions. [Operator Instructions]

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Jean-Francois Neuez from Goldman.

I would like to ask a question on cost and a question on revenues. The first one that I would like to ask on cost is just in light of what you said about reducing support function rather than business-related expenses, I wanted to understand whether -- essentially, I wanted to give you the option to clarify about litigation risk also. It's obviously an industry which is prone to litigation. That has been demonstrated, less for SocGen than for many other players, but nonetheless. And I just wanted to understand, in light of a recent sign, for example, that has been given to a Dutch bank, where the sign itself was linked to cost savings related to compliance and essentially showing that if you take too much there, you could have to pay back later. I just wanted to understand how you can tell us about the expenses and rationalization that you're planning to do with regards to these costs and reassure us about the litigation risk going forward. And also wanted to understand if your cost -- how can I say, the reduction, you believe that what you're doing is to catch up with the rest of the industry or whether you think that you're doing new things which are essentially an innovation. So I'm trying to understand execution. And the second, on revenue, is very simply, I just would like to know whether you could give us percent of the breakdown between equities and fixed income in your projection, if that's okay.

Yes. Thank you very much, Jean-Francois. I will give immediately the floor to Slawomir for him to comment on the cost and the revenues. Let me just highlight, in particular, where we stand, again, remind you where we stand in terms of overall litigations. And as we've mentioned, I think that we've had, actually, when you look back the last 12, 13 years, less issues than most of our peers. And effectively, we've probably, a time frame which was a little bit -- which took longer. So we settle, if you remember, 2 issues, one on a corruption case and one on sanctions and embargo in 2018. And we entered with U.S. authorities, French authorities in deferred process. You know this usual agreement for 3 years. And 2021 is a very important year. We were able to close the French litigation process last -- end of last year. And we have 2 DPAs, which are ending this year. So it means, of course, we have currently -- we've made a lot of effort to invest. And again, Slawomir will come back to that more in detail, to invest in our processes, in our control functions. But we are also still carrying the cost of specific teams, if you wish, which are there to monitor the processes, make the audit, et cetera, et cetera. So going forward, it's very clear that we will keep the highest standards in terms of compliance. And I think we've made very good progress, but we can reasonably expect a decrease of the cost without compromising on that. Because, again, we have -- we -- probably the peak is 2021 from that perspective. Slawomir, can you elaborate further, please?

Yes. Thank you, Frederic. Good morning. Thanks for joining us for this Q&A. So let me give you some more color on your first question. It is about -- a lot in the presentation about responsibility, right? And so when we speak about the cost, we also speak about responsibility throughout the presentation. And this is how I will frame my answer to your first question. We will be absolutely focused on not going backwards on all the expectations that regulators, in particular, but the society at large, has for us. And so all the cost reductions that are linked to transversal functions, et cetera, will be done as referred to peak spending in maximum intensity remediation, if you will. When you run multiple, large-scale complex remediations, you have an overspending, if you will, to get things done, to -- in terms of extra consulting expenses, et cetera, et cetera. But as you mature in the various areas, you are able -- and I'm going to give you 2 examples, you are able, one, to optimize your technology and your data underlying these remediations. That's one particular area where you can, after the peak spending, reduce your expenses while keeping the same level, let's say, of control, to put it simply. And the second example is, for instance, the sourcing mix of your resources, right? When you start these big programs, you are going to do things basically in your main locations, right? And once again, when you mature, you can think more creatively about your sourcing mix. And there are things that you can do in a near-shoring or offshoring center once you have the maturity to set things up this way. And we have, in particular, in my experience in the U.S., where I worked with a particularly demanding regulator, we have experienced this. We have experienced peak spending and then reduction of the spending exactly on the lines that I just described. My point being, there will be 0 risk taken in terms of scaling back on what's needed and expected. So that's about the cost. In terms of the revenues, I can give you a sense. We're thinking in this framework of converging to EUR 4.5 billion in, say, normal market conditions. We're thinking about something around EUR 2 billion for fix and EUR 2.5 billion with probably a little upside, but EUR 2.5 billion in the mainstream thinking of ours for equities.

The next question comes from Guillaume Tiberghien from Exane.

I have 2 questions and a clarification. So the first question is on RWA inflation and RWA growth. So I guess, if I understand well, the ROE target from 10% to 12%. You basically -- it seems to suggest a 20% inflation of RWA from Basel IV. So I just wanted to double check that. And can you elaborate on where exactly this comes from? And can you say a word on organic RWA inflation? The second question relates to ESG. So you have a target to do EUR 120 billion over 5 years, but you've already achieved 18%. So is it not time to actually review the ESG target? And there's one chart in your slide -- sorry, I'm lost with regard to the number, where you show the ESG numbers for 2020. And I wanted to double check how this reconciles with the EUR 120 billion overall target for 5 years. So the number I'm seeing is on Slide 34, where you highlight EUR 5 billion positive impact finance, EUR 4 billion sustainability-linked loans. So that would be EUR 9 billion. Is those EUR 9 billion the same scope as the EUR 120 billion? Or what else is there in it?

Thank you, Guillaume. I will leave first the floor to William on the -- your question on the risk-weighted asset and then to Slawomir on the figures for ESG. Let me just say that, of course, we might review our objectives going forward. It was already an ambitious target. It's a cocktail of lending and balance sheet figures and, of course, the lead mandate on green and social bonds. If we do better, of course, we might further increase that going forward. William?

Yes, Guillaume, thanks for your question. On the first part, which is the Basel IV impact. As you know, we have -- we are already one of the banks giving more details than the others as it relates to the overall impact of Basel IV. But I will refrain from going into much details as per each and every business. What I can tell you is that out of the EUR 39 billion, there is, of course, a sizable part that is relating to GBIS. But overall, given the plus and minuses, I mean, GBIS, of course, will be impacted by FRTB KCVA, but we benefit from different type of computation as we need to operational risk as a case in point. So overall, you should expect an RWA growth which is lower, and I think somewhat lower than the 20% you are used to. With regards to the RWA organic allocation, I can be more specific. Overall, as you can see in the presentation, this is fairly even with some compensation effects between F&A and end markets. What is important is that -- because I think it's very much in the minds of many of you, is that we give the fuel to F&A to develop. It's about, as you say -- as you know, for the group as a whole, we have EUR 5 billion to EUR 7 billion RWA organically every year for all the businesses. F&A is one of the beneficiary of it. And growth -- organic growth of RWA allocated to F&A is very consistent with the growth we want to achieve as per revenue -- as far as revenue is constant, and it is compensated by optimization on the market side.

Slawomir on ESG.

So on ESG, what you have to understand is that these figures don't add up because they are different. So the EUR 120 billion is the balance sheet commitment -- the capital commitment, but in terms of balance sheet to the energy transition. So basically loans that are going to be -- and that have been and will be extended to the energy transition project. While positive impact finance, EUR 5 billion last year or sustainability-linked loans specifically last year, are flow figures, if you will, for some achievements. The positive impact finance is not directly part of the EUR 120 billion committed to the energy transition.

And again, you have the bond also, it's part of the financing. That comes back to the issue of being very clear also on the definition with ESG. We will have, again, collectively to really be sure that we talk about the same thing and the right definition.

The next question comes from Giulia Aurora Miotto from Morgan Stanley.

Yes, can you hear me well?

Yes, fine, Giulia.

So 2 questions from my side as well. The first one, I would just like to go back to the derisking that has been carried out. And I just wanted to ask if you can give us some examples to make it a little bit more tangible in terms of what has changed in your business that makes you confident that the extreme moves that we have seen in 2020 will not repeat. And this is going forward, but also on the risks that you had in your back book? So that's my first question. Then the second one, on F&A, Financing & Advisory, which I can see why structurally this is an area of growth, absolutely. But I was just wondering, over the past 3 years, you seemed to have underperformed peers that have grown revenues like 4% versus SocGen from 2017 to 2020 growing at about 1%. So I wonder what has driven the underperformance and how do you accelerate growth. And then if I'm just allowed a quick clarification. If I'm not mistaken, your target to double revenues in ESG, but I haven't seen the number of actual ESG revenues. So I don't know if you are disclosing that, that would be helpful.

Thank you very much, Giulia. I will leave the floor to Slawomir to answer your different questions.

Okay. So on the derisking, it's reasonably simple. So there is a nominal piece to it. So you have a portfolio in terms of nominal exposure to a certain type of products. And within these products, you have various degrees of complexity or, let's say, a sensitivity to dislocation. And so the first step was to analyze very carefully which products were driving the highest negative impact on risk management, if you will, in the context of dislocation. And there, one of the main decisions was made to reduce the overall portfolio of mainly Autocalls, but within the Autocalls the -- reduced very significantly more than the average of the reduction of the entire portfolio, the piece that was deemed more complex to managing dislocation risk. So that's one step. Second step, we should have maybe started with this, the overall risk appetite in terms of the stress test that is generated by these activities has been dramatically reduced, both in terms of limits and in terms of consumption. We gave you the consumption figure in the presentation, roughly 70% decrease versus pre-crisis level. And at the end of the day, this is the most tangible means to reduce your exposure to the risk simply to reduce your consumption of stress test. And then there's the whole set of measures, very detailed, in terms of how you manage in terms of your hedging policies, in terms of the very nature of the underlyings of the products, et cetera, which also contribute to qualitatively reduce your exposure to the worst outcomes around the correlation in particular. So this is the story, right? And at the end of the day, it allowed us to reduce our risk exposure. Why? because it's very fine-tuning of the portfolio, if you will, to maintain a decent position and to protect the revenue base, in the context, which I already spoke about in the past, in the context of improving margins in this market segment on the markets, if you will. F&A. In terms of F&A, so there's a lot of dependency on which year you take as a reference point, but you took 2017, and there's this discrepancy that you identified versus the market. You have to remember that our activities are well integrated. And clearly, there was an impact, which we think was modest, but there was an impact on our F&A business linked to the layers of restructuring that we executed in -- from basically 2018, 2019, and that's part of the impact. And then it's fair to say that in our business mix, we have a relatively lower exposure versus some of our peers, in particular if you take the entire market of the U.S. peers, in terms of the pure investment banking revenues, which have been growing, almost exploding as a business class, if you will. And here, obviously, we have a business mix effect, which is not positive. But as you can see, combined, they didn't have an overly material impact on our revenue base. Now going forward, we believe that based on the various trends that we discussed in the presentation, we have a very compelling growth story, to the tune of the 3% per year that we talked about and supported, as William said, by an allocation basically comparable in terms of capital -- organic capital growth, while we maintain the high returns that we enjoyed here. Because this is maybe the last piece you have to have in mind in our strategic approach of those businesses, we are not in market share acquisition phase. We are very careful to continue to balance the returns with the absolute value of the top line.

And in ESG, we effectively don't disclose the figure at this stage.

We don't disclose the figure. Yes, sorry about the ESG, but we don't disclose the figure, but it's obviously in the hundreds of millions.

The next question comes from Delphine Lee from JPMorgan.

I just wanted to go back on financing -- follow-up on financing advisory, the question. So I understand what the impact of restructuring you've done in the past in 2018 and 2019. But any areas of growth where you're seeing margin pressures or lower growth? I mean, I guess you talked about the structural growth in energy and infrastructure and transaction banking. But what about the other areas? Just trying to understand a little bit the different components of F&A, which obviously includes really many businesses. The second question is just regarding -- I mean, capital allocation and just capital briefly. So I guess there's still a small part of TRIM. So just very briefly, I mean, how much is still coming in GBIS for TRIM? I mean, I guess that's quite small, but just want to have that number. And the last question is on equities. If we were to compare your revenue run rate that you have in '23 versus, let's say, pre-crisis of 2019, if you could just explain a little bit the moving parts of the subsegments, which are growing? I guess you've been talking about the market share gains in Delta One and the growth in listed products. But just trying to understand where -- what run rate can we expect on structured products versus the past. And then also any other things we should be aware of, I mean, in terms of trends.

Delphine, so I will give the floor to Slawomir to answer your question to get a little bit more color and detail on the F&A different activities as well as on the capital market side and the equity in particular. Perhaps just on the TRIM, let me remind you that we've said 30 basis points this year. We took 8, 9, I think, the first quarter. William?

Roughly 10 in the first quarter. So we are less -- so if you divide it by 3.5, you get the RWA amount equivalent and a portion of it is allocated to CIB, actually the majority of it, but not all of it. And then remember that in terms of TRIM strategy, we had our strategy to give TRIM. This is one of the reasons why we've gone through deleveraging in 2019 to prefinance the impact on TRIM -- from TRIM on the balance sheet of GBIS.

Slawomir?

So on F&A, so maybe first comment in terms of growth, as you can see recently, Q4-on-Q4 or Q1-on-Q1, you see a high -- a higher level of growth, high single-digit in the Q4 versus Q4 and the decent performance in Q1 as well. So just in terms of trend. But going more directly to your question, F&A is, as you know, composed of transaction banking on the one side and then global banking and advisory on the other. So transaction banking, you know the business. We think that there is a compelling case for growth there and that we have, especially in our core markets of France, Europe, Central Eastern Europe, in synergy with the rest of the group, a very good growth case, supported by significant technology investment. In terms of the global banking and advisory business, you can think of it as a 3-part business. One is IB. So with a wider definition, including that capital markets, M&A, equity capital markets. And from a growth perspective, again, in terms of mix, this is arguably smaller at -- in our house and, let's say, the average of the market, certainly, if you take into account the American CIBs. But it's obviously a division which has very strong prospects for growth as the price received and the growth recovery happens between the restructuring and new opportunities. Across all the sectors, it's a subcomponent which has good growth prospects. Then we have asset finance, which is made of mostly real estate and some other aircraft, et cetera, et cetera, type of businesses. And there, after the, let's say, the -- obviously, the hit during the crisis in terms of the dynamics of these sectors, we strongly believe that in the future, as the markets restructure and maybe trends change, but we believe that there is also a reasonable, albeit lower growth rate, but a reasonable growth rate as well. And then you have, obviously, natural resources and infrastructure, which is another pillar of this division, which, between the ESG trends, which obviously arguably are a lot about substitution, but also about growth. If you are positioned as a leader in this case and we, one, have leadership positions; and two, clearly are determined to keep them and to keep investing to keep them, you have an extra opportunity to capture extra growth, recognizing that there's some substitution. And hence, overall, we talk about the 3%, not more. But again, basically, this both -- I mean, all of these 3 divisions have good prospects for growth. Now the last piece is a business which is called [ADT] in our internal jargons, which everything credits. As structured credit in the American way of talking about this, anything securitization and anything basically that is structured with a long or ABS content. And in particular, everything about type of credit. And in this division, we also believe that we have very strong prospects for growth in terms of how the buy side is restructuring itself and how the buy side is investing in the private credits. We believe that this vehicle of ours in itself and as it enables the access to our own origination, if you will, for the buy side, we believe that there are very strong prospects of -- for growth there. And we have actually a small investment in the space to make sure that we integrate even more with top portions of the credit on the mark side. So that's more or less the picture. And then in terms of the market's performance and dynamics, it's about really balance, right? So you have it in the presentation, we think that by 2023, we don't expect investment solutions to be much more than 1/3 of the mix. And within the structured solutions -- investment solutions, the structured products is not the entire 1/3 investment solutions. There are some other businesses which are functioning completely differently. And we believe that it's not going to go beyond this. And all the other businesses are going to be managed proactively as to remain focused on profitability and balance in terms of risk. So no market share play per se expected in the division.

The next question the next question comes from Matthew Clark from Mediobanca.

A couple of questions, please. First one is on the financing and advisory division and the cost income ratio there. I'm just trying to understand why your cost income ratio is up in the kind of 60% to 70% range, where your closest peers' equivalent divisions are down in the kind of 45% to 55% range. Could you maybe explain the structural reasons why you would run with a higher cost income ratio than those peers, particularly given you just said that pure investment banking is a lower component than many in the market? And then second question is on the Security Services division, where you're forecasting flat revenues from a pretty weak year as a base period. And just understand -- I want to understand why you're so unambitious there? What's the problem? And if you can't grow that business, why are you the best owner for it? Why not just sell it?

Matthew, I will leave Slawomir your 2 questions.

So on the F&A cost-to-income ratio, we don't disclose the income ratios at the level of granularity. But what I can tell you is we are not overweight, for sure. It's an understatement in terms of the pure ID. Yes, our business is highly structured and with a high content in terms of advisory. So from that perspective, it's not -- and it translates into high returns on RWA, right? So there's a logic there. It doesn't happen by chance. And so let's say, the production cost of such high return on RWA is linked to the level of expertise, a global reach that we have to maintain in our teams. And so it's part of the business right now. We have been addressing some of the issues in terms of transversal cost. And while the EUR 450 million reduction is focused on the market side, I think the EUR 500 million was much more distributed, if you will, across the business. And we are going to, as I said in the presentation, we are going to continue to seek to optimize our costs wherever we can. But at the core of it, there is a higher value produced and which has a higher cost for sure. So that's one point. On the Security Services division, the idea is the following, right? We have a market which is a difficult one, highly competitive, and why the business has a lot of sound features in terms of stability, in terms of capital consumption, et cetera, it's a business which is not in -- how to put it, it doesn't benefit from very conducive market conditions from the top line perspective. And we want to be conservative when thinking about this, especially also given the fact that it is sensitive to some extent to the rate environment. And so the combination of all this make us, if you will, conservative. Now the way we think about it, as with any other business, really, we will be proactively seeking to optimize, be it in terms of cost, and we are embarked in Security Services in a cost effort, which is meaningful. But also in terms of other solutions in terms of potentially partnerships or simply investing in what would be the most accretive, but in a very, very disciplined way. And so it's part of our business portfolio today. It brings some stability. It doesn't have extremely appealing prospects for growth, if you want to be careful and conservative, which we want to be.

Can I just follow up and ask what the return on equity is roughly there just for the Security Services business in isolation? Just so we can understand, if it is an ex growth business, why is it so attractive that you want to keep it? I mean...

So we don't disclose these figures at that granularity.

But it's not particularly dilutive because, again, it requires very few capital. So it's more a play on the breakeven. And as we've said, we've worked very hard in the past. So I think it's also a business which might go through, we will see, and you might have seen this issuance with the European Investment Bank and Forge, we are also looking at innovation. We feel comfortable to keep the business, as Slawomir said, looking potentially also at that partnership, why not, and innovation. But the release openly does not impact the overall...

Either way.

Yes.

The next question comes from Omar Fall from Barclays.

Just looking at Slide 31, I think back in 2019, in that previous restructuring, you'd given us some very helpful return-on-equity metrics. I think investment solutions was like a 15% ROE; financing, above that; and the flow business, very low, less than 5%. Can you give us an idea of what those metrics look like now post that restructuring and your expectations going forward? Any period? And if you don't want to give firm numbers, just the direction of travel. And then second question, just a small clarification, and apologies if I missed this on the cost, but the difference between the EUR 5.5 billion and the EUR 5.7 billion will be entirely revenue-led, right? That's just incremental business -- that incremental business development bit on Slide 18 in the chart, i.e. in other words, if revenues are good, then variable comp will be up and that's captured by that gap is the right way to look at it.

Omar, again, I turn to Slawomir to answer your 2 questions.

So on the -- thank you for your questions. On the ROE or, say, profitability per segment, let me put it this way. While we won't disclose the detailed figures, things have changed slightly in the sense that in the market dynamics and also given restructuring that we have carried in all of these businesses, basically the short story, like the direction of travel, as you put it, is that it's much more balanced today between all these compartments, and we have made substantial progress in the flow activities, while we have something more stable going forward in the other businesses. And remembering that there is always, in the market activity, some degree of sensitivity to the market conditions, but across the cycle, this is the direction of travel, so to speak. In terms of the cost, you are right. I mean the short answer is it is linked to what is going to happen on the revenue side. And you have similarly a range for the implied cost-to-income ratio for the entire GBIS business, which is basically also linked to the fine parameters of the [indiscernible] everything.

The next question comes from Tarik El Mejjad from Bank of America.

I have 2 questions, please. The first one is, I'm just trying to take a step back here and see what's your return on equity potential for the GBIS in the long run. I mean, if we look at the ROE of 10% target, I mean, clearly, you're expecting a higher ROE at the structural products, because when you look at the F&A and all the other products, I mean they are heavy in RWAs and Basel IV impact. So -- which takes -- leads me to think that basically ROE for those products will be way above 10%. And last year, when you had the issue with structured products, you said structured products is a great business because over the cycle at the peak it can do 15% and the lowest point could be a loss. So what I'm trying to understand here is through the cycle, are you still expecting basically structured products to be at 15% around? Or are we really by 2023, it's just basically the nice part of the cycle where you expect things to be supportive -- the market to be supportive and helpful for you to deliver good profitability in there? The second question is on the cost of risk for F&A. From Slide 13. Should we assume through the cycles of this is around 30 basis points? Or maybe you can share with us the number if it's wrong.

Yes. Tarik, perhaps on your first question, let me, first of all, highlight that, personally, I consider we should look more at the structural profitability without the IFRS because again it's something temporary and which, of course, is allocated in particular to GBIS. So the 10% corresponds to 12%. And I must say, I consider it, it's a very acceptable profitability above the cost of capital when you look at the mix of the different activities. And Slawomir, I think, commented to answer your first question, that, again, there has been some travel made in the last 2 years. I will let Slawomir answer your first question. And perhaps, on the cost of risk, Slawomir, but also perhaps Slawomir could give you some indication. Slawomir?

So it's a very important question that you're asking, and I welcome the stepping back here. Because I have to challenge a little bit your statement in the sense that the F&A ROE is actually higher that what you seem to have in mind, and I would even vent to say we're much higher in a normal set of circumstances. And remember, we have a specific business that has high across the board -- it's not concentrated in any one of them, across the board, a high-return on RWA, a high gross margin if you will. And in terms of the Basel IV perspective, we believe that the combination, right, of, one, market dynamics, which will certainly change in certain departments, if they are required to be much more capitalized, the market dynamics will change. And then we have a high ability, we believe, to adapt our businesses in terms of segments, in terms of products, in terms of geographies even, and we believe that we are able -- we will be able to sustain a higher profitability there. And so which brings me to the second point I want to make. Absolutely not, right? So the performance of GBIS as a whole, in terms of the 10% and 12%, as Frederic underlined without the SRF, is not going to be driven by a higher performance in terms of ROE of structured products, especially since their, as you saw, their share in our overall business is actually reasonably small, right? It's part of -- it's only part of 1/3 of equities, right? So this is how you should think about this, if I may. In terms of the cost of risk, I'll let Sadia complement, but we have something which -- through the cycle is lower, that what you just said. And in terms of the trends, we believe that there's a meaningful recovery, but a gradual one in the next 3 years.

Sadia?

Yes. On F&A, we have [indiscernible] diversified the portfolio across various sectors, primarily driven by investment-grade counterparts, and for what is on the non-investment-grade side, strongly structured. So as you know, in 2020, the cyclicality that we had on the F&A was driven by 2 specific cases as well as the IFRS 9 for cyclical impact, but we expect this cost of risk to normalize across 2021 and going forward.

The next question comes from Flora Bocahut from Jefferies.

I have 2 questions I wanted to discuss. The first question goes back to the Slide 10, where you show us the change in the RWA allocation. And the way I understand it is that you want to fund the RWA growth in F&A via the optimization of RWA in markets. So just wanted to understand here what exactly you have in mind regarding the optimization in markets and whether this is also reflected in the revenue guidance that you provided for that subdivision. Then the next question is, I'm just surprised that you're not talking at all in this presentation about private banking because it's about GBIS and there's no discussion about AWM. Obviously, [indiscernible] is being sold, but [indiscernible] is just 20% of the revenues in AWM. And when I look at the evolution of the ROE in GBIS over time, AWM has been a big drag actually since 2016, mainly because the cost-to-income ratio is north of 90%, which I guess is also the case for private banking. So just wanted to ask also regarding private banking. Why is it not discussed? Does it mean it's non-core? And what are you doing there to improve the profitability, please?

Flora, I will leave the floor to Slawomir regarding your question on risk-weighted assets. On private banking, you're right, but we are, to a certain extent, in the transition phase. And apologize, but you know now it's -- we have moved the supervision to Sebastian. And actually, yes, it was part of GBIS, but it is moving towards more closer linked with the retail. So that's why -- and we wanted to be selective, to be frank, and concentrate on, if I may say, the core GBIS as it will go further. Let me just say on the private banking side, it's core. First, with the French retail, we are developing stronger and stronger synergies. And in line with my view that when people -- we come to branches in 5 to 10 years' time, it will be around savings. So that's why actually the move towards closer relationship with the retail was decided. There's more to extract, in particular, with our new banks. And secondly, regarding the international retail, which has done pretty well, again, first in the last 5 to 10 years in terms of compliance, we were referring to compliance, a lot has been done there to ensure the highest standards. And we have decided to, on one hand, integrate further, the different locations that we have and effectively extract the cost savings through a project, which is an outsourcing one with a company called [ ASCO ] , which is a company, owned predominantly by [indiscernible] and also with the minority stake by [indiscernible] and I. And here, we will benefit with this outsourcing from scale impact. So we are working also there. Beyond the development of the business, the revenues also to reduce further the cost, and we are positive on what we can achieve. In due course, we will make a presentation probably at some point today. But it's fair to say we did not decide to put that at the heart of the presentation today. Risk-weighted assets, Slawomir?

Good morning, and may I add that everything in the presentation is excluding the 1 division. So in terms of your RWA question, So first of all, it's about this idea of incremental capital allocation to SNA. So stemming from the growth, organic growth of the RWA of the group. So that's the first most important driver. And then the idea that as we make optimizations, we will be also substituting, if you will. It's more marginal, but substituting capital allocation between the 2 divisions. Which optimizations? 2 things. One, when you look at things at a very granular level, which is the way this is done and should be done, you identify, be it in terms of clients, allocation, distribution, in terms of some of the specific business at a very granular level, you can identify patterns that are not the best allocation of our resources. And so we have -- it's a marginal thing. It's also a permanent thing. We have opportunities to optimize at that level. Think about it as a product access and the client access where the distribution of the allocation of capital and the distribution of the implied returns can be optimized. And so this is what we're talking about. But again, in terms of what is the relieving impact, it's the first one, which is the incremental allocation of organic growth, of RWA will be focused on SNA.

The next question comes from Anke Reingen from RBC Capital.

The first is on your targets again. I mean, if the business is quite volatile just by the nature of it and you're giving us quite specific on 2023 targets. I just wonder, is the driving input basically, the OE target of 10% of the revenues would be lower. You worked on the cost or the capital allocation? Or is it basically as a result of your restructuring, the revenues are just much more predictable? And then secondly, on market shares, if you maybe can just elaborate a bit about -- I mean you said structured products were gaining market share. But is your underlying assumption market share gains or just basically growing in line with the market. And you mentioned North America a couple of times. Is that because you're reentering the market? Or it's just basically building on your current franchise in the market that is going. And then on ESG, I mean, is that a market you think you're gaining market share? Or is it here as well because the market is growing.

Thank you. Slawomir will answer your question if you mentioned. He is the one to comment on North America because he was our head of GBIS for 5 years. So we are not entering the market, but probably you can see that we can do also even better than what we've achieved in the last 5 years. Slawomir?

So thank you for your 4 questions, which shall then be answered. So on the volatility and what's the driving input into the model, right? Obviously, very, very fair question. And it's really our assumption of what is the -- through the cycle level where the markets converge as far as the market converge, of course, we have a hypothesis, which we know about SNA, but on the markets focusing my answer on the markets. It's really the highest level of care and thinking went into assessing what is this convergence figure for the market in normal market conditions. So of course, you have volatility Q1 showed perfectly that you have opportunities arising all of a sudden in the market, that all of us in the industry when we are functioning well, are able to capture to this or that extent. And so let me put it this way. If 2023 is exactly like Q1 2021, we will most likely be significantly higher. But this is where we believe we shouldn't go, right? We wanted to take a very responsible approach of thinking about this in normal market conditions. So no disruption, but also no exceptionally conducive market conditions. And without being too long, we use many techniques, right? We thought about our past, what the revenue stream has disappeared, what -- because of the market conditions or change to market structure, what revenue disappeared because of our restructuring, et cetera, et cetera. What was the strips of exceptional items, performance of 2020 and then other considerations in terms of our client portfolio, et cetera, et cetera, we have many means to assess this figure. And we came to the conclusion that this was the most reliable one, the 4.5 estimate normal market conditions. Should things be rapidly different? We will be proactive, right, and not waiting for things to happen, right? I'm sticking to the second subset of your question about, are you going to adjust costs if these things are different. We will manage this portfolio throughout the years, very proactively. That is something I can tell you. In terms of the market shares of structured products in particular, I'm not sure I got your question exactly precisely, but we're not expecting our market share to increase. We're expecting our position as leaders in this market, leaders in terms of innovation, leaders in terms of advice, leaders in terms of new products, et cetera, to remain where it is. And as you saw and as you probably see here, it is still a leading position, right, in terms of pure market share. It depends on the components, right? Are we going to have a bigger market share on the most complex, most difficult products to manage in the Autocall space. No, we will not. We will actually, and we have decreased our footprint there. But we are innovating and creating new ways of proposing structured investment solutions, and we believe that, overall, outstanding will remain the same. But we are not really, again, as in none of our businesses in a market share game play. This is not what we're trying to achieve here. In terms of the America. Well, clearly -- so to speak come from there as far as the last 5 or 6 years are concerned. And what I can tell you is, so we're not revamping anything. It's a significant business of ours. As you can see, there is a slide. We're talking here, I mean I'll let you do the math. It's a client revenue vision, but you see that this is shy of EUR 2 billion basically. So it's a significant business of ours, very diversified. And as you know, we have very good prospects for growth in some areas, in which we are already present, right? So the structured credit, the American way, it can't be exotic credit, but the structure credit the American way, linked to securitization, to private debt, et cetera, is a market where we have been growing these past 5 years, where we have a very meaningful position with banking the biggest names in the space, and this is what we're going to direct, invest a little more very reasonably and in a very disciplined way in areas where we are already present and strong. In Asia, similarly, we are a leading house in terms of selling and advising on investment solutions on structured investment solutions, and we fully intend to, again, grow our presence in the space. And let me may give a segue into your last question about ESG. These 2 regions are going to be the ESG regions, right? Where you see the European concept, we're very positive, but it's going to happen in these geographies. This is where the biggest investments in terms of ESG are going to happen, especially in Asia. And this is also when we say we want to marginally focus the incremental capital allocation from a geographical perspective on this region, it's also because of that because of the product and plan opportunities, but also because of the ESG opportunity. And so here, closing on your final remark, which was about the market share in ESG or just basically along the market with stable market shares. Here, I would say it's a little bit of both. We have some substitution. Again, we're a big -- historically big natural sources energy bank. So some substitution. But also because we want very recently to be a leader in the space. We believe that we are there positioned to capture some extra market share, over time. But it is fair to say that it's a very competitive market, which we fully intend to be a big player on.

The next question comes from Stefan-Michael Stalmann from Autonomous Research.

My first question tries to step back in time a bit. You generated returns on normative equity of around 11% to 12% in 2015 to '17, and that's excluding Asset and Wealth Management. And at the time, you targeted about 14% return on normative equity. And then in 2018, it went down to 8.5% and then 6.5% in 2019 before we even talk about the COVID-related dislocations. So I'm curious, what do you think were the root causes that have derailed these return trajectories and expectations after 2017? And could you maybe link more clearly the strategic choice that you're making today with the diagnosis of these problems? And the second question, again, a return on normative equity question. And I appreciate that you probably don't want to give us hard numbers by business. But if you look at your 10% target, are there significant differences between SNA and Global Markets and Investor Services? And are there significant differences between fixed income and equities? And likewise, are there significant differences between the major geographies directly. That would be very helpful.

Slawomir?

So thank you for your question. So first of all, I would say, well, many concepts change between these 2 periods of time that you're referring to. In terms of -- at the end of the day, in terms of some market feature, market conditions. What I mean by that is there were specific pockets of revenue that we were drawing from this or that geography/product, if you will, in the metrics of our business portfolio. That's one. So changes in some markets features. Two, costs, undeniably, the phase of industry-wide remediation across multiple topics accelerated during this period of time. And in terms of the capital linked to some of our activities in terms of regulation also changed, right? And so unfortunately, all these 3 drivers were basically having a negative impact. And I think this is what drove the story that you just described mostly. Now just addressing specifically to your question about strategic choices today versus the diagnosis, let me maybe highlight a few things. So one lesson from my perspective, and we share it at the general management level of the group is you have to have balance, to have more sustainable, predictable performance. Balance has been -- between your client segments, between your geographies, between your product mixes, et cetera. That's the value of balance in situations that are exposed to these negative drivers is the best answer basically. Because you never experienced all of these negative drivers the same way to the same extent across your entire business model. So the more balanced you are, the more sustainable you will be in dealing with these drivers of negative impact, so to speak. It's also extremely true on the risk side, obviously, and hence all the point we're making clearly about the lowering of the idiosyncratic risk profile, which is exactly the same thinking and probably also clearly something we draw from the diagnosis we made of 2020 that we have to have more distributed returns versus risk and that this is going to be part of why from a credit stability perspective and exposure to the risk on the downside, we will fare much better in the future. So I hope this gives you some color to your first question. In terms of the distribution of RONE across the businesses basically and geographies. Again, we are not disclosing the figures, but let me put it this way. It's -- from a target perspective, it's pretty much in line with what I just said, right? So after accounting for our current estimate of all the impacts that we see coming further down the road in terms of regulation, in particular, and assuming, again, a decent market conditions across the board in the context of macroeconomic -- decent macroeconomic performance, decent -- continued recovery from macroeconomic perspective, We believe that these returns will be fairly balanced. So -- and we don't intend, that's for sure, and that's part of the philosophy here. We don't intend to run something where we would have 15% somewhere paying for a 2% somewhere else. Because this is not the best solution in terms of making sure you increase predictability and you increase sustainability. It's true, again, all -- through all the access products, plans, segments and geographies.

The next question comes from Pierre Chedeville from CIC.

I have -- my first question is regarding your electronic platform AG markets. I remember that a few years ago, you made an Investor Day, and we had a presentation of this tool. And I wanted to know how it is developing now among your corporate customers? And are you happy with the development? Could you give us, for instance, like some of your competitors do, how many users you have now on this Asia market platform. And more generally, are you satisfied by your positioning with electronic platform, for instance, in the change area or rates area? My second question is about what you said regarding SMEs and your wish to develop among them, What is your strategy to penetrate better SMEs. When we know that, for instance, your network is not comparable to mutualized networks. So what types of products or added value do you want to sell to these SMEs? And I remember that you had JV called MCIB, which was a JV between retail, I guess, and CIB. And I remember that, once again, a few years ago, you gave NBI of this JV, which was around EUR 100 million or EUR 150 million. Can you give us a little bit more on that, CIB and SMEs. And my last question is about cash equity. You didn't talk regarding this business, and we see that, once again, one of your competitor wants to develop there. What is your view on that?

Thank you very much, Pierre. I will immediately leave the floor to Slawomir. Let me just comment your assessment of our positioning. Well, we have, actually with SME, a pretty good position and to a certain extent, it's also reflected in the share of guaranteed loans that we have, as you know, we -- and you know the weight it was organized fundamentally was to say let each of us take our share of the facility, the financing, et cetera. So let me just remind you that actually, we did something like EUR 19 billion out of a total of EUR 135 million. So which means something like a 15% market share if I am right, which is higher than our overall market share. So I think we have, historically, a pretty good presence, and we had organized also beyond the branches here. You talked actually about the organization when you talk a bit about -- not very, very small SME about platforms, where we put together all our resources in a relatively integrated way, including on the M&A side, et cetera, to bring to the clients slightly close to the ground, the full range of services. But perhaps Slawomir, if you could elaborate your answer here.

Yes. Thank you for your questions. So on the electronic platform markets, we are definitely as fond of it as we were a few years back when we gave you the slide presentation. This is the backbone today and even much more than it was a few years ago of our interaction with the clients. And more and more services are added to this from pricing, self-care pricing capabilities, even on structured products for a number of clients who are repeat, so to speak. Flow clients in the structured product space to a journey in terms of the plan onboarding and the way I see it, it's central to our relationship and holistic as much as we can in terms of the relationship with our wholesale clients. And so from that perspective, it's -- we believe, a very strong asset and we'll continue to be so. I will give you, as a follow-up, the number of users, et cetera, just to make sure that you get exactly the picture that you're looking for. But again, it's strategically very clear. And in terms of the interaction with the SMEs, it's actually part of our thinking because we have very much part of the investment in transaction banking that we carry in MCIB. We have been focusing on making sure that the client and specifically in the ForEx and the hedging space and managing the treasury and managing of the cash is at the forefront of our new development of this platform, exactly in the space that you described and see the idea, and it's a little bit the same with MCIB. So the investment banking for SMEs is that we integrate as much as we can, the capabilities of the wholesale with the access to the SMEs in our French retail and international retail, and this is led by GBIS and around our SG markets platform because we believe that it's a very meaningful, not only existing business, but also future prospects. And as we spoke during the presentation as well, about this, we're talking about billions of synergies and a very meaningful piece of our fixed income business actually, which is directly linked to the synergies that we have intra group with the SME markets, Again, in France, but also remember, in all of our networks in Central Eastern Europe and Africa. So it's very much central from that perspective. In terms of the cash equity, we run this business very much in integration with obviously our research, but also our Equity division, our Derivatives division. And we want to optimize this business and in the process of optimizing it further. So it's impact it's capacity to generate meaningful flows. We are very open to look at all kinds of solution and we will be dealing with this proactively, trying to achieve both the right relationship with our issuer clients and again, meaningful profitability at the end of the day across the entire chain. So this is an area where we will continue to optimize, improve loaded -- even more with electronic capabilities and again, try to maintain a footprint in terms of the issuer clients, but also be mindful of the profitability.

The last question comes from Kiri Vijayarajah from HSBC.

Yes. A couple of questions from my side. One on FIC and on GTB, if I may. So on the fixed side, how do you think about your competitive positioning in things like credit trading, DCM, particularly in U.S. and Asia, where you don't necessarily have the depth of corporate relationships you have in Europe. So is that an area you think you might need to invest, particularly where it overlaps perhaps with your ESG ambitions. So are you happy with your current capabilities, I guess, in U.S. Asia FIC. And then secondly, on GTB, the EUR 500 million investment program you talked about. Just trying to understand, is that a defensive measure to stay relevant technology-wise, i.e., are all GTB players needing to make that type of investment? Or are you thinking a bit more as driving incremental revenues? And if so, what sort of revenue uplift should that $0.5 billion investment generate in GTB, please?

So Slawomir on the different questions, DCM, ESG, corporate relationship in U.S. and Asia and then GTB.

Thank you for your questions. So on the first one, so today, we drive a very meaningful portion of our global DCM revenues from actually the dollar platform in all shapes and forms. So be it euro issuing in dollars or issues in the U.S. directly. So it's already a very meaningful business. Why? Because we have both, obviously these major European clients who are issuing in dollars from the entire EMEA region, but also a fairly significant portfolio of relationships in the U.S. and in Asia in our chosen sectors from which we also draw some revenue. So I would say on the DCM side, especially in the U.S., we already have a meaningful presence, so to speak, and a very profitable one. In terms of the credit trading, so the credit trading directly linked to the bond chain, if you will, we want to be very conservative, right? It's an inventory play, which, obviously, helped a lot of our peers show increased revenues over the last quarter. It's not something we believe is very meaningful for us to be running major credit risk inventories there. And so our approach there is extremely focused on making sure that we run a profitable chain. Now from a credit perspective a little more broadly. So the entire, again, structured credit as in the American meaning -- so anything with loan, content, securitization, asset-backed product of all kinds and all the business around them in terms of collateral financing, et cetera. This is a very particular opportunity in which we have been investing in which we are strong, and we have been strong for years. Some of our countries in the U.S. have 3 decades of history, et cetera. And so there, we believe there are opportunities with the buy side in areas like in the Americas, obviously, but also working on the link that you have there between the U.S. market and Asia in terms of distribution on some of this risk. And here, basically, this is the value chain where we really want to be active. In terms of...

ESG. Also ESG...

Yes, yes. And of course, yes, of course -- sorry, on the ESG content, of course, because of everything we do in Europe, in particular, and our expertise on the product side, on the structuring side, it's a major value proposition on top of what I said. And actually, across the board, including in the asset-backed product space, at the end of the day, virtually anything, even money market investments have today the opportunity to bring ESG content to this, and we are present across the board there. In terms of the GTB, it is -- well, you know the markets well apparently. So it's obviously a little bit of both, right? It's a market where everybody is investing constantly because it's highly, highly tech-intensive market and one where you have to be investing to just be relevant in -- so part of it is that. But we have after 2017, we have given this business more prominence in our strategic thinking because of its role in terms of activating a lot of synergies and serving this very important and profitable client base, which are the SMEs in France, but across our -- all of our international networks, but also in terms of anchoring the relationship with the largest full corporate, including in Western Europe and in Asia and in the U.S. to a lesser extent, but we are present there. So it's a little bit of both. And the catch-up, so to speak, is more behind us and we're more offensive investing mode right now, if you will.

Is there any other questions?

No. There is no more question.

Okay. Well, listen, Thank you very much for, again, attending this call, and look forward, again, meeting you soon with all our team. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for your participation. You may disconnect.