Standard Chartered PLC ($STAN)

Good morning. A very warm welcome to all of you here in the Hong Kong. The last time we had 1 of these overseas investor trip was back in 2023. Some of you partook in it, including our newly minted CFO. Much has changed over the last few years. We've seen significant changes, structural changes and shifts in the way flows are being wired and configured, whether they're in trade, supply chain, investment FDI capital, in wealth flows and currency mixes, all accelerated also by the advent and acceleration of digital transformation. Now we're here in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has been very active over the last few years in this whole reconfiguration process. The industry is actually very, very vibrant, whether you look at the IPO market, the issuances are hitting record levels, sustainability angles. If you think about insurance sectors, it's really, really writing -- underwriting record levels of APE, family offices, wealth, et cetera. Our own businesses are also delivering consecutive years of record performance. Obviously, the question near ahead is, is this going to be just a flash in the pan or something structural? And perhaps this is something that you can judge yourself over the next couple of days by being here. Now we are here in what we called One Causeway Bay, which is our seventh and newest wealth and priority banking -- sorry, priority private wealth center in Hong Kong. So we have pioneered this and we now have the broadest network of its kind, and you're experiencing firsthand because this is not quite open yet. This will be open next month. Now if you look at that direction, just 30 kilometers, you will be -- sorry, you can't see because it's blocked by the mountains and whatnot. But 30 kilometers this way would be the China border, okay? If you take the high-speed rail, it takes less than 15 minutes. On this end, literally 300 meters will be where the world's highest level of average rent per square foot. It's higher than new born, higher than Upper Fifth. So this is where mainland Chinese all love to come to stay, to eat, to shop and increasingly to do banking and do their wealth. And that's why we're set up here. Now if you look just right down, we'll get to do at the coffee break, right down, that is actually where the first plot of public land was auctioned and sold in Hong Kong in 1860. And since then, every day, there's a firing of the noon day gun, okay? That has been a history, marking time. You might hear a bang at around noon time, but that's also part of the tradition of Hong Kong. Now obviously, you hear also the primary focus also for us to deliver you with our new 3-year plan because we achieved our previous 1 ahead of time. So part of the process is also for us to share with you our aspirations and what we would like you to measure us against and hold us to in the foreseeable 3 years, okay? So hopefully, our objective for the 2 days is very, very simple. To share with you what we believe are durable and structural trends and opportunities that continue that we will face and how the bank is going to position ourselves against these opportunities. So I'm going to run very quickly with you with agenda here. So Bill and Manus will cover the next chapter, 3-year plans, financial targets, followed by Noelle and Tanuj, which will go through the transformation agenda, followed by business updates by Roberto and Judy. And then we're going to have a very, very quick speed date breakout session. Just to give you a sense of experience of some of the aspects we're doing on the ground here. And then we're going to have drinks and dinner on the opposite side of the harbor at Mplus, which is a West Kowloon cultural district. This is the world's most ambitious art and cultural center covering 40 hectares, and we're going to be taking -- this is an underpass here that we can take a boat here, just a 15-minute boat ride over there. If you're a sea sick or worried about that, there's a shuttle bus option both towing and throwing from that venue, okay? And the next day, we will actually have to start off our Central Banker, Chief Executive of HKMA to cover what's on his mind in terms of policies and what are his priorities for Hong Kong's financial services covered by a bit of deep dive with myself and Jean and Mary really going through the structural themes that Bill will be sharing shortly. And then we've got to have some fireside chat with clients, just for you to get a sense of what is on their mind in terms of their priorities for their individual corporates followed by digital assets, what we're doing around there. So this is really the kind of next couple of days. And hopefully, there's enough time through presentations and more importantly, through interactions because most of the insights may actually come outside of slides, okay? So wishing you a very, very fruitful next couple of days. With that, I'm going to hand over to Bill.

Well, thanks very much, Ben. Thanks, Ben, Mary, as always for the great hospitality in Hong Kong. Sorry about the weather. I hope we get a chance to actually observe what's out there. If you go into your pockets and you pull out your Standard Chartered issued bank notes, $20, $50, $100, $500, put them together, you'll see the profile of the mountain range out there with Lions Rock, which is the local benchmark. And if we get a sunny day later today, you'll be able to see it out there. If you don't, then you can just go into your pockets, take out your bank notes, leave them on the desk when you leave, and that will have been your small contribution to our event. We are super excited about what we're going to do here today. And before we get into the cut and thrust, I just wanted to hit a couple of things that we hope you take away from this because it will resonate throughout each of the discussions that we have -- we hope. First, that's Standard Chartered, whatever -- wherever we come from, and we're going to spend a little bit of time on how we got to where we are is a growth company. We're growing at a really good pace. We're growing, leveraging key competitive advantages that we cultivated for some time. We've been investing into those. We focus our strategy on those growth opportunities. And we would like that to come through a little bit more clearly. Of course, you see it in financial targets getting to 18% return on tangible equity by 2030. Obviously, we have to grow to get there. But we want to explain how we're going to grow, why we're so confident that we can deliver that. And what's structural and differentiated about our bank. Second, we want to underscore the degree to which we have shifted our business mix very much with that growth and exploitation of those competitive advantages in mind. We're a very different bank today than we were 5 years ago or 10 years ago. We may continue to be a different bank going forward, but anchored in a set of very consistent strategic themes and areas of thematic change in financial markets that we've been focused on for some time. We want to share that with you and put that into the context of our business. And third, we'd like to build your confidence in the same way that our confidence has been built that our consistent track record over now a good period of time, positions us very well to deliver on the rest of the plan that we're talking about. So those are just 3 sort of high-level thematic things that I want to call out our front. And hopefully, we'll be able to point to what's really going on to support each of those statements as we go through the next couple of days. So a few high-level thematic issues. First is you'll hear the term superconnector a lot. You saw it in the video, you heard it from Ben, you'll hear it from others. What we mean by that is that we have a network, which is unique. Other people have networks. It's just ours is our network. It happens to be anchored in the fastest growing markets of the world, connecting those to all of the major economic centers of the world with really good underlying financial infrastructure and products that are supporting that. That superconnector role is at the heart of what Standard Chartered does. It's leaves us saying that the -- our network is our home market. Of course, we have a home market right here in Hong Kong, in Singapore, in London, in Dubai, et cetera. But the real home for us is our network, and we are the super connector. We're going to talk about the strategic growth drivers in just a few moments. We've identified 5 that I outlined back in our annual report, but we'll dig in on that. And I think you'll see those underlying driver themes present throughout the presentations because everything that we're doing 1 way or the other is either anchored in or heavily influenced by those key themes. Needless to say, we think we're very well positioned for those teams. We've got very clear plans to take the substantial investments with our shareholder dollars over years into our core infrastructure and into our products and services built off those core infrastructures to become an increasingly more productive bank. So you see that in terms of outcomes of financial guidance, which you've already seen with cost-to-income ratios at 57%, et cetera. But we want you to understand a little bit better what we've done to get here in terms of being able to be increasingly more productive from here, and of course, we'll set out those plans. And this is what's going to drive our growth. This is what's going to allow us to achieve what we think are probably super normal growth rates and super normal returns a super differentiated franchise that has a very long history very strong underlying brand. But now we're sitting here in 2026, and we see a future that's super exciting. We're not going to spend a lot of time on history. And I don't know why we started in 2015 as sort of a fluky coincidence. But in 2015, certainly, when I joined the bank, the assessment I made as best I could, was that this is a super franchise that had made some mistakes and fallen on some hard times, and that we could rectify the mistakes and the franchise could flourish. As you can see, we kind of split the history very broadly into 3 groupings. The reposition phase, you could call it cleanup, which was getting the balance sheet in place. But in many ways, introducing the disciplines that had allowed us to stray with the super franchise into some not good areas at all. It took a while. We repositioned a lot. We took a lot of the income out of the bank in doing that. It was low returning income, but it was income. So it looked like the bank wasn't growing. Actually, the things that mattered and the things that we're doing today, we're growing quite nicely, but it was obfuscated by that cleanup phase. We then moved into the execute phase. So we were clean. We were ready to go, and we were investing in the growth engines. There was still a little bit of -- quite a bit, in fact, of capital reallocation, you could call it reducing suboptimal risk-weighted assets, things like that, that continue to suppress the top line but led to the steady improvement in returns. We now think we're in the compounding phase. The bank infrastructure is good. The core products and services are good. The strategic positioning is good. The areas of focus in the markets on which we're focused are good. And we think we can now compound. And by the way, the economic backdrop is good, and we can talk about what could take that off track. We think that at this point, we can compound. And ultimately, compounding is what it's about. This is how we think we can get to 15% return above that by 2028 and then continue to grow to around 18% in 2030. That's not where we stop. And -- but we will focus increasingly on how we generate maximum shareholder value. You could say we could anchor that in measures of EDA where ROT will become 1 measure that we look at, but the generation of EVA by getting an extraordinary return on capital that we deploy will become increasingly important during that period as well. That's for the future. Okay. We think we have a distinctive growth offering today. We are a scale player. And I remember when I joined the bank 11 years or so ago, the number of times people -- 1 of them may be sitting in the front row right now, said, you're not you're just not fully scaled. How can you compete against local banks here or global behemoths there, like that 1 global behemoth that you used to work for, who's got a gillion dollar tech budget. How can you compete? The answer is -- of course, I don't know the answer when I joined the bank. But when I looked in, I said, what we do, when we do it well and 2 are very scaled to be the #2 transaction bank in Asia, to be the #2 global trade bank period to be the #3 wealth manager in Asia with the fastest growth, right? It's not just that we've got the size. We're also outperforming in terms of growth. How can that be for a bank that's not the same size as others with whom we compete. It comes through focus. It comes through focus. It comes through and you'll hear Noelle, and Tanuj talked about this quite a bit. The fact that we've converged onto technology platforms that are almost uniquely uniform for a global bank across the world, which allow us to actually be more effective in these areas where scale is important. That's led to network income growth. It's led to the measures of network income and affluent income within CIB and WRB that are improving in a way that obviously is continuing to improve returns. But our cross-border affluent strategy, where we have scale and the things that matter is what will allow us to continue to exploit our competitive differentiation. We're also quite diversified, not because we chose to be diversified. I'm 1 of these corporate finance theoretical people who think a diversification in its own right is not so valuable. We have a diverse combination, whether it's by income type, interest income, noninterest income, whether it's by geography, whether it's by the product type, we're quite dispersed. Why? Because our customers are highly sophisticated, they -- whether they're cross-border multinational corporations or governments or financial institutions or affluent individuals. They're sophisticated. They have multiple and deep and sophisticated banking needs, and we've met those needs over generations in many cases, which has led to a dispersed business model, which is somewhat differentiated. It's also diverse, which is helpful because there are cycles that move in different ways. And I think this builds resilience together with our much stronger balance sheet, and we'll talk about that in some detail. This allows us to continue this growth at a super normal rate. Now these 5 themes, you'll see sort of weaving throughout the sessions that we have. I covered these in the annual report in a little bit more detail, if you want to go back for reference. But we took a step back as a team and we said, "What are the thematic areas of change in financial markets that are relevant for us -- are we positioned for these? If not, what are we going to do to address that? This just didn't come up in February of 2026. We've been working on these for years. But we thought it was helpful to put this down into a single schematic and then explore these seems in some detail. I'm going to cover each of these in turn in the following pages in the slide deck, but the emergence of multipolar, multialigned world, we all want to know what that means. It's a fact. Threat or opportunity. The answer is yes. But we've been investing in being the superconnector in a fragmented world, solving the complicated client problems, which is driving our outperformance in network income growth, right? It's nice to talk about themes. Where is the money? The money is you see it. That's what's driving the growth in Standard Chartered. The digital transformation, this is not -- customers want to do their banking online. That's 1 small part of it. The financial infrastructure is changing fundamentally into digitized money and supporting agentic commerce, all of which is very early stage. We've been investing in this for 7 years. It's going to happen. Like mark my word, it's going to happen. It will happen slower than we think for a little while and then much faster than we think. We're right at the inflection point, in my opinion. You'll all have your own views. We're positioned for that. This to us will be 1 of our biggest opportunities, getting it wrong, could be 1 of the biggest threats. Obviously, we think we're well positioned. The changing role of banks in the economy. You know the stats, we'll go into the shift of capital from banks to nonbanks. Threat or opportunity. Yes, we positioned ourselves overwhelmingly as a bank that's going to be servicing the nonbank sector. We always have. We will continue to. It's a huge area of growth for us. It's been a big driver of the improvement of our returns. Rising wealth participation, I don't need to tell you here. Ben's comment about the real estate up the road being more expensive than anywhere in the world, is a reflection of the fact that this is a very attractive destination for wealth to congregate. And frankly, we have an extremely strong position to receive and help manage that wealth as well as Singapore as well in Dubai and the U.K., and we will continue to expand that business. And we'll explore those trends in some detail. and the transition economy, which people aren't talking about as much as they did, we are because we're continuing to grow our sustainable finance income line at a rate that's faster than the rest of the bank. And that's because the clients that we serve are increasingly focused on executing their own transitions. That will accelerate with the disruption in the Middle East and higher energy prices. So this is not a flash in the pan. This is not a political fad or political correctness. This is money, and we're doing a good job. By the way, the fact that we're doing the right thing and our thought and action leader really helps us to attract good people and retain them. And then we can make money on top of that, Nirvana. Okay. Looking at these themes in turn. We're not going to go slavishly go through these slides. But the multialigned multipolar world, which, in our case, it substantially means very strong anchor in Hong Kong and China, very strong anchor in the U.S., given our leading position as a U.S. dollar clearer. Very strong position in South Asia, ASEAN, Middle East, Africa and an increasingly strong position with clients in North America and Europe. That's our network. It is fragmenting at almost every figure point. And it makes transaction flows harder on the margin. I mean makes regulation fragmented, which means duplication of underlying services and capabilities. We see that the underlying trend is a positive one. So Asia Pacific is becoming an increasing percentage of GDP and global trade, obviously, seeing that the China continues to be a major and growing exporter. At the same time, capital controls were actually going down, not going up. So Ben will talk in some detail, and I think quite insightfully, when we get to that session on Thursday about why the opening up of China in particular, we think is an exorable and why it's actually in the Chinese policymakers interest. How are we positioned for that? Our transaction banking role, our leading role as an RMB bank globally, #1 in 20 markets, leading FX and FM cross-border dealing capability, Bond Connect, Stock Connect, Wealth Connect. These are all positions where Standard Chartered is a leader in connecting across the fragmented world to the advantage of ourselves and our shareholders. The digital transformation, we can just -- we can talk about a couple of things. One is I will proposition, as I have many times, and you've heard me say it, that the blockchain-based settlements are inevitable for much of what happens in financial markets. It's cheaper ultimately. It's easier. It's more transparent. It's 24/7. It's real time. The underlying money is -- and contracts are programmable. That's all sort of good stuff in and of itself. The game changer and the accelerator of this trend to digitization of money will be AI and Agentic commerce. The agentic commerce, meaning agents are executing with agents that's already happening in many securities markets. Look at Jane Street and Citadel's financial results, that's Agentic Commerce in it large. AI-enabled, low latency, 24/7 core infrastructure. We can go head-to-head with those guys. We're not making their P&L. That's the next objective. But that would take us well beyond 18% RoTE. We are completely focused on serving our customers in the agented commerce world. We've been investing in this trend for 8 years. And when Alex and I first started talking about investing in digital assets within a market maker and a custodian and a tokenization engine, 8, 9 years ago, I don't think we had Agentic commerce in mind specifically. But we knew that this is a super powerful tool that we had to understand well as a bank. We build capabilities. We've built those capabilities in the bank. You can see that we're a 20% market share in the minting and burning of USDC. We're the third largest minter and burner. You know, but minting and burning is the conversion from Fiat to digital, digital to Fiat, through USEC, which is the most consistently used stable coin in compliant markets. The #1 and #2 are crypto-native companies. Most stable client activity is confined to the crypto world today. We're #3 with a 20% share of the conversions because we're the destination for people who are converting from the economy to the digital economy and back again. We could not be better positioned for the next wave of evolution in the digitization of money. The AI tools that we built that Noelle and Tanuj are going to talk about in some detail, the infrastructure that we've put in place, which you can't see today, if we can just talk about it, that infrastructure is designed for this world, and we will absolutely be a leader in this space as we are today. We know that the migration of capital from banks to nonbanks. You can see it in notional loan outstanding. So you can see it in the improving RWAs and return on RWAs for us, but also other banks. The -- you can see that in the NII as a proportion of our bank's income, which is a little bit over half that has been decreasing consistently and will most likely continue to decrease. Obviously, there's a rate sensitivity component to that. But that aside, the structural trend is clear. We had a financial crisis. Banks per week going into the financial crisis, regulators have stepped up their strengthening of banks, nonbanks are not regulated in the same way. That's not a problem, and it's not wrong. They're also not leveraged the way banks are. And if I were the desire financial system regulation. I would also be aggressively strengthening the banking system and allowing nonbanks to take the unlevered risk that's going to happen. We can either fight it and go to Washington and win or go to London and wind or buzz or we can say, yes, there's a trend here that we can be part of. We can be the facilitator given our origination capabilities, given our underlying financial plumbing capabilities, we can be the guys that are shepherding in this new world, making good money, improving returns dramatically while we do that. The wealth participation is clear. Asian Wealth, Chinese wealth in particular, is still a small proportion of global AUM, but it's growing very fast, and we're extremely well positioned for that. It's not just China, it's ASEAN, it's in India and the rest of South Asia. Of course, it's the Middle East, which is going to go through its own set of changes as we know. But we've matched that underlying growth trend with a set of products, capabilities, partnerships that are differentiated. And Judy and Ryan will talk about that, Jean, will talk about it in some detail. I don't want to get into too much on this other than to say we are 100% buying this trend and have been for a couple of decades, right? This 1 preceded me by quite a bit, but we're definitely into acceleration mode and full credit to the team for having done that. And sustainable finance and the transition economy, we've not seen a material slowdown in the pace of spend in sustainable infrastructure. That is actually going to increase now with the price of oil at $110 a barrel and the price of a PV cell pretty much unchanged. It's pretty obvious where the incremental power generating dollars are going to go. And by the way, those PV cells are local. They're not going through the Strait of Hormuz or anywhere else. So the underlying -- I think the underlying economics are very compelling, but the policy objectives are also clear in most parts of the world. In our markets, there's been no pulling back. In China, there's been no pulling back on sustainability investments. In India, South Asia, no pulling back. And we're capitalizing on that with the increasing income. So these measures here are their outcome measures. The -- we focus on the changing role of the banks that has the effect of reducing our NII as a percentage of income, increasing our non-NII as a percentage of income. Obviously, we're growing the non-NII because we're growing wealth. We're growing financial markets. We're growing our fees around our transaction banking services, the non-NII is growing, it's not growing as fast because we're optimizing returns. And increasingly, those RWAs are going into the nonbanking sector, where they probably belong. Network income reflects the fact that we've got a distinct position vis-a-vis our sophisticated cross-border clients. They turn to us. It grows faster, less capital intense generates higher returns. Financial institutions, same thing. We've always been a banker's bank. I mean the a correspondidg banking is, in a lot of ways, where Standard Chartered started 170 years ago. But we've expanded that sort of deep knowledge of, frankly, the most sophisticated treasury clients in the world are other banks. Two, the broad range of financial institutions, asset managers, sovereign wealth funds, financial sponsors, et cetera. And then obviously, affluent, we've just talked about. And all of these are significantly improving trends. Call them outputs. There are outputs, but they're coming on the back of very deliberate choices that we've made along the way. Our resilience is substantially improved. And I mean, from time to time. I'm not -- none of us are super big at like back patting ourselves we'll let you do that at the end of the session. The I mean, this is just like just a quick snapshot. We've improved our returns from 0 or negative to 12% on the way to 15% and 18%. We've done that with doubling our capital position over that period. We've done that while reducing our risk-weighted assets, dramatically improving the quality of our underlying loan book, which, of course, has led to the improvement in risk on -- return on risk-weighted assets. If I said that 10 years ago, we're going to significantly derisk the bank to grow income and dramatically improve returns and profits. You're going to say, "Well that's kind of stupid because that's not banking as we know it. But that's what the bank has done, not because we set out to do it. because we just kind of look and talk to clients every day and said, what do you need? And what are you going to pay us for? I mean we're quite mercantilist as well, what are you going to pay us for. And so we're not going to pay you for your money because it's undifferentiated. We are going to pay you for all these interesting products and services where you're somewhat unique. Of course, we invested heavily in those products and services. We invested with your money, for which I thank you. But we're getting a good return on those investments, and we're much more resilient than we are today. Now Manus will talk about this in some detail, but over the past several years, obviously, when we were going through the cleanup phase, the reposition we weren't paying dividends. We weren't buying back stock, and we were conserving capital to reposition the bank. We began -- the software is quite cheap in our estimation. We as we entertained shareholder returns, we focused on buybacks. We introduced a dividend a little bit later, still skewed to buybacks. We're now sitting with a stock price that's higher than it was. I won't say where it is relative to fair value. We think there's still tremendous value in our stock. We're very happy to buy that stock. We also want to make sure that the shareholders of ours that would like to have a steady dividend, see that we will pay out in excess of 30% of our profits and dividends, and that given our expectations for the company, would cause our dividend to continue to increase a progressive dividend strategy. When we think about what the balance is now going forward of what are we going to do with our capital, the substantial capital that we're -- a substantial and increasing capital that we're generating, we will continue to invest in our business first and foremost. We're getting a very good return on organic investment in each of the strategic areas in which we focus. We feel like we are fully investing in our strategic areas today, which is why we then turn to returning capital via buybacks or increasing dividend. At the current share price, we would see a rebalancing of the distributions between dividends and buybacks. So we'll talk about roughly 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 between organic buyback, dividend. But of course, we're going to look at that as a function of the investment opportunities, the share price relative to what we would consider to be fair value. And any changing expectations as it relates to dividends. As I said, Manus -- by the way, congratulations, Manus. Manus, he's been acting like the CFO for some time. So I mean, sometimes he acts like the CEO. We'll keep them in that box. But that's okay. But we couldn't be happier with the team. And congratulations to Tanuj, our Chief Operating Officer, who you're going to hear from shortly, and you'll see why. Tanuj is partnered up with Noelle during the session as our Chief Operating Officer. So congratulations to both of them. So productivity is a huge area of focus for us. It has been for some time. We've gone through different phases of focus on productivity, a lot of core infrastructure building in recent years. You've heard me and others talk about the massive investment that we made in financial crime compliance going back 10 or 15 years -- 12 years. We have very, very solid compliance infrastructure today. Of course, it always needs to be refreshed. Very substantial investments in cybersecurity. We feel like we're well positioned. There's 0 complacency at Standard Charter Bank about cybersecurity. Mythos, non Mythos, Codex55, anything. We've invested heavily in migrating our finance infrastructure from Oracle to a private cloud-based SAP platform for both finance and all of our HR applications. SAP considers us to be a poster child for large-scale migrations. You can hear that from them. But it reflects the focus and investment we made in the bank. We've migrated our data centers in the Eastern 2/3 of the world into a highly sophisticated private cloud. with geo resilience, i.e., Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, when the drones took out the AWS servers in Dubai, we were able -- I'm going to still want to have Newell's line to adjust your script, but we were able to migrate our entire data estate from Dubai to Singapore in hours. And it continues to be mutually backed up. We had no impact in Dubai, just to be clear, that was precautionary, but we're not on the AWS cloud there. But I mean this would have been impossible a year ago, much less 5 years ago. So we've made those core investments in infrastructure. Now we can build the super productive machines on top of that. And that's exactly what we'll do. You'll hear about that in the transformation session. the income employee income per employee increasing substantially is a result obviously of income growth, but also of a fundamentally different infrastructure, growing in its cost at a very different pace than has been the case in the past or then certainly relative to revenue. And that's delivering that step change in cost income ratio. We'll be digging in on this. Manus will -- Noelle and Tanuj will be digging in on this, plenty of opportunities. I just wanted to hit the high-level thematic. We're 100% focused on becoming a fundamentally more productive organization, and we've made the investments to do that. All of this is going to be enabled by AI. I can -- again, Noelle will speak in some detail about where we are in AI. I'm super proud of what our bank has done because we took the step back 2 years ago to build a core AI platform that's now hosting hundreds of models and use cases, tens of billions of tokens being processed on a very regular basis, done efficiently, safely and soundly right? So everybody stands up and gives a lot of BS, frankly, about AI. You'll probably get some best from us as well. But fundamentally, this is real, and we're using this. It's making a difference. I think we're extremely well positioned, both for defense and for offense. Now our transformation through the years has been powered by many, many episodes of innovation. This innovation has happened in SE Ventures, which we focused on specifically for a while, we were calling that out as a specific business line. A lot of the innovation is happening right in the core of the business. And given the core foundations that we built the innovation machine can accelerate from here, not decelerate. These are just a few of the debentures or other initiatives that we've undertaken, consistent with the 5 themes that we've talked about. I'll let you prove those. We have sessions that cover most of this. You can ask some questions about each of those we go through this. Just restating the financial targets you've already seen from your -- no doubt, your quick release this morning. In a way, I'm most excited about the high-teens CAGR for EPS. I think that's fundamentally, what should drive recognition of value in a growth company. And I think if we can deliver consistently as we have high teens growth in earnings per share through that combination of earnings growth and share count and management, I just think this is a fabulous growth opportunity, that it is our job to demonstrate to you why that's the case and why you want to buy these shares. But there's no hype in there. These are just the numbers. the 15%, 18% ROTE, we think, is a good benchmark. But fundamentally, what we want to do is deploy capital where we can get a great return, positive EVA and to do that increasingly. So as we get into the higher teens, ROTE, you probably focus a little bit less on ROTE and a lot more on EBA just to make this bank bigger and bigger and bigger because we've got a super, super franchise. But Tony is not about EVA. Manus didn't want me to say that at all. Once he's fully feet under the table as CFO, he's going to introduce an EBA framework, which he's going to take credit for, and I'm going to applaud him. With that, we're going to have -- you'll see over the course of the sessions, we've actually got 5 outside perspectives from experts or world-class characters that are related to the 5 themes that we've got. The first that we've got is Parag Khanna, he'll be known to many of you as an academic and geopolitical commentator talking about what this fragmentation means for all of us. There will be 4 others related to the other themes, interest first throughout the session. So thank you again for joining us. Thanks for listening to all of us, and please enjoy this video. [Presentation]

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Hong Kong I am delighted to say that I know most of you in the room already. But for those online who are less familiar, my name is Manus. And for the avoidance of doubt, I have not Manus the AI agent, which appears to have appropriated my unusual Irish name and nor has Meta tried to invest $2 billion in recently. I am, in fact, the Head of Investor Relations at Standard Chartered and for the last 24 hours, the interim CFO. I joined the bank a couple of years ago. and I have been looking at the bank for a very long time because I was a sell-side analyst previously. And so I have seen Standard Chartered through many different cycles. And I can genuinely say that this is an extremely exciting time to be taking on this role. It's exciting because of the foundations that we have built. Those are foundations in terms of client relationships, foundations in terms of our core technology and foundations in terms of our strategy. And it is because of the strength of those foundations, that we are now ready to enter into a phase of acceleration against the backdrop of those trends that Bill has talked about. But before we get into the future, let's just look a little bit about those 3 phases that Bill talked about already: reposition, execute and compound. Back in 2015, the bank had to go through a significant period of repositioning and restructuring as it removed a number of high-risk assets from the balance sheet. And that meant that for a period of time, both income and costs were broadly flat. By 2019, the bank was ready to grow again and to distribute capital again. In fact, we'd initiated a share buyback at that time. But of course, just as we got going, COVID hit, which slowed our momentum, in particular, had an impact on net interest income. Coming out of COVID, growth has accelerated. But the important thing to understand is that, that acceleration in growth has not just been because markets have been conducive. It's been the direct result of the foundations that we have put in place over time. And we are now poised to continue that and to compound that growth going forward. Let's look at the last couple of years in a bit more detail. Back in February 24, we laid out a 3-year plan, and I'm delighted to say that we're able to deliver on that 3-year plan in 2 years. We managed to deliver revenue growth of 16%, which exceeded our 3-year growth targets within 2 years. We delivered positive income to cost jaws over that time frame. We delivered an underlying return on tangible equity of 14.7%, which well exceeded the 13% we were targeting and which itself had already been upgraded, and we were able to distribute capital. But not only did we do well, we did well relative to peers, we think as well. We showed the best RoTE improvement amongst our peers over that time frame. We showed the strongest income growth, and we had exceptional EPS growth and TNAV per share growth as well. Those latter 2 were powered by a 15% reduction in our share count over that period, and that was enabled by the over $9 billion of capital distributions that we've announced since February 24. That $9 billion, just to take a pause on it, represented 45% of the market capitalization of the bank when we announced it. But I know you know these numbers already. There's also an awful lot that's been going on beneath the surface during the course of that last couple of years. We have fundamentally been engaged in the transformation of the core of our bank, and you will hear more about that through the course of today. We have changed our organizational design and made our processes significantly simpler across the bank. And I think, I hope we now present the bank to you in a way which is easier for you to understand. And on a reported basis, more accurately represents the banks that you own our shareholders. So let's look at the financial targets. Bill has already mentioned, the ROTE and the EPS targets. I'm going to spend time talking to you about the building blocks to get there. First of all, we will deliver a CAGR in our income of 5% to 7%. That will be driven both by the macro trends, but also importantly, by the investments that we've made to take advantage of those trends. We will deliver a cost-to-income ratio of 57% in 2028. That is down from 63% last year. We continue to expect our loan loss rate through the cycle to be 30 to 35 basis points, and we will operate across our CET1 ratio range of 13% to 14%. And lastly, we will deliver a dividend payout ratio of at least 30%, which will lead to a progressive dividend per share over the course of the plan. Combined, those are the factors which are going to take us to a greater than 15% rate in '28 and to a high-teens EPS CAGR over the course of that period. So how does that look in terms of our RoTE walk? Well, I've given you 2 separate ways to think about the RoTE walk here. The first is a more simple P&L view. But simply, we're going to grow revenues more quickly than we grow our expenses. And that's because we believe we have powerful top line trends, and we are investing to ensure that we can scale our revenues at lower marginal cost. A topic will come back to frequently. This will be offset by an assumption that there will be some normalization of impairment if our impairment moves back to the 30 to 35 basis point range, which we see is through the cycle. We delivered 19 basis points of impairment last year. For the avoidance of doubt, we're not seeing any new risks on the balance sheet at the moment, but 30 to 35 basis points is the assumption for planning purposes. And we will see a small uplift from operating dynamically across the CET1 ratio range. But I think more interesting, and then I'm going to spend more time on is the second part of this throw because really what drives this ROTE improvement is a mix shift in our business. We are going to continue to see our WRB business, our retail business, move towards the affluent space and our CIB business will continue to see its growth being driven by the network and by financial institutions, clients. And combined, those 2 factors will drive an uplift in RoTE of almost 400 basis points over the course of this period. So let's take a look at that mix shift in a bit more detail. You know about our CIB WRB businesses because we've had investor seminars on them over the course of the last 18 months. In CIB, we are expecting our revenues to move from 54% financial institutions to 60% over the medium term. Our network income will move from about 2/3 of income to 70% of income by 28%. And in WIB, our affluent business will move from 70% to 75% between last year and 2028. Those are the mix shifts we're seeing, and they have a number of important impacts, which will drive our returns higher going forward. Firstly, moving into these businesses means we are moving into businesses which are higher income return on risk-weighted assets. So within CIB, our network income and our financial institution FI business are both about 200 basis points higher in terms of income ROA than the domestic business and the corporate business, respectively. And within our affluent business is much higher return on risk-weighted assets than our nonaffluent business. But this is about more than just a more efficient use of capital from that mix shift. Moving ourselves into those customer segments also allows us to move into much better areas of growth, which really tap into the areas that Bill has talked about already and which you will hear plenty about during the course of today. We also think that by moving into those areas, the customers that we serve will be stickier and they'll be stickier because they tend to bank with us across different geographies and because they take multiple products from us. So it's a higher growth, stickier customer base that we're moving into. And the great thing is we have already invested in the platforms, which are allowing us to deliver that growth. So we expect to see strong operating leverage by focusing on those customer segments, which we know well. And lastly, we think that, that mix shift will lead us to a lower risk profile as a bank overall, which I'll come back to discuss in more detail later, and we think it will drive higher connectivity between our affluent client base and CIB. It's not just about a revenue mix shift though. There is also a shift that we expect in the balance sheet as a result of our business moving. But simply, we are seeing an increasing surplus in our WRB business as it generates cheaper liabilities. The cheapest form of funding we have comes from WRB, or cast liabilities in WRB. And we are continuing to generate a surplus of liabilities, i.e., there's more deposits than ways to deploy them at the moment. in WRB. And within CIB, our lower cost, higher quality deposits in our CASA based there, the operating accounts are also continuing to grow very effectively. What that means is 2 things. First of all, of course, it means a lower cost of funding going forward. But secondly, by having those high-quality liabilities, we have options for deployment of those liabilities into different areas of the balance sheet, be that into the banking book or into the trading book. Now that means that the treasury portion of our balance sheet, which has already fallen in recent years is likely to continue to fall. And that's important because we estimate that going forward, it will generate about a 50 basis point uplift to our OT through the course of the plan. Now that 50 basis points, to be clear, is already embedded in the relative walks that I've given you, so it's not incremental. But I thought it was very important to highlight it to you because it is very fundamental to what we are doing as an institution. It's something that we've seen over recent years. It's something that we think is durable and will continue over the course of this plan. And we think it will carry on for the future, driving the synergies between our WRB business and our CIB business on the balance sheet as well as operation. Let's look at the revenues in a bit more detail. We've grown revenues by 16%, as I said, over the last couple of years. And that's despite NII headwinds because of the rate environment. Rates have really affected the blue bits of this chart. So our transaction services business has seen good growth in operating accounts and good growth in fee income, but it's had NIM headwinds, which means it's gone backwards for the last couple of years in revenue terms. Similarly, our deposit and mortgage business within WRB has been broadly flat, largely as a result of net interest margin headwinds. The real drivers of growth have been coming from what we call our engines of noninterest income growth. Our Global Banking business, which has grown at 13% compound adjusting for our aviation finance business, our Global Markets business, which has grown at 12% compound and our Wealth Solutions business, which has grown at a fantastic 26% compound. And together, those noninterest income engines have meant that we have managed to grow our noninterest income by a 13% compound rate over the course of the last couple of years. And that is what we expect to continue going forward. So we are expecting growth of 5% to 7% compound over the next 3 years. Within that, we think that noninterest income will continue to grow faster than net interest income. We already generate 47% of our income from noninterest income, which is higher than peers. And because of that momentum that we're seeing, we expect that to move to north of 50% by 2028, well higher than peers. It is a unique feature of Standard Chartered that we are able to continue that growth and something which we think is critical to the future for the bank. For the avoidance of doubt, we're not changing our net interest income guidance for 2026. We continue to expect 2026 NII to be broadly flat on 2025, but we do expect some modest growth in net interest income thereafter. Now turning to expenses. We've talked a lot about revenues, but we know that we have structural inefficiencies in the bank, which we need to address. We have invested including through FFG, in efficiency programs, which have allowed us to keep our back office costs broadly flat over the course of the last couple of years. We know that we now need to ensure that we can deliver improved efficiency for you going forward without asking for any additional large below-the-line charges, and that is the commitment that we're going to make for you today. We know that our operations and functions continue to benchmark somewhat less efficient than peers. And you're going to hear later today from Noelle and Tanuj about all the efforts that we are making to ensure that our bank becomes simpler, more connected and faster to drive better efficiency going forward, because the outcome for you as shareholders is clear. We are going to move from a cost income ratio of 63% to 57% over the course of this plan, and we will deliver positive income to cost jaws in each year during the course of the plan. We will also ensure that the revenue productivity of our employee base continues to improve. And that will be enabled partly through a rationalization of our operations. We are a bank that is investing to grow. We have tremendous opportunities, and we will continue to invest to grow. But I know that there are still efficiencies -- inefficiencies in this organization, which we need to address. Our challenge now is to move to a process of continuous improvement to ensure that not only do we grow the top line each year, but that we also improve efficiency and returns each year. And that is what we're aiming to deliver. Let me be clear. We know and we are committed to ensure that the top line growth that the bank is going to deliver over the next few years will deliver the maximum possible profitability for shareholders. Let's look a bit at risk now. I talked before about how the business model is moving us into lower-risk customer segments. And I think that is really fundamental to what we're doing. This is not just about taking individual underwriting decisions differently. This is about an entire shift in the way that we think about the business. But let's look at it in numbers, first of all. So within our CIB business, you probably know already that the investment-grade proportion of our exposures has moved from 42% to 74% and over the course of the last decade. And even in more recent years, if we look at the probability of default, within our corporate book. It's continued to fall -- this is based on Pillar II data. It's continued to fall quite sharply in recent years, and we think it now benchmarks very well versus peers, and we're very pleased with that. within WIB, we have been moving to focus on affluent clients for some time, and that has enabled us to exit certain single product unsecured relationships with customers, which means that the proportion of unsecured balances on the WRB balance sheet have moved from 19% to 12%, a 7 percentage point drop over the course of the last decade. So again, moving us to a lower risk place. Now having said that, the world is an uncertain place, and we are very happy to continue to guide to an expected through-the-cycle loan loss rate of 30 to 35 basis points. But we fundamentally believe that the mix shift that I talked about previously will not only drive better income to return on risk-weighted assets, but will also drive us into a lower-risk business model that is enduring. Let's talk about the balance sheet and capital. We have maintained a very strong balance sheet over the course of the last decade, and we certainly intend to maintain that position going forward. We have a CET1 ratio target range of 13% to 14%, and we've tended to operate if you look back at the last 7 years at the upper end or even above that range. Indeed, at Q1 2026, we had a CET1 ratio of 13.4%. And that gives you an indication of where we expect to operate going forward. We will now operate dynamically across the range such that on average, you should assume we'll be at the midpoint of the range. We are a very capital-generative bank and we have generated more than 330 basis points of capital since 2023. And if you look at the uses of that capital in the last couple of years, we've retained about 25% and distributed about 3/4 of that capital to shareholders via dividends and share buybacks. Going forward, we expect to generate more capital because we're going to be a more profitable institution. And very broadly speaking, you should assume that the uses of that capital will be about 1/3 for RWA growth 1/3 for dividends and 1/3 will be available capital, including for buybacks. Let's look at that framework in a little bit more detail. Our first use of capital, as Bill mentioned, will be to support our business growth. We expect to grow the top line, as I said, between 5% and 7%. And we expect our average risk-weighted assets to grow less than that. In other words, we are expecting our income return on risk-weighted assets to improve over the course of the plan. Secondly, as I've mentioned, we will deliver a dividend payout ratio of at least 30% with a progressive dividend per share. We believe after those to uses of capital, we will continue to have significant available capital for us. The first and most likely use of that capital will be for share buybacks because as Bill said, we continue to think that our shares represent exceptional value at these levels. However, we need to be aware as well that we operate in markets which offer us growth opportunities which we think many of our peer set do not have. And therefore, if we are able to find opportunities to deploy our capital in a way which both drives income growth above that 5% to 7% expectation and meets our income return on risk-weighted asset hurdles, we will consider that as an option. Lastly, we will continue to consider inorganic growth opportunities, but these will always be in line with our strategy. And for the avoidance of any doubt, there is nothing included in the plan for inorganic growth and we don't have anything that we are planning at the moment, and there's nothing on the table for that. The guiding principle of our capital allocation is actually relatively straightforward. We will allocate capital in order to drive the maximum economic value for our shareholders. So let me summarize what we have been saying, both Bill and I, during the course of today. We're going to deliver a ROTE in 2028 of over 15%. What's going to take us from that 12% level we did last year, up to 15% is income growth driven by some structural trends supplemented by the investments that we've made in core areas. We are shifting our business mix into areas which enable us to access that growth and deliver higher returns at the same time. Because of the work that we have done on transforming the core of the bank and will continue to do. We're going to be able to scale at a lower marginal cost. So we will see strong operating leverage during the course of the plan. We will maintain tight discipline on risk we will maintain a strong balance sheet. And of course, we will continue to distribute excess capital to shareholders. All of those factors can take us from 12% to north of 15% in 2028. But importantly, all of those factors continue past 2028, and it is exactly the continuation of those factors that we have enormous confidence in and which will take us to an 18% RoTE in 2030. We've repositioned the bank. We've been executing very strongly against the plan, and we're now excited to be entering into a phase of compounding growth. Thank you. With that, Ben and I are happy to take some of your questions.

Let's get ready. Just a reminder that if you're asking a question, please wait for the microphone to come to you and speak really clearly so that everyone on the webcast can hear what you're saying. Thank you.

Jason Napier from UBS. Thank you for having us here in Hong Kong. First of all, to Manus, and on behalf of the sell side, congratulations. There's certainly hope for us. Manus, the first question for you on the capital allocation piece that you were just describing RWA growth is going to be a big focus, right? So you've mentioned that about 1/3 of capital generation goes to grout then in the third but you also got RWA growth. And a lot of the income growth is balance sheet light. So you can be a little bit more precise about what do you think maybe your footprint demands or some other way to add color on RWA outlook? And then, Bill, for you, please. Like really clear sort of analytical framework for the way you think the world is moving. I use words like inevitable and inexorable. Could you talk about what that means for the balance between income growth and cost growth. You want to be ahead of everything. You want to be in the right places and invest it appropriately. How do you balance those sort of factors in the delivery of jaws over the next 3 years and indeed, over the next 2?

Yes. Let me start with the second question, and then I make a little bit of a tee-up question on the RWA comment. And I know you directed that one to Manus appropriately. Yes, we do have a -- I mean, analytical framework sounds a bit rigid, but I think we identified -- I mean we're going back years, some underlying trends. And we have been investing in that. We also understood, and you'll hear a lot about this for Noelle and Tanuj so we needed to new need to invest in our underlying infrastructure. If you're trying to optimize ROTE in the coming year, those aren't investments that you make, right? But we have. And there certainly during that repositioning period when income was flattish and costs were flattish, both down 1% per Manus' side. The -- we definitely could have cut costs faster at the expense of the future. And we definitely could have flattered income by not exiting those suboptimal RWAs which would have had the unfortunate effect of not having that nice upward sloping ROTE line over that period. So we -- maybe out of naivety, maybe out of confidence, maybe just because it's the right thing to do, we've been investing in the future all the way through. We're not going to stop now. Now we've got a more balanced payoff. The things that we've been investing in are paying off. So it gets to a 12% underlying 1.9 ROTE on the way to '15 and '18. Obviously, a chunk of that also reflects stepped-up investment in Fit for Growth and other things. The -- but we're not going to stop investing in the future. We are going to see an increasing amount of the fruits of our earlier labor flow to improving ROTE and EVA. So which then takes me just very quickly to RWAs. The our RWAs have decreased significantly, but our balance sheet is more or less the same, my intensity has decreased. So we're finding some very attractive ways to use our balance sheet in a higher returning way. What we've always been focused on is returns. So optimized returns. Of course, we have an eye to client franchise and having gone through these RWA optimization efforts and other banks. I mean several of them, they're all called JPMorgan, but we kept on going through the same thing with different owners. The -- you can go too fast. You can also go to slow. And then you can get it just right. And only time will tell whether we got it just right, but it feels pretty good to us in terms of pacing. A little bit slower than 1 might have liked, might explain why our share price went no place for the better part of 5 years. But we're definitely ending up in a good place. And as the saying goes all as well that ends well. Now the word on Manus.

Yes, it's not ended, though, it's just beginning. So Jason, on the capital allocation framework, just to clarify, we're expecting 5% to 7% revenue growth. And what I was saying on stage was that our RWA growth within our base case, we'll be below that 5% to 7%. That's what will drive the improvement in return on risk-weighted assets. I was also saying that over the course of this time frame, it is possible that there will be opportunities to deploy capital, which will take us above that 5% to 7%. And if it can take us above that 5% to 7%, and if it meets our income return on risk-weighted asset hurdles, we will consider it. But just for the avoidance of doubt, that gray bar that you saw the available capital, our planning assumption is that, that will be delivered back by share buybacks. That's what we built into the model. We are not assuming any incremental RWA growth. We are simply retaining the ability to commit to that RWA growth if it is EVA generative and if it is the right thing to do for shareholders.

This is Kunpeng, China Securities. Congratulations for this very strong guidance, and thank you so much for the very nice presentation just now. I also have 2 questions but first for Manus, and I'm so happy to see the exact numbers of the royalty contribution from the 2 core businesses, CIB and WRB. But can you give us a little bit more color the exact product categories or income categories of this royalty contributions of these 2 businesses. And second is for Bill because this question is a bit rough, so I put in the second. So as we have the guidance until 2030. So does this mean you're going to stay with us for the next 4.5 years?

Let's go Manus first of and Ill think about that. I'll think about that second question because it hadn't occurred to me that, that might come up. Okay.

So thank you, Kunpeng, for the question. So look, we don't give ROTE by product. I know some of you have asked about in the past. It is complex to give it by product because the reality is that we look at our RoTE on a client basis and on a full relationship basis. So looking by product is not right. Hopefully, what you'll be able to take away from the presentation is that if you look at our CIB business, it's like the rest of the group, we'll see it's growth driven more likely by the engines of noninterest income. So we would expect the banking business the markets business to continue to grow more quickly. You've seen the good growth there. We think that will continue. And of course, within WRB, we expect to see our wealth business continue to grow at a double-digit rate as you'll hear from Judy a bit later on. But those are the trends that both underlie the group. They underline the improvement in RoTE within those divisions and then what we're comfortable in going forward. I would just caveat that because I'm now a CFO and I need to caveat things, but it is based on the current interest rate outlook. So we're using current cures for that, of course, that could vary.

To your second question, Kunpeng. The -- am I going to be around to deliver this plan. Let me say what I'm going to do for sure. None of us can control perfectly our destiny from day to day. The number 1 is we're going to take the team that you're going to see today and on Thursday that you're seeing from time to time, and continue to strengthen that as a team. I think where we are -- now this is obviously my personal opinion, but where we are right now, especially with the addition of Manus as a CFO, it's the best team that I've had the pleasure of working with in Standard Chartered. I'm not saying that everyone is better than somebody else. I'm saying that as a team, it's exceptionally capable. And this team to different degrees has been driving the improvement that we've had. I want to really lock that down. Second is the delivery of this strategy. So there's no major step change in the strategy that we're laying out in these 3 days. What we're doing is taking a step back and saying the direction of travel that we've been undertaking a join will carry on, but with the need for very, very significant ongoing modifications, in particular, is the state of the world changes, those external conditions. And we think the strategy is quite clear. It's working for us, really want to bed this down and make sure that we're in an excellent position to deliver that 18% in 2030. I can tell you, in 2030, if we're generating 18%, I'm not going to be doing high fives with the team. I don't think that, that's the potential of this back. But I'm not allowed to say that because the slide says 18% by around 18% by 2030. But I mean, this potential of this bank is far greater. I want to do everything that I can to make sure we land that. And we have, obviously, new members of the team, not least manage that I want to make sure are completely bedded down. The final thing is I would really like when it's time for me to hang up the spurs or get my spurs hung up, but the next CEO comes from inside Standard Chartered. That's -- I would -- I can't control that. It won't be my choice. All I can do is prepare the team to the greatest extent possible, giving people the best opportunities. I think we have that talent inside our bank. The Board will always, when they come to that review the external marketplace as we did for CFO, which is why we only announced this yesterday, whatever we might have thought the outcome was likely to be. But the -- I'm not taking anything away from what I think the Board will do. But that -- those are my objectives. Now can I get that done in 6 months? Definitely not. Do I need 10 years? Definitely not. Some place in between.

Chris Hallam from Goldman Sachs. It feels just 1 question. It feels as though perhaps the core message so far is you're sort of in this event asking shareholders to entrust you with a license to redeploy additional capital into some growth opportunities as and when they may become available as suppose you kind of saw that a little bit already in Q1. And that would naturally cause a pivot in the way that the capital is distributed versus investors. With that in mind, it sort of begs the question, how big is the growth runway you can see? And perhaps more importantly, as you get to 2030, you've got the 18% target. When does that become a question of what you could do versus what you should do because you, the leadership team and the Board need to think about do we keep going and try and maximizing returns? Or is there broadly on the product suite? Is there EVA opportunities that maybe 17.5%, not 20%. So where do you try and balance that RET maximization versus what's right for the year or what if the business comes from this?

No, it's an excellent question. And it's definitely the framework that we're considering. We're already making ROTE versus EVA trade-off decisions, right? I mean we've got a wealth business with a super strong ROE it could go further and further. If the -- if there are -- and Judy will talk about this, if there are opportunities to deploy capital around that opportunity. to generate meaningful EVA that may not take the ROTE from 35% to 45%. That's still good for shareholders. So the mindset is already there in terms of the incremental decisions that we're taking. I think you're asking, at what point does that sort of flip the center focus for the entire group. We'll get there, right? And we'll be watching that very carefully. I think we've executed in a very disciplined way, and we will continue to excel and a very -- execute in a very disciplined way. But Manus?

I -- the driving focus will continue to be to grow income in excess of risk-weighted assets. So let's not take away from that as a very important focus we want to look forward to. I would just add to Bill's comment, you mentioned Q1. I think the point about Q1 demonstrates that quite nicely. We grew income year-over-year significantly faster than we grew RWAs year-over-year. So all we're saying is that we see tremendous opportunities within our footprint to generate very strong value, and we have opportunities to deploy our capital to do that. And we will do that in service of delivering that 15% -- greater than 15% royalty, driving up towards 18%. And I look forward to the debate about at what point we should stop and maximize on EVA, but we've got to way to go.

Yes, we do. I want to get back to -- when we talk about growth, we inevitably are first drawn to income growth. and the areas of profitable income growth. One of the great enablers of our growth is going to be what we have done and are doing on the infrastructure side. And you will obviously talk about that in the context of transformation. But the opportunity for us to take these really, really solid foundations. You're going to have to form your own view is just how solid they are. We think they're exceptionally solid at this point and to be able to deploy capital, deploy resources quickly and with super normal profits by virtue of the underlying infrastructure that we built. I mean you work at Goldman Sachs. You have a reputation as a firm for having done that for a long time. I won't say that, that's a role model. I don't think we're that far away from being recognized as a player that can deliver a best-in-class infrastructure that allows very aggressive tactical reallocation of business lines and capital. you'll form your own views of how close we are to that. But we feel pretty good. And that's at the thrust at the heart of what Noel and Tanuj will be talking about. And that will absolutely enable growth in ways that we couldn't have imagined growing years ago or maybe even 3 years ago. Let's go to the back. I can't see the faces all the way, but.

Ed and James at the back.

Why don't we start.

Great. It's Ed Firth from KBW. I suppose 1 area I was very interested in hearing about was the financial institutions and sort nonbank-funded institutions, and that seems to be a very big area of growth for you and emphasis. It's also an area where I think a number of regulators have expressed concerns and I guess, there've been a number of market concerns about what's going on in some of those areas. So I just wondered if you could give us a little more color about what exact areas of growth you're seeing and what sort of competitive advantages you see that you have and perhaps how you're navigating some of the risks that do seem to be out there?

That's great. Thanks for that question. And Roberto will be talking about that in some detail when we get to the CIB section. But the nonbank financial institutions is a pretty broad sway of activity. So I think maybe at the beginning of your question, you probably had private credit in mind, and that's -- obviously, it's been a lot in the press. We think and have thought for some time that the extension of credit from things other than bank balance sheets was absolutely inevitable. It happened in the U.S. for decades. Now it's happening in a slightly accelerated way. and it happened more recently post the natural crisis in Europe and Asia. But it's happening for good reasons, and we are leaning into it. but we're also leaning into it very cautiously. I mean, Jason, our Chief Risk Officer, is here, who will be available to answer these questions if you want to get an offline perspective as well. But the -- we don't have a big proportion of our loan book to private credit companies. We don't provide a lot of back leverage to private credit portfolios. We do a bit of each. We do some subscription line to underlying funds. Mostly what we do with the private credit companies is we originate credit and sell it to them. And sometimes, we sell it's clean as in the way we bought it, sometimes it gets restructured or slice or dice in some way. But the that we do that because they've got a lower cost of capital than we do in some areas or they're just a better bid for some other reason. That is something that I think is an extra role. So we've seen the mood music change in regulation. The U.S., obviously, has gone from seeking to add a material amount of capital to U.S. bank requirements, but kind of back down to where they started. They haven't gone backwards. The U.K. and Europe have also stopped advancing the capital engine as it were, but they haven't gone backwards. I don't think we're going to see big releases of capital by regulation. And I don't think we're going to see a big increase in cost of capital from the nonbanks on the back of the credit cycle. They may converge a little bit, but it just makes sense for credit to reside in the hands of people that aren't carrying a lot of leverage and that aren't undertaking a lot of maturity transformation. And that's not a bad thing as long as we can continue to originate credit and distribute it. Insurance companies are kind of the same thing, but obviously under a different regulatory umbrella. But insurance companies have reasonably complex operational requirements, and we are, amongst many other things, an operational bank. So we have very deep relationships with institutional asset managers represented by many of the people in the room, insurance companies, pension funds directly. Sovereign wealth funds globally who need us for operational reasons. They need us for acquisition of assets. They need us for managing of risk associated with their portfolios in the markets where we operate. we needed to build quite a strong service infrastructure around those nonbank institutions. We were very poor 14 years ago. I've mentioned in this kind of grouping before, 1 of the very large asset managers of the world, it was happened under the principles quite well. I said to me on my first day in standard charter in the first few days. We rank our broker dealers, you're 17 out of 17 and frankly, you're only in the list of backings because we have to deal with you because of the markets where you operate. Otherwise, we wouldn't be talking to you at all. That's very helpful. What do we need to do to get into your top 3 or 5, excluding equity trading, which we don't do. You're going to have to handle the inclusion of multiple funds for a particular trading strategy. You're going to have to cover the markets where we operate. You're going to have the an account opening and compliance regime that isn't -- that doesn't incur massive amounts of brain cell lossage every time we talk to you, et cetera. And we invested very deliberately for years after that. And we're now top 1, 2, 3 always in the markets where we operate in top 3, 4, 5 in G10 ex equity trading through operational improvement and then the hard work and personal relationships developed by our relationship managers. But none of that came easy, but it was very deliberate. And -- but where did it start? We heard from customers what they wanted us to do and then we did it. Not different than what you'll hear from Judy. I'm not changing the subject, but the customer improvement -- the customer satisfaction improvements. In wealth management, during Judy and Ben's and Mary's time running that function, have gone from bottom quartile to number one. It didn't happen because we had better products. It happened because we invested in customer service and customer satisfaction. So for nonbanks, being relevant, understanding what they want, originating product for them, providing the ancillary services that come along with that and then continuing to grow.

It's Joe Dickerson from Jefferies. I that it was very interesting, the point you made on the efficiencies that come from the liability serves. So this is the first question. What deposit growth have you assumed over plan, roughly in line with the income growth because there's clearly a very favorable trend coming from the mainland, particularly this year in terms of deposit maturities which could make their way south of the quarter. So what's the deposit growth there? And could there be any scope to augment the 50 basis points? And then I'm sure this will come up in another session, but you mentioned in the release today the migration of some of the WRB clients into MOX. What is across the franchise in WRB. What is the opportunity for lack of a better work push clients or transition with them into digital banking, is there a broader opportunity of borrowing income here for the bank?

Quickly, Judy is going to cover the second question very directly in her comments, so I'll save that for her but, you've seen a changing composition of our retail business. Obviously, the 70% up to 75% of income coming from athlete, but you've seen a very aggressive reshaping of our mass market portfolio. including the investments in the digital banks, but also the divestitures of a number of the mass market businesses across, in particular, our smaller markets, which is ongoing as we speak. And the migration of individual, you've also seen asset dispositions of unsecured loan books or asset pools in India, Korea, et cetera. And we'll continue to optimize there. But then in Hong Kong and Singapore, you're seeing a migration of unsecured assets into the digital banks, lower cost to serve surplus deposits in those entities that can deploy effectively into those asset bases. This is all in the spirit of ongoing optimization, but also recognizing that in some very important markets like Hong Kong, Mass market banking is very profitable, and its own right, we have a good position, and we want to make sure that we grow that. But again, I don't want to take too much away from a duty saying. But that's sort of it leads into the deposit cut.

Yes. You'll note, Joe, that we haven't put out loan growth targets or deposit growth targets for a reason because we see those as outputs rather than inputs to what we're going to achieve as we seek to move our business to improve return on risk-weighted assets going forward. Your assumption about what underlies the plan will be broadly correct. And within that, you should assume, as I was implying on the slide, that our WRB base will grow somewhat faster than our CIB deposit base. But actually, on that side, it may be worth just asking our Treasurer, Dan, who is here, Dan Hodge, if you want to say a couple of words about future expectations on how you think that will impact returns.

Yes, absolutely. Thanks very much for the question. No, I mean I completely agree with that. We're not sort of giving overall sort of targets for growth in the funded balance sheet, but it's very much a sort of the mix improvement. And so -- what we're saying is that the 50 basis points is coming from 2 areas. Firstly, the weighted average cost of funding of our liabilities is going to default. And that's because we're actually growing all sources of funding that getting impression we're sort of starting to shrink to the corporate cash flow wholesale. We're growing them all, but we're growing the sort of cheaper stable retail funding at a faster rate than the other sources of funding, so you get that mix enhancement. And because you're growing sort of the more stable deposits at a faster rate, you mean you actually need to hold less liquidity per dollar of funded balance sheet. And obviously, so the average treasury is going to yield a lower spread and that will lower sort of NIM than the average commercial assets. So there's a combination of those things together that generates 50. Can we do more than 50. Obviously, we'd like to and we constantly seek to try and optimize the cancer and so the volume and the mix of our funding and what we do with our funding across our various legal entities.

It's Andrew Coombs from Citi. I'd just like to come back to capital allocation. Slide 5 your uses of capital over the last 2 years versus the indicative using capital going forward. It is quite a marked step change. You're obviously very heavily weighted towards buybacks. You're now talking about this mix. So just in terms of the RWA development from here, is it because you think you've already transitioned to a more capital-light and efficient model and there's less to do on RWA takeout? Or is it because you see more opportunistic ways to deploy RWAs going forward? I'm just trying to think the gross part RWA equation. And then the second part to it I appreciate there's nothing inorganic in the plan. But at the same time, I think this is the first 1, I remember you explicitly calling out in the slides as a potential. So can you just talk about how hard where you obvious gaps in the franchise, et cetera, et cetera?

Let me start and Manus will definitely fill in. The -- I mean we had $80 billion of suboptimal RWAs when we started this, we're down into the -- depending on how you look at it at the 9% to 19% range. Some of that is just stable. I mean there's always going to be an in and out of clients that haven't generated strong returns over the past 3 years, but that we are continue -- we are happy to continue to invest in. So we can definitely squeeze a bit more out of the low-returning RWAs. But that's just a matter of hygiene and ongoing discipline. I think it's very well embedded. Roberto will talk about that. There's not a huge opportunity to expunge big chunks of RWAs in the ordinary course. Obviously, we could divest things and then some of the mass market retail divestitures are expanding some RWAs, they're not low returning. They're high returning, and we're getting paid a premium for those assets as it happens. So that's not really the point. The opportunities to deploy assets are quite interesting. Now right now, obviously, we've had some mini wobbles in the market on the back of some of the private credit noise and the couple of frauds that have caused spreads to increase a bit this spreads are still quite tight. So the deployment opportunities are likely to be episodic and idiosyncratic. But we've got the capital to deploy there if we want, which is why we give ourselves some breathing room. We're only going to deploy capital into RWAs if we're getting a good return. There's nothing that we have to do. So those are just opportunities, and that's why Manus refers to available capital being deployable into a number of things, including RWA growth, if we can generate accretive returns. In terms of the inorganic, I think we went to the great lines, of course, everybody would want to know exactly what the criteria are. Kind of we'll know it when we see it. But we know that the bar for strategic relevance is very high. We spent a lot of time focusing our bank into things where we see core competitive advantages, highly unlikely to deploy capital into something that isn't directly related to 1 of those core and tried and tested competitive advantages. And we further said that we are very happy to buy back shares at anything like this price because we see -- we've guided you to an 18% return on tangible equity from 11.9%, and we think that the market is pricing in something a lot closer to 11.9% than 18%. So that's kind of simple observation. We would love to own more and more of our shares. Something inorganic would have to exceed the financial returns and be strategically relevant. If we had something in mind, we could talk about it, we don't. So it's -- beyond that, it becomes hypothetical.

And then maybe the first time you've seen it on the slide, Andy, but it's not the first time that we've said it, it's a statement of what we've been saying previously. So there's no change in our position just because it's on a slide. I don't assume there's any change. in direct answer to your question on RWAs, I think it's both really. It is because, as Bill said, we've been very successful in driving down the level of suboptimal RWAs that we've got on the bank balance sheet. We still have more to do. We'll always have some suboptimal, but we will continue to work on that. But that pool of suboptimal is somewhat lower. And it's because we are more confident in the outlook, we are more confident on being able to see ways to deploy our capital. But just to be clear, again, deploying capital is not the objective. The objective is to maximize growth and returns. We will use the capital to do that in any way that we can. But we have regular conversations at a client level, at a business level than at a bank level about how we can make ourselves more efficient, both in our new business and in our existing business. So deploying capital is not an end on its own. The end is driving the business forward in the maximum value generating way possible.

Yes. Sixth on the front row.

It's Guy Stebbings from BNP Paribas. Another question on capital, but this time on the CET1 target, which you kept with 13 to 14, which I guess is expected. We talked about more operating perhaps in the middle of that range on average rather than slightly [indiscernible] it. I guess the context here is some U.S. banks have obviously seen a reduction, the bank ongoing talk about changes, but without necessarily moving things materially at the stage in terms of the real core requirements. I guess I'm thinking out to 2030 and how much we think about target is very much it's going to stay there or whether it was sort of considered that you might to more or whether there's much you would need to see from the regulator before that target could be shifted down side?

We actually have a fair amount of capacity above our regulatory minimum. So we have quite a large buffer. That's part of what gave us comfort going -- being more actively dynamic throughout the 13% to 14% range. We just reset that that's the verbiage around our capital range. So we're unlikely to change that anytime soon. but we are perfectly comfortable as we've already demonstrated, going down into the bottom half of the range. It's not because the world is a perfectly wonderful and PCL place, plenty of scenarios that we could worry about. But we think that we built in a resilience in our business that allows us to be just much more dynamic than we have been. It would be interesting as we go out to 2030, and we imagine the kind of capital generation around an 18% return on tangible equity and the business mix shift that would -- that we've indicated quite clearly in my and Manus' comments, and it will be very clear through the subsequent presentations. That structural business mix shift also makes the bank much more resilient. Manus made the point about the lower risk profile of the bank. A more resilient bigger profitability buffer and different mix shift, higher quality and mix shift business may very well allow a structurally lower level of capital to be run. It's not in our models. It's not something that we're guiding to. But it's -- when we're thinking about upside from here, that's certainly 1 source of upside in terms of incremental capital returns. It just comes from the fact that we've built a more resilient, we will have built a more resilient business.

But it's not -- just to clarify, the assumption out to 2030 is the midpoint of the range. We continue to have that within our model.

That's what I tried to say.

Just clarifying.

But good to clarify.

We will be around, obviously. So please, if you don't get a question now.

I'll just break through as well. We'll go Kian and then Perlie and then...

One is on cost. You clearly outlined some further opportunity on costs. I'm just trying to see if you can unpack cost a little bit more in terms of how you think about cost inflation, hiring and the offsets around that? And then the second question is a bit -- and also platforms is you've done this back office platform and middle-office platform as it first investments to go. And then the second question is regarding more second order effects from the energy crisis that we're seeing because you operate in a lot of countries which are energy deficits countries. And I'm just wondering how -- what risk do you see in those countries and how we should think about the risk going forward, impacting you in particular?

I guess some quick answer is because we've got a whole section in transformation that Noel and are going to take us through. There's more platform investment to go, but we've broken the back of the -- the major infrastructure is in place. We have some fill-in to do, including completing the rollout of our core banking platform to places like Korea and Taiwan as a significant 2 remaining markets. The -- I say that there's an obsessive cost focus. There is for me, and I know there is for Manus, but also from the rest of the management team in terms of becoming a more productive company. It's not about cost cutting. It's -- although that will be the result for sure. It's about having a structurally more productive environment that is fit for future given the financial markets and the financial infrastructure world that we're going into. It's design right in the first place and then allow for genuine scale and growth with none linear cost increases, like far less. So -- but that's an obsessive focus because we know that in this agent commerce world and the digital money world, margins are coming down. Margins are always coming down in our business, but they will come down faster than in the core plumbing businesses in a completely AI-driven agenetic world. We have to be ahead of that. So there's an obsessive focus, I think we can win in that race. But obviously, we have to do that. And the -- sorry, the second question?

Geopolitical risk.

Yes, we watch very carefully. There's -- the global macro impact of structurally higher energy prices. Obviously, it's driving inflation, which is leading to higher interest rates. We're seeing that in every market we see a pickup in inflation. Up to a point, that's a helpful thing for us. Beyond that, it becomes obviously growth suppressive and negative. And then we're looking at the vulnerable -- the particularly vulnerable parts of our footprint where the higher energy prices are taking -- what was, in many cases, a fragile recovery from the kind of the restructuring post-COVID increased inflation period, higher interest rates. A number of the markets in our footprint, we're beginning to recover. It's more challenging for them. We don't see anything that's flashing red, but there's plenty that's amber that we're watching and pulling that out along the way. Manus?

Just to add on cost, we've given you our guidance for '26, which I should have made sure you've seen in the back of the pack that remains unchanged, given you the 2028 guidance. But really we have a wonderful session coming up with Noelle and Tanuj to talk about those platforms more. So I'll leave it there.

Last but not least.

It's Perlie from -- I could just be loud enough. It's Perlie Mong from Bank of America. Just a quick follow-up on cost. AI investment. It looks like a lot of your cost planning is based on productivity probably help our AI. I think it's probably fair to say that as a sector, we're still quite early in the investment cycle just because how quickly things have moved on. So how are you thinking about that investment piece. And I can't help but notice that Fit for Growth, we still have about 1/3 left of that. So how much of that would be potentially in a for AI type investments? So that's number one. And number two, very quickly on wells, I don't think there debate that the well flows on coming and coming ticking fast. But in terms of the channels it's coming, so far, we've seen a lot of growth from that affluent. But it looks like a lot of people are now talking about the generation of wealth transfer and offices. So how do you see the different segments of the those coming through and to tie that into the AUM, I've noticed that you've brought forward that net in piece, which is about $50 billion per year average now, which is actually quite similar to what you've done in the last 5 quarters, average. Now how do we think about the margin piece? Because if you're doing similar 1 money, mechanically, you would expect the fee income growth to slow down. But in Q1, we see 3% growth. So how do we square that, please?

We're going to -- I'm going to kick the wealth question entirely to Judy. I think we've given the high level. You understand our conviction, and we'll get to that. And look, we don't -- we've not broken out an AI cost number because we've -- having built this -- the platform that Noelle will describe in just a few minutes, the AI is now embedded in everything that we do. Almost every process, almost every productivity program, almost every revenue investment has an AI component it's almost meaningless at this point to say what are we investing in AI. It was not meaningless to get the infrastructure layer right in the first place. That was a meaningful investment, but it's built at this point. And it's working. And as you know, I will say, there's hundreds of models that are operating on that platform and billions and billions and billions of tokens being processed in the various use cases. So AI will be centrally important to the productivity initiatives from here as well, both from a diagnostic perspective, identifying the inefficiencies and vulnerabilities. But also in automating process and removing burdensome either human or machine interventions, that cannot be done much more efficiently through a Gen AI machine. So -- but Noelle and Tanuj are going to talk about that in some detail. So let's just save that.

And on the Fit for Growth program, we remain committed to finishing it this year. The numbers are, as we've guided to previously, we will stick to it. There's been no question of redirecting those funds into some other ways to discrete program, which we've talked about. You'll hear, and this is a good tee up for the coffee break in the next session about how we are turning the learnings from Fit for Growth into a muscle that we're using going forward.

That's great. There will be more time for interaction and more time for questions, and you'll have all of our colleagues on the management team available during their presentations for some of the deep dive. So let's carry on. Next up, and David, are you going to compare and direct us?

Yes. We'll be back here at 10:45. [Break]

Welcome back, everyone. We're now going to move into our transformation session. So I'd like to invite up Tanuj and Noelle. Thank you.

Good morning, and good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon to the ones joining virtually. I did check there are some colleagues joining from Australia today. So thank you very much for joining us. I'm Tanuj Kapilashrami. I'm the Chief Operating Officer. I'm joined by Noelle, our Global Head of Technology and Transformation. In my role, I look after strategy transformation and our corporate functions. I've been in financial services, specifically banking for over 25 years. I've had the great fortune of living and working across many of our footprint markets, including Lovely Hong Kong. Delighted to be talking to you today about our transformation journey, both what has been delivered and what's going to happen next. Bill started the session today by saying that Standard Chartered has a very clear ambition. We want to be the world's superconnector not just a global bank, but a global financial network connect solving for transborder needs of our clients, connecting capital trade, payments across the network in a world that is becoming increasingly fragmented. Delivering on this ambition requires more than geographic reach. It requires an operating model, encompassing people, processes and technology that is interconnected and purpose built. An operating model that can be scalable, reusable and is standardized. And that's what I'm hoping we are going to be talking to you today. The world is not standing still and neither is our response. Our transformation is not technology led for the sake of technology. It is strategy-led with increasingly sophisticated interplay between people, processes and technology to deliver very differentiated outcomes for our clients, colleagues and for our shareholders. Noelle will get in a minute to talk about the tech architecture, but I really wanted to highlight the fact that this is not just a tech story for us. It's a process people technology story. And that's 1 of the key reasons why Noelle and I have chosen to do the session jointly today. I want to be clear from the start, and Bill said this as well that this is not a defensive cost action for us. Our whole transformation agenda is about creating operating leverage to deliver exponential growth. That's the objective of our transformation work. They are cost targets that I'm going to get into, which is an outcome of the work, but that's not the real objective. And a lot of the work that we are going to be talking about today is the work that's already been done, which is enabling growth and how we feel by enabling AI on top of it, that growth is going to be delivered further. The other thing that Bill said, which I want to double-click on is that we are a global bank. We don't have 1 or 2 home markets. Our network is our home and that is 1 of our biggest structural strength. So to build a model -- an operating model that leverages the value of the network to deliver on our superconnector aspiration requires a response, which is a very distinctive response. So like I said, we are going to be telling you today the investments that have already been made, the outcomes they have achieved and what happens next, especially with the advent of AI. At its heart, our ambition is to deliver a bank that is simple, connected and fast. Simple means global core platforms, fewer variants and standardization where it creates scale, Connected means shared cross-border capabilities that serve multiple markets. First means executing at pace but Jason will love this with very, very clear guardrail. So that is simple connected fast. We're going to talk about simple Connected faster lot today. We are not measuring our transformation just by program volume KPIs end dates, et cetera. We've got very clear financial metrics that we are linking these 2 very clear commercial outcomes. A 20% increase in income per employee by 2028, 15% reduction in our corporate functions, headcount. This is technology operations, all of our support areas resulting in ultimately a structurally lower cost base. So a cost-income ratio of 57% by 2028. Our transformation is not new to us. This has been a journey that's been on. The first slide that Bill flash today in his presentation outlines the financial outcomes. We started our transformation by tackling our operating model because we firmly believe that technology follows the operating model. If your operating model is complex, technology will be complex. And I think, candidly speaking, if you go back a couple of years, we did operate in a matrix with a very strong local orientation. What that did for us is resulted in duplication inefficient capital allocation and unscalable investment decision. So 1 of the big pieces of work that's been happening for a long time, predating FFG, but accelerated by FFG was the work that we have done in simplifying our operating model. We stripped out regional layers radically simplified our executive and leadership bench and clarify division rights between our global businesses and market leaders. To just give you a sense of numbers. We moved in my time in the bank from 8 regions to 4 and now 3. We've got our market CEOs double hatting with 1 of the 2 global businesses. Today, almost 80% of our market CEOs double had with 1 of the 2 global businesses. And 1 of the big changes we did was align all of our markets to 1 of the 2 global businesses. So this is not just a reporting line change. This is the way we do capital allocation. This is the way we report on performance. This is the way we take investment decisions. It's been a pretty fundamental change. What this has done, and again, not just a cost outcome. What this has done for us is accelerated decision-making is reduce the path to decision-making. But what it's also done is got accountability much closer to our clients. And that's been the 2 big outcomes of the operating model changes that we have done. One number on this slide, I want to double-click on is the size of our workforce in our global capability centers. We call them GBSs, Global Business Services, 43% of our head count now sits in 1 of our capability centers. Again, this is not just a defensive cost action play. What it does for us is by co-locating a critical mass of our processes and people it gives us -- it puts us in a position to be able to standardize, automate and AI and deploy AI scale, far difficult to do when you're trying to do it in a much more geographically fragmented model. So these organizational changes have been the foundation of everything that we have done till now. And with that, I'm going to pass on to Noelle, who is going to talk about modernization of our tech architecture.

Thank you. Hello, everyone. Process of elimination, I'm Noelle. And here's the good news for you today. Bill and Manus, we're so excited about the talk that I'm about to give that they gave a good portion of it already. So what you all know is we have BCP in our management team in case anything happens to me up here, we know they can step in. So I've been in technology and operations for a little more than 30 years. And so I've been leading change across technology cycles and across multiple organizations in different sectors. So I know when you hear the word transformation. It sounds a bit lofty, maybe there are a couple of skeptical people in the room. But what I -- what Tanuj and I are going to share with you today, I think, is a very -- based on my experience, is a very credible story, about people and technology coming together and changing what this bank is capable of doing. Okay? So I'm going to start by talking about significant work that's been underway for the last few years. Bill talked a little bit about it. Manas talked a little bit about it. Where we have been modernizing our technology foundations for resilience and growth. And that work is now starting to pay off. So Bill talked about our journey in cybersecurity and our journey in financial crime or anti-crime and we then focused on 3 additional pillars and all of these things together form the very core of this bank, okay? So those 3 critical pillars are what I'm going to talk to you about for the next few minutes. First, in the fourth quarter of last year, we completed our global private cloud. We now have 10x the processing horsepower that we had previously. And we have geographic resilience against domestic disturbances, data center outages, subsea cable disruptions, climate issues with unprecedented levels of automation. We have redesigned and rebuilt our connections to third parties. We use a concept called abstraction, which means that we can move them to any location. So put simply, we can be in any market quickly in any market with Internet access. So that's the first thing. And I want to pause there for just a moment because that wasn't just a feed of engineering. It was actually a feat of engineering, but to have a global private cloud to have geo resilience and to have third-party flex the way that flexibility, the way that we have it is really quite differentiated and very, very important for a network bank like ours. Second, in March of this year, we migrated our largest market, which we're all sitting in Hong Kong from the mainframe to our global core banking platform. We now have more than 90% of our markets on a single platform. And what that means is we can build, we can test and we can deploy code much more quickly. And because we own the source code, we are no longer beholden to third-party road maps or geopolitical tensions. We can and have started integrating digital assets, blockchain and AI natively on our own terms at commodity prices and sustainable scale. Okay? That's the second thing. Third thing, our modern payments platform, okay? So we're at the infrastructure core banking, now we're up at payments. Payments is out of the back service, offering the same levels of choice and service excellence consistently across markets. What this means is that our businesses can open new digital services, new payment corridors and facilitate trade quickly and easily, okay? So those are the 3 things that we've been focused on for the last several years, significant investment has gone in. And you might be able to tell that we're quite proud of them. And so these systems are future ready and resilience is built in, and I'm going to give you 4 reasons why that's true. First, they're commodity based. So what that means is they're scalable, they're standardized, they're performing at the best possible price. Second, they're cloud native. So we are significantly moving away from mainframes. Third, they're API first. So no more bespoke integrations. And last, the source code is owned by us, as I already mentioned. Now we did not set out to rebuild everything everywhere all at once. Even though there might be somebody in the room who published tax just a little while ago, we focused on creating operating leverage for the bank by targeting the systems, modernizing the systems that all of our products rely on. We made them industrial grade and future ready, okay? Now we can extend up above that core where differentiation matters at the client interface level, okay? So we're standardizing it at the core and we're differentiated at the client edge. And the balance between the 2 is critical, okay? Standardization gives us speed and efficiency and specialization and configuration gives us new products, new services and new experiences for clients. Our transformation program is -- it doesn't have an end date, okay? It is increasingly the way that we operate. We've gone from large infrequent releases to small frequent changes every day. Feedback loops, whether they're customer operational or risks are built into these platforms. And data is not an output. It is a live signal. And what that means is it streams and it's analyzed in real time. and it drives decisions and it drives improvements every single day. Now let's talk a little bit about the results we're seeing from all of the work that I just described. So as Tanuj mentioned earlier, we've been on a continuous improvement journey. So over the last couple of years, we've seen a 30% improvement in operations in throughput per FTE. Our digital services are now always on in any market, 24/7. We've seen a ninefold increase in transactions process per second, supported by, as I mentioned earlier, a 10x increase in processing power and our downtime has been reduced by 80% while run costs have remained flat. So we think our results are getting better. We expect more, as you probably heard from Bill, we're constructively dissatisfied fairly frequently. So the key point is this, scale, speed and resilience are no longer constrained by linear cost increases. And for network bank, that's pretty transformational. So that's our modern foundation, okay? Now we're going to talk about the people and processes that sit on top of it and bring it to life because tech for tech's sake is not what we're about, right? We are an applied technology company and people and process bring this to life for us, okay?

Thanks. Thank you, Noelle. Continuous improvement is the word that we've spoken about quite a bit. Our transformation is not a program with an end date we were transforming before Fit for Growth, but Fit for Growth was a very important accelerant and we can pick up your question when we get to later today. We are on track to deliver $1.3 billion, which is going to be a 1:1 ratio in terms of spend and cost saves. Over 300 initiatives across all parts of the organization driving improved customer experience, increased straight-through processing rate, much faster turn time on our applications. Perhaps what's been less visible on Fit for Growth is the amount of investment we have done in securing plumbing. I wasn't going to use the word, but that Bill used it in his opening, so I'm going to use it. we have mapped 100% of our processes in the organization. And we have mapped a consistent set of skills that underpin all of those processes. And that road map, heat map blueprint that we have developed becomes incredibly important when we talk to you about AI deployment going later. So 100% of processes map, consistent set of underlying skills such a map which gives us a very good sense of how work gets done. Some really clear outcomes on the slide, 53% straight-through processing rates increase in wealth solution. What's not here is a 10% reduction in our technology estate that has happened because of all of the work that we have done. So what Fit for Growth has helped us do is build that muscle of continuous improvement. So it's not just a one-off efficiency gain, but a muscle that sort of sustains beyond the program, which is going to finish by end of this year. So moving on, we call this the bridging slide because we will talk about having secured the foundation, what happens to our snacks. But I will go back to why simple connected is not just a transformation pipeline for us. It's an economic logic that helps a super connector bank delivered to its full potential and beyond. So again, I've said this a few times, we are not anchored to a single market. And for us, that's a structural strength. That means we are not constrained by 1 growth cycle, 1 domestic balance sheet, 1 regulatory environment quite the opposite. We are very well positioned to be able to capitalize on opportunities that arise anywhere in our network. To do that, we do need an operating model, which is simply connected fast, which basically means we want to scale without multiplying cost. And for that, the bank has to be simple to harness the power of our network, the bank has to be connected and to do this safely and repeatedly at the speed required across the bank -- across the globe, the bank has to be fast. And what that does, collectively for all of you, is high income growth, greater operating leverage and a much -- and a workforce that is much more upskilled to be able to compete with the future direction of the bank and compete with the future of banking. So like I said, not just a transformation tagline for us, but an economic logic that helps superconnector bank deliver on its aspirations.

So let's go just a little bit deeper into how we're transforming to be simple, connected and fast, okay? We've modernized our technology through a simplification approach that retains optionality, standardized at the core differentiated at the client edge. And our principles are straightforward, build once and deploy across markets and businesses, differentiate through configuration rather than custom code and reduce fragmentation. This lowers the unit cost to serve. It improves resilience and it makes growth more scalable, easier to achieve. Let me just give you a couple of examples to try to bring this to life. First -- the first 1 is the 1 I've mentioned already, standardizing on commodity infrastructure, 1 pattern across the estate. Second, we have a single identity and access management layer for Standard Charter. Three, we have on payments backbone for the company. And fourth, we have a single enterprise AI platform with reusable services. We built in operations. This is a good example. We've unified over 100 applications into 30 standardized workflows accessible for our operations, people through a single user interface. Over time, that interface becomes a single pane of glass to manage client onboarding, servicing, risk and governance workflows and more around the world.

What it really means for our client is that a capability that we build in 1 market, let's say, a real-time payment solution can be deployed in multiple markets at fraction of cost and in a far more speedy deployment way. So that's the real value of the model that we are doing. We are constantly simplifying, standardizing our processes and data. And a lot of that leveraging of it for growth investments has happened in our capability centers. So we have demonstrated reduced time lines, more efficient processes in our KYC, onboarding, customer due diligence processes. So we talked about simple.

Now we're going to move on to connected, okay? So the power of a superconnector is in the connections. A superconnector creates network value. So a single capability can be reused across clients, products and markets. Our platform architecture is designed so that 1 client engaging with us in a single product and a single market has access to our full capability globally. So trade finance will link to payments and cash management will link to foreign exchange, the client doesn't see seems they see a network. And the real unlock over time is deeply integrated client and transactional data, which gives us advanced analytics more precise personalization, more seamless payments across geographies, more straight-through processing for our teams. And that reduces friction, it improves the client experience, and it helps our businesses deepen relationships with their customers.

So basically, what happens is clients don't see product market boundaries, they see 1 Standard Chartered. The -- at the beginning of the slide when I spoke about the work we have done on our global capability centers, that's a really good proof point that helps deliver on connected because by centralizing processes and people in big shared service centers, we are able to drive that connectivity across the network, and which was not possible in a geography by geography model. So a really good example of leveraging our shared service centers to drive that level of connectivity.

Agreed. So we've talked about simple. We talked about connected. The 2 together have a multiplicative effect on making us fast, okay? So we're not just digitizing. We're building the capability to operate in a fundamentally different ecosystem, and Bill talked about it this morning. agent commerce, the digitization of money, the speed at which financial services will move. I think in the not-too-distant future, is something that we are preparing ourselves for. The winners will be those who can sense, decide and act in real time, dynamically changing products, dynamically managing risk and strengthening with scale. The most important part about this ecosystem from my perspective and perhaps this is somebody from technology talking that serving customers has to be quick, easy and fast, whether they're human or machine, right? But always, and we've referred to Jason in this conversation, he happens to be our Chief Risk Officer, but always with the guardrails that this industry requires. Architecturally, we've separated our foundations from our product delivery. And we're running those foundations as utilities, okay? So our run costs are predictable time to market is faster and scaling across borders is easier. One example for you, in technology delivery, we've moved from 18 manual approvals to get code across our markets to clients. We now have an automated pipeline based process, okay? So those -- that's the from 2 in the kind of ecosystem we're building. And we're preparing all of these systems for AI by rolling out standards-based APIs across them all. What that means is that these systems can be orchestrated by humans and by machines. The result, our product owners can make changes much more quickly and be able to respond to the dynamic markets that we operate in.

So in summary, simple reduces friction and risk. Connected removes latency and together, they multiply so we can execute much faster at scale and with the right level of control, just leaving you with some numbers before we move to AI. Our clients are already seeing results. 97% of our tech releases are now fully automated. We are deploying products 30% faster than we have done previously. And we have reported 28%. Judy will share some of the customer satisfaction data later, but 28% reduction in manual client payment queries in a relatively short period of time. So that's been the impact of this work that has been seen by our customers, all of this resulting in much better client experience, which is what this work is in service of ultimately. The foundations are now in place for us. And the focus goes from building to scaling, and that's where the beauty of AI comes in.

Yes. So now we're going to talk about AI, and I wrote down some of the questions that were asked. So if I don't get to them, we're going to have a little session at the end, where you can ask us questions. So the scale that Tanuj talked about, really only matters if complexity is reduced and it stays reduced. AI exposes complexity immediately through data quality issues, through hidden dependencies through technical debt, and its capability curve is exponential, not linear. So the pace is not just fast. This thing is structurally different from any technology advancement that comes before it. So we are increasingly simple. We're more standardized and more connected across platforms. At our core, we are increasingly 1 unified financial platform across 54 markets. That creates a simple ambition that we work on every single day, build a bank that gets better with every transaction and every client interaction. Our next frontier is to take that AI platform that Bill described and embed it deeply into the foundation as a structural capability not as a bolt-on. So the bank in every transaction learns from each one. And we're doing that through 3 reinforcing elements. First, 1 enterprise AI platform, as I mentioned earlier, with intelligence built in. So AI can scale consistently across markets and businesses. Second, an operating model that identifies and automates routine, repeatable transactions while keeping human judgment where trust matters most. And third, a data and AI architecture that learns, improving accuracy, improving cycle times and improving marginal cost as we scale. So what this enables is a business that can sense change, adapt faster and act more quickly. So let's double-click on the platform for just a moment because it has 3 key characteristics to it that are really important to us as we continue to scale it. First, risk management. As I mentioned, we are, after all, a bank. And so regulatory change, regulatory standards, the control environment are critical to us and they absorb significant capacity across the organization. An AI platform in a network bank in particular, must be able to codify controls monitor them through automated guardrails and be able to absorb regulatory change that happens very frequently with ease, okay? Second productivity. Our AI platform can handle routine initiation, validation, approvals. And again, that frees up people to focus on trust, clients, advice, relationships, and third, precision. And in my opinion, this is the game changer for an AI platform because it's all about data and the quality and accessibility of data and -- so we're moving from 150 fragmented day lakes across the estate to a single global data supply chain. That's cloud native, standards-based with compliance built in. Better data improves model accuracy. Model accuracy gives us more straight-through processing, straight through processing, frees up capacity for clients and for growth. So what you see on the slides behind me are really just examples. They're not an exhaustive list, but they are the kinds of outcomes that we're experiencing now as we scale into this capability. And we can see this very clearly across the bank as AI is applied end-to-end. In payment operations, our AI platform can route routine transactions while surfacing exceptions in context so that people can make decisions more quickly. That improves our client experience, and it lowers our unit cost per transaction over time. AI-enabled software engineering. So in our SDLC, software development life cycle, AI is helping us develop faster, increasing our time to market, with fewer defects across the estate. And we've also deployed Copilot across the enterprise, and you can see the numbers behind me. And we are targeting work that has low value where time can be reallocated to higher order judgment led client-focused work. So for us, the logic is very clear. We lower run costs, we lower production incidents. We increase time to market and capacity for differentiation. So stepping back, a platform changes the economics of change itself. Each new capability builds on what's -- what's come before it. So AI deployments become faster and cheaper over time. It also changes how work scales. So growth no longer requires proportional cost increases because machines handle speed and volume while humans focus on clients, trust, relationships and growth. That creates flexible AI-enabled capacity, and it's a powerful lever on cost to income over time. And because the system learns the economics improve in a reinforcing loop, better data, better models, more straight-through processing, more capacity free. So the investment thesis is straightforward. We're building a bank where the marginal cost of growth declines with scale. And we believe that's what an AI-native enterprise delivers, and it's already underway here.

Thank you, Noelle. This brings us to a really critical inflection for -- in turn, I'm conscious we are running on time, so I'll make this very quick. We have secured our foundations. The work now is for us to accelerate transformation by embedding AI into our business processes. And that's the work that we've already started, and that's really going to be the focus over the next couple of years. A key enabler of this work has been the work we have done to identify our processes and pivot the organization to becoming a much more skill-based organization. This is not a tagline. But by deconstructing work, into a set of consistent skills and identifying the activities that sit under the work, we can be very precise on what gets automated, what gets augmented and what needs to remain human-led. And that's really the embedding of AI into the -- into our processes that sits on top of the foundation. So just to bring this to life by giving you some examples. In Singapore and India, where we have more than 50% of our hiring demand we have launched agent-enabled employee onboarding. So AI agents coordinate end-to-end onboarding, manage tasks, data exceptions across systems, while humans retain the final decision on risk management and the end decision of the process. This work has reduced having managed our effort by 35%. And has led to a value creation framework, which we are deploying into sizing the size of our HR operations outlet. So it's a really tangible example of deconstruct work, decide where we deploy agents, what gets left behind on humans. And that is the process that we have been deploying across multiple of our processes. Treasury is another area where there's been some fabulous AI deployments that we have done. So we have driven AI dividend decision-making in enhancing liquidity management with faster clearer insight demonstrating how we can scale AI, deploy AI in complex regulated environments. Across both of these examples, returns compound as each AI deployment accelerates the next and that's when our economics start improving. And that's when we structurally start decoupling volume growth in our businesses from head count growth. So that is the way we see -- we already are, but we see deploying AI across our business processes. So look. bringing you back to where this all started our transformation, it's a journey. It's a continuum. What we are sharing with you today is a point in time as we see it today. What are the outcomes, a very clear set of productivity metrics. Bill has alluded to them menus. I won't go through the numbers, but you can see it, 20% increase in revenue per FTE at least a 15% reduction in back-office head count over the longer term and a structurally efficient organization with a much improved cost income ratio. There are 3 messages before we open for Q&A, that Noelle and I want to leave with you today. First, we have delivered significant structural change in our organization, simplified the organization, modernized our core and addressed complexity and risk. It's creating a more resilient and scalable foundation for the bank. Second, our transformation is about building an agile operating model, an agile operating system. This is what allows us to operate as a single global network so we can scale without rebuilding costs every time. And the third, we are not standing still, that we are continuously improving, innovating and harnessing AI to accelerate better outcomes for our clients. Thank you very much. And Noelle and I will take any questions that you might have for us now.

Okay. Thank you, Noelle Eder and Tanuj. So we're going to do questions, but I think we already had -- Perlie had asked a couple of questions on this. So why don't we just take those first, which I think was -- there was 1 around Fit for Growth to how this was different Fit for Growth. So maybe if Tanuj could take that. And then there was a second one, which was around AI and how much AI adoption is embedded into the revenue FTE targets that we've announced, so Noelle after that one. So Tanuj, first.

I exceeded the time limit on my presentation to answer your question in more detail. So, we are going to complete FFG by end of the year. And I think the point I was hoping that I make, it's not just on the $1.3 billion that we are delivering, but it's the investments that have been made in our foundation work that we've done, including a lot of the core investments that we have made on AI. So things like AI factory, the foundational work on AI did come out of FFG. So it was a very important accelerator. The program will finish by the end of the year, and we'll give back $1.3 billion in terms of cost saves.

Let me ask if we answered your question -- your second question already or if you -- if there's a nuance to it, you'd like us to address?

No, I think no, I think you've very much answered it already. I think it's just about because AI is moving very fast and then it's 1 of those things that we are all trying to adapt to. And in terms of the way you think on cost like at what point do you see the next version of [indiscernible], whichever technology comes through, how do you think about investing in that and good close maybe by just working with what you have?

Yes. So you want me to take that one? Okay. So let me talk about how we think about our AI stack and maybe that will help a little bit. So at the foundational layer, I've mentioned commodity, right? I mean we're very, very interested in ensuring that we have best possible pricing for GPUs, et cetera and so forth. Above that, we're at the data layer, we have a partnership with Databricks to help us really get to that high-quality accessible data in the global data supply chain that I talked about. And above that is the model layer, and we are agnostic at the model layer. And the reason we're agnostic is because we agree with you, the capability curve here is like nothing we have seen before. And so the idea that we're going to out-innovate the market or any particular third-party relationship we have is going to out-innovate the market is unlikely. And so we deploy a concept called portability as much as possible. We are not perfect, but we deploy portability as much as we can. And what that means is there are architectural patterns where you can move your models from 1 place to another. And so we try to help our businesses be agnostic and be able to ascertain for themselves based on the value created for their clients and for their businesses, which model is best over time. But we don't think for a moment that the world will remain static.

Okay. Any questions in the room? Okay, Nick.

It's Nick Lord from Morgan Stanley. The first is just about Mythos and sort of how you are thinking about that? I mean I presume you've not seen it yet. But I'd be interested from what I do here, there's quite a lot of work that is required once you've seen it. So I'd be interested to know how you're thinking about that. And second, you might have partly answered this already with the earlier question, but which models are you using at the moment to using open source models as well as sort of your Anthropics and your GPTs are you using some of the Chinese models as well as some of the U.S. models? Just be interested in more detail on that.

So I think both of those of you, Noelle. So Mythos first.

Sure. So Mythos and we talked a lot about this as a management team. We've talked a lot about it with our Board, obviously, with our CSO. I think we think Mythos can best be interpreted as a signal in a much broader trend around sort of the curve on vulnerabilities. I think everybody knows what Mythos says, but just in case you don't, it's a frontier model that reports to be able to sort of detect and move to exploitation on zero-day vulnerabilities. And so the bank has a sort of a -- we have a 2-part response. The first part is very operational in orientation. We have vulnerability management practices. We have software development practices. We have a defense in-depth set of controls implemented in the bank. And so we continue to tune those and advance those and both our software development organization and our architecture and cybersecurity organizations have been on top of this trend since long ago. And so Mythos is a point in time on a curve, but the trend has existed for quite some time. And so we have really been putting our energy into shifting left across the capability growth. So software and how AI is used inside the software development life cycle, as I mentioned earlier, to help our software developers sort of identify, predict, determine where they might need to resolve something before it goes out the door. From a more strategic standpoint, vulnerabilities take advantage of complexity they take advantage of technical debt, legacy architecture, et cetera. And so you heard us talk today about our technology and really our bank game plan, which is to resolve the questions about technology life cycle funding and obsolescence and really take that estate to the next level of modernization. That is as large a defense against vulnerabilities as anything else. And so our cybersecurity perimeter defenses, our threat intelligence is really, really quite strong. We have a defense and depth strategy. We're shifting left. And then from a technology standpoint, overall, the strategy helps by eliminating complexity and legacy technical depth.

Nick can I just add, 1 of the points I made when we were talking about FFG is the 10% reduction in our tech estate as 1 of the outcomes of the world just as -- last 2.5 years, we are doing the same with very clear targets on reducing our third-party supplier. So this idea is how do we contain that estate in a way that we can mitigate against the risks metal.

Yes. And it's a great point because the third-party ecosystem, obviously not under immediate and direct control by Standard Chartered, right? And so advancing our third-party security assessments in partnership with Tanuj's organization who has procurement and relationship management for us with third parties has been an integral part of the last year, and we're well served by it now in my view.

I think Nick had a second question just on which models specifically we're using at the moment.

Yes. So our businesses predominantly make choices around models because they really create the business cases, they create the value propositions. They are closest to our clients and can really ascertain. So my suggestion would be that Judy is going to be speaking this afternoon. She's very well versed on this and can discuss it at length in terms of WRB and what we're doing there with regard to models. But I would just say to you, yes, in answer to your question about which models are being used, right? We're quite agnostic. We're a pretty large bank. We have a large number of businesses and they have different needs and different interest levels. And so over time, from a technology strategy standpoint, what we endeavor to do is make sure that we are precise with regard to model utilization so that the value matches the cost of model, the improvement of the model matches the value and the expectations of the client. And so that's what we try to do to enable the businesses.

Jason.

Jason Napier from UBS. Tanuj, with Fit for Growth restructuring charges and gross saves, we slightly lost track of what organic cost inflation in the bank is if you could give us a sense as to what the underlying rate of inflation cost is. And then Noel,within that context, I think we all agree that the AI companies are today are not making any money and are spending a lot of it what proportion of group costs is IT broadly defined? And is it a problem that we don't really know how they'll be charging in a year or 2 from now?

Okay. So I think on -- the first one, I'll probably turn our sheet to Manus to help comment on that and then on the second to Tanuj.

Thanks, Jason. I mean obviously, what we're doing is Tanuj and I and the rest of the team, we're working very closely together on managing the cost of the bank going forward. We've given you an indication in the past of what the inflation and growth rates of the bank are. And you've seen those walks previously. And I think you should assume that that's a natural run rate that we will be at. But you should also assume that we have flexibility ourselves both in terms of what we see in the environment and in terms of how we want to invest at the pace of investment that we go at. So you've seen we've called out in historic cost works in the past. And I'm not calling out anything differently now, but you should place that in the context of what we think we can achieve in terms of the top line and what you think we can achieve in terms of improving on this efficiency as well.

So managing the cost of tech and I know -- I'd like Noelle to comment on this as well. I mean 1 of the big things that we are doing is being very, very thoughtful on the cost of AI. So I mean the big 1 was Copilot, which we did very recently rolled out to a large percentage of our workforce. And I'm going to be very honest to say we did our time -- we took our time doing it quite intentionally. We took our time to roll out in a way, which was a much more structured way deep analysis across to our families, what is the value creation framework for job family that we roll it out in, et cetera. So I guess, we are incurring the cost but developing a very clear value creation framework to ensure that we have the right return on investment that we are doing with our colleagues from an augmentation perspective. In terms of buying tech with the overlay of AI, I know that's something you've been thinking a lot about, Noelle.

Yes. I mean, I think Bill sort of referenced the points earlier today that I would give you first. I think it may appear to people that we're a little -- we might be a little slower than others with regard to AI we don't publish numbers on sort of massive amounts of use cases and all these kinds of things that we see in the press. What we spent our time doing was investing in a platform, because we fundamentally believe that the platform gives us scale, it gives us reusable capabilities, and it helps us sharpen our value creation framework whether that is with regard to revenue and growth and client experience or whether that is operational efficiency. And our book is about -- our AI book is about 50-50 across both. But the marginal cost of reusing these capabilities is much lower than sort of a significant new build every time we have an idea. And so then 1 more thing I would add, which is I mentioned in my remarks that we have moved from large infrequent releases to small frequent changes daily, okay? So in my experience and in my opinion, that's how AI works best because oftentimes in generative AI, in particular, doesn't come out of the box behaving itself like you 1 might hope, right? And so what you're doing is sort of constantly tuning your hypothesis around the problem statement and you're tuning the model to sort of get it to work. So if you go big in that free, you're going to spend a lot of money trying to get to an outcome that you could have proven at much lower cost. So we try to have that discipline and the fact that we took our time on this platform I think gave us the opportunity to really establish those frameworks and we have 2 co-heads of AI. We have 2 folks leading it on the tech side. They work together on this framework to help our businesses and our functional groups really use this effectively.

Here is Katherine from JPMorgan. So I have 2 questions. One is that operates across like many jurisdictions, and I think different governments may have different guardrails when it comes to AI implementations, right? So how do we reconcile that? So say, for example, 1 example in China, I think they have very specific requirement of data storage and how to use data. So something that you build outside of China may be very challenging to implement the onshore, right? I'm not so sure about the other jurisdictions. I think they may have their own thing. So how do you reconcile that and make sure that within this connected bank, this would still work for spend? I think this is question number one. Maybe this question first and I have question 2, if it's possible.

Why don't you give the second question and then we will...

Okay. I think for the second question, I think -- okay, it's not easy to -- let me think about how to put it. It's about layoff, it's about staff management, right? Now we have AI. I think just now you mentioned a very good point is that AI handles the process where human handles like the trust, the relationship, the growth, right? I think that's a very ideal picture. But in reality, I think some of our existing staff may not be the best fit in this type of model. So how do we handle that relationship? Like some of the tech companies in the U.S. they're making very, I would say, chunky cuts, like 20% of the workforce and all those as a bank, how do we think about like human resources and staff management on that part.

Sure. So I think the first 1 on jurisdictions and AI restrictions, Noelle. And then we'll turn to the second for Tanuj.

So it's a good question, and we are in 54 different markets. So there are a lot of rules. The majority of rules are around data sovereignty and data storage. That really -- that's the majority of the rise. The AI framework from a regulatory standpoint are coming forward. But I don't think they're substantiated enough to sort of for me to comment on them really at the moment. So let me tell you about our architectural approach to AI because we saw this coming, right? And we've had a lot of experience over a lot of years in all of these markets. And so we use 2 concepts that are really quite important to this thesis. The first is orchestration. And what that means is essentially where data is rule-based at rest, meaning it needs to be kept inside of a particular country and come to rest there and stay there and be encrypted, we honor that. And what orchestration does is it will pull that data across the network if a client who owns that data wants access to that data. And so we manage the complexity in the network itself. And so the network really becomes part of -- a big part of the strength. The second concept I mentioned earlier is portability and portability is a concept that says essentially if something happens, I can move from 1 market to another market. And I'll give you an example it's not in AI, but it is in data and Bill referenced it this morning, when Amazon had 3 availability zones taken out in the Middle East, when we do a lot of business in the Middle East, we have data stored in the Middle East. We have regulatory considerations about that data in the Middle East. And so what we did is partnering with our regulators and our risk teams and our businesses to move that data to the geo resilient data centers that I spoke about earlier in my remarks, and we did it in a matter of hours. And so that kind of concept is the portability concept. And so we are employing that concept. Again, we're not perfect, but we are employing that concept as much as we can to be able to facilitate on behalf of our clients across multiple jurisdictions, which is really 1 of the huge value propositions of the banks.

Let's go to sort of people. I mean before that, I'd say we had a responsible AI Council in our bank before generative AI became a thing. So even before generative AI came up, we were talking about exactly the kind of questions you're asking today. How do you kind of compete with AI-native companies when you have multi-geography, multi-regulatory set of framework. So this is something we obsess about a lot, as you would expect us to. The -- on people -- I mean we -- I spoke in my presentation about becoming a skill -- a much more skills-based organization, and we've been on this journey now 6, 7 years. It's really not a tagline, but it is this realization that with the AI coming in, the construct of jobs that we understand today is going to become irrelevant. So AI is going to impact every job, all of our jobs. We believe there'll be very few jobs that will fully go away, but we believe there'll be lots of activities in the jobs that we all do that will go away. So I think that mindset of what does it mean to become a company where people's work is defined by the jobs they occupy to a company where you underpin all of the work by a consistent set of skills has been a journey we've been on for the last 5 years, and we've made a huge amount of progress on it. And what that has led is a big focus in our company on reskilling and redeployment. And I looked at the numbers just last week. If I look at last year, over 50% of the new jobs that have been created in the bank have been filled by people internally by reskilling and redeployment that number was less than 30% even 18 months ago. So this idea that these are skills here for the future. We are going to upskill our colleagues and deploy them in those roles is going to go away. We have been very clear in our presentation that structurally, our back office or our corporate functions will be 15% lesser. And that means people's jobs are going to be impacted. We are going to give our colleagues all the support for them to be able to reskill themselves for opportunities within our bank or opportunities outside. So that's going to be the philosophy within which we will operate.

Thank you I know there's a few more questions, but I think we are going to have to stop there. But Noelle and Tanuj will be around the next break, if you want to ask them any other questions. So thank you, Noelle and Tanuj. [Break]

Roberto, just confirming you can hear us?

I can hear you, David.

Excellent. Yes, we can. Off you go. Thank you.

Great. Thank you very much, and thank you, Matt. Hello, everyone, and many apologies for not being able to join you live in person today. Now many things could have kept me from being in Hong Kong with all of you and the team, but my son's University graduation is 1 of them, and that's happening tomorrow morning. A year ago, we delineated our CIB business strategy as an investor seminar in London. And today, we're going to focus on how this strategy links to the themes that Bill has already outlined and how the areas that we are confident will continue to drive momentum in our business. CIB has several competitive advantages that we've built over the past few years. One, our network is critical for our clients, and it can be reconfigured quickly in anticipation of supply chains and capital flows. Network income is higher returning than single market domestic income and is growing rapidly. Two, our corporate business is unique due to our footprint and trusted long-term relationships. Credit origination from the corporate franchise and risk distribution into our global FI client base have driven balance sheet velocity and significantly higher returns. We're focused on significantly scaling this activity. Third, our sustainable finance income has crossed the $1 billion mark in 2025. We've had great results by introducing new sustainable technology into emerging markets and then financing it by our global FI client base. In digital assets, we have shown the ability to compete at the front end of the pack. We're moving from thought leadership to monetization, having completed a variety of transactions, including some firsts for G-SIB, as you will hear from Jeff Cott on Thursday. Rising wealth participation in our footprint is a big opportunity for our business and 1 that we're positioned to capitalize on across our WRB and CIB franchises. CIB has the products, advice and solutions that our wealth clients seek. Ray Ang, our Global Head of Private Banking, will talk to you about this later. Before we drill down, it's worth recapping a little bit on where we've come from in the past 10 years. Our financial performance has improved as we've narrowed our focus to areas of competitive differentiation. We've become much more disciplined in how we allocate capital using metrics and incentives that are directly linked to our desired client outcomes. Having established network income as our sweet spot, we've made it the biggest contributor to our revenue. Clients value our ability to originate and transform risk by our markets and banking teams. In price, how the transaction services business can facilitate the seamless movement of cash, trade and custody around the global network. We returned to accretive growth. We exited business lines that were not aligned to our strategy, such as principal finance and aviation leasing, and we reduced our exposure to local corporates. All of this has put us in a position where we can focus on structural long-term value creation. This makes us more resilient. Top line growth slowed a little over the last 2 years due to the falling rate headwind and we have increased the quantum of our rates hedge to decrease sensitivity. We've built technology solutions that our clients value, making it easier for them to transact whilst improving our own operating efficiency. To take a very topical example, we now provide digital front-end solutions for Fiat underlying, which will also manage digital asset underlying in the medium term. We can deliver Fiat and digital, whether 1 ends up dominating or whether they will end up coexisting. From a platform point of view, deploying the straight bank engine in payments for the SABRE tool at the heart of our risk management offering in markets reflect our successful execution of single solutions. This makes us simpler, faster and less error prone. We target international corporates and financial institutions that need our network for distribution, execution and sourcing risk and the league tables bear testament to what we have achieved in our chosen products and geographies. Importantly, we've not yet maximized the addressable wallet that is available from our largest multinational FI and corporate clients. This presents a very significant upside opportunity. We're driving the cross-sell between products by measuring and then rewarding collaboration that delivers a tangible client outcome. We're building a far more sophisticated client wallet measuring tools and align our resources accordingly. Client review meetings and discipline around wallet planning have been introduced with a new level of focus, all led by a coverage banking division. Our MIS tracks performance daily and measures how effective our resource deployment is in generating accretive shareholder returns. As we look to the future, the goal is simple, deliver a best-in-class experience to our clients with a relevant product suite by innovative platforms. We're nowhere near saturation point, and this is very exciting for the short, medium and long-term prospects of our business. There are good reasons why we talk about our network, how it is unique and how it drives high returns. Clients need a bank that can provide deposits, financing and derivative solutions at speed with seamless pricing and execution across the globe. We historically focused on domestic local market corporate business, where we've been aggressively pivoting by exiting or up-tiering clients for whom we cannot deliver the best value and by serving corporate and FIs who treasure our cross-border strategy. This is why network income is now over 2/3 of our total income. Network income is growing faster than many of the external benchmarks that we all monitor, such as global market and trade volume growth, credit growth, global GDP growth and SWIFT payment volume growth. Our goal is to take network income above 70% of our total revenue stream, and we're well on the way to reaching that target. If we now look at the patterns in our network, our corridors are reconfiguring and growing as the world's trade and investment destinations shift. This plays entirely to our existing competitive advantage. Our clients are showing a resilience to the change in the macro environment, and we are able to follow them. The fact that we have multiple corridors and no singular dominant corridor diversifies our revenue stream. China, for example, is one end of many of these corridors. They have adapted their supply chains and distribution channels, and we have facilitated this change across our footprint, and we've located native speakers in relevant markets to best service our clients' needs wherever they operate. We see China into ASEAN and China into South Asia as growth corridors now and in the future. Looking at the Middle East, the region has increasingly been providing an attractive investment in recent years. We participated in this trend with people, technology and capital. We expect the geopolitical situation to amplify inbound opportunities into the GCC, particularly from North Asia. We've discussed the income growth from our network and our ability to evolve and reconfigure corridors as needed. When we supply our capital-light solutions across borders, we enjoy a far better return. Through time, we managed to go deeper with our clients by adding new markets and new products. We solved their complex issues, and we gained positive wallet share convexity. Our network deals enjoy an excess return on RWA of more than 200 basis points relative to domestic income flows. Our stats on cross-sell and the positive linkage between product penetration and the income multiplier tell a very good story. The multiple we achieve as we go deeper with a client is clear. We make 25x more from the clients in the green box versus those in the gray box. We now transact in 3 or more products or markets with 44% of our clients, up from 32% in 2019, and we still see further room for improvement. When the Venn diagrams of our network and clients' needs overlap, we build an enduring, valuable and trusted relationship. Having discussed the overall trends for trade and investment corridors, I'd like to give you a snapshot of what this means for corporates and financial institutions. MNCs are having to adapt to evolving legal frameworks, regulation, technology and the impact of climate change. The importance of operational resiliency is increasing year-by-year. COVID, tariffs, deglobalization, geopolitical changes are all leading to an increased need for infrastructure spend, [ trend shoring ], defense spend, energy and food security, amongst others. Certainty of delivery is becoming more important than price. It is unrealistic that we will revert to a world where all goods are manufactured locally for domestic needs only. A new equilibrium will be found with key players expecting sovereignty over the key nodes in their supply chains. All of this creates enormous opportunity for our network business, playing to our strengths in the corridors that matter regardless of whether they already exist or will emerge in the coming years. Now the corridors for our financial institution client base are often quite different to those of the MNCs. Developed market FI clients want access to yield and new markets. Our footprint offers risk diversification and returns enhancement, and few banks can grant the access, liquidity and structured solutions that we do by our branch and subsidiary network. This has been a huge strength of ours for many years, but only in more recent history have we really concentrated on targeting FI flows. Conversely, the developing and emerging markets in our network need developed market solutions as populations age. Their need for long-term assets and asset liability management structures to fund pension and life insurance products is very real and tangible. We're in the right places at exactly the right time to meet the demand from local market insurance companies, pension funds and asset managers who rely on our capabilities to solve their issues in an increasingly affluent, aging world. FI is 54% of our CIB business today. The client base within FI is highly diversified, and we see growth opportunities in each and every one of these client segments. Banks and broker-dealers value our clearing licenses and access to markets where they lack presence and scale. Investors look to us for yield enhancement. We source [ EN macro ] and credit risk via our corporate and FI footprint engines, and we then distribute this risk. From vanilla to more complex structures such as TRS and CLOs, our clients value our offerings tremendously. The ability to originate and transform risk to suit client preferences is something we excel at and something that sets us apart from our competition. Network income and FI income offer superior returns on RWA, which is why we're optimizing the allocation of our financial resources towards these lines. Our aim is to maintain our trajectory in FI, which as mentioned, currently makes up 54% of our income today, and our goal is to have this reach 60% by 2030. Last year, we spoke to you about O2D, originate to distribute, at our CIB Investor Day. It's a model that has existed since the 1970s, when banks started evolving from originate to hold, where they were long-term holders of credit risk, into arrangers, structures and distributors of risk. I highlight this because O2D represents one of the most impactful chapters in the convergence of commercial banking and investment banking, but also in the development of Standard Chartered over the last 10 years. We have shown an ability to push origination higher by taking market share and by adding new product capabilities. Our corporate clients value us addressing their financing needs in terms of capital and solutions, and our FI clients reward us as we enable access to diversified structures with attractive yields. This is still a massive opportunity for us. Our goal is to grow origination at double-digit percentages and then distribute at even higher levels, and this will enable double-digit income growth and single-digit balance sheet growth. The reason we've built this capability over time, and we continue to do so, is because it is absolutely critical to our client strategy. Growing the FI client base and expanding CIB's capabilities in Europe and the U.S. has given us a far better traction on the distribution side. The very clear headroom to expand this space is why we're so focused on growing both our origination and distribution engines. Another most recent strategic priority among which we are now amongst the market leaders is deploying capital towards sustainable solutions. The world clearly needs energy. And in the long term, it needs it to be plentiful and clean. Demand from clients and investors remains very tangible even in a universe of shifting priorities. The $1 billion we made in this segment last year achieved this public commitment 1 year early. A couple of real-world examples. We financed the world's first greenfield sustainable aviation fuel project and the U.K.'s largest battery storage asset. We provide sustainability-linked sovereign lending and nonrecourse nature-based project finance. These transactions demonstrate our ability to combine balance sheet strength, structuring capabilities and risk-bearing capacity to unlock new markets, mobilize capital and deliver tangible decarbonization and resilience outcomes in both developed and emerging economies. So in terms of CIB priorities, you can think of them as follows: growing the FI client base, improving our originate-to-distribute capabilities, developing a leading sustainable and transition finance franchise and building a world-class digital assets offering. On the latter, client demand is increasing as use cases become reality, whether that be for access, execution, custody, tokenization or interoperability. In the last 2 years, we've executed payments on chain and distributed notes on chain, and we provide liquidity in crypto. We keep adding capabilities. As of today, the pure-play stablecoin and tokenized deposit providers are limited by licenses, regulation and access to central bank windows. Each of these barriers will potentially drop away, and we'll be ready for a world where assets and liabilities move in real time and on a 24/7 basis. CIB is investing in people and tech so that we will continue to deliver for our clients as we enter a highly disruptive period for the banking sector. We see opportunity in this disruption, and we're investing for growth. With our recent hire of Ole Matthiessen, we're creating a single digital stream that works across all our product horizontals with full implementation and P&L accountability. As Bill has said, we've positioned ourselves as a trusted bridge between [ TradFi ] and [ DeFi ], providing institutional-grade advice and rails to access, transact, trade, store and manage digital asset risk safely and efficiently. And we are deeply involved in the development of market infrastructure, working with regulators and governments to help create secure and interoperable ecosystems for digital assets. We've been experimenting in this space since 2016 and now see an inflection point with stablecoins and related tokenized assets finding their way into the mainstream. Using transaction services as an example of monetization, having a single payments platform across the network in the form of S2B NextGen makes us simpler and faster to scale. Clients connect their platforms via APIs into our easy-to-use solutions, and we're seeing rapid growth in products such as digitized cash and FX as a result. Simple and effective connectivity to our platforms translate into steady, repeatable business. Other client use cases in addition to custody and real-time settlements include tokenized money market funds, risk mitigation by hedging of crypto and collateral mirroring. Beyond digital assets, we'll continue to invest more broadly into our technology capabilities across CIB. In Global Markets, this means building scalable platforms and infrastructure that meet the needs of an increasingly sophisticated client base. Our markets business is being transformed. We focus on client needs and build content, products, risk transformation capability and technology to service them with intent and purpose, delivering value at speed. We moved away from being a largely FX-dependent business to one that competes in rates, commodities and credit. We're a leading diversified [ EM6 ] franchise and have increased market share significantly with key clients across the globe. We're now top 3 in EMFX on rates in APAC and a top 5 EM6 franchise. A core outcome of our focus has been the growth in flow income, which we've shown you before. This is our income from regular, predictable and consistent client deals as they transact in relatively liquid products. Flow business is high-quality, recurring and stable, and it is not dependent on market movements or outsized financing or M&A, and we focused on growing this income stream steadily. In the last year, we've hired exceptional talent and deployed technology to keep growing our market share by streaming more products and prices to venues where we have the expertise to assess risk and provide liquidity. These investments enable the expansion of the business, and we will continue to further scale this model, driving a growing and even more resilient flow income stream. So in conclusion, our strategy will drive the group outlook of 5% to 7% income growth from 2025 to 2028. FIs and corporates value our ability to originate, transform and distribute risk by our markets and banking teams. In markets, we'll keep growing our client flows. And in banking, we will keep origination and distribution growth at double-digit levels. And clients rely on the transaction service business for the seamless movement of cash, trade and custody around the globe. We will expand the transaction services business as the rate headwind is slowing, and we are better hedged. We will continue to innovate within the digital asset space. Lastly, we'll continue to upskill our coverage banking team to provide more value to clients by ensuring that all our products are delivered seamlessly, and Jan Metzger will be joining us soon to lead this effort. Our income outlook is underpinned by the 5 long-term structural shifts that I've talked you through. Network as a percentage of our income stands at 67% today, and we're looking to push this past 70% by 2028. FI income makes up 54% of CIB today, and our goal is to reach 60% by 2030. Sustainable finance will continue to be an area of differentiation for us. The investments we're making in technology are getting us ready for the fiat and digital worlds to coexist and compete. And rising wealth participation is reshaping our markets, and we're perfectly aligned to capture this trend. These 5 long-term strategic focus areas will be supported by cost discipline in line with group targets. Improving capital return remains our North Star for resource allocation decisions. I'll now hand over to [ Ray ], who will talk more about the opportunity we see to supply CIB products and risk management advice to our affluent clients, and then I look forward to seeing you in the Q&A. Thank you. [ Ray ]?

Thank you, Roberto, and good afternoon. Bill started by talking about us being a super connector. And I thought I just had one slide to describe how we are super connected within the bank, right, between WRB and CIB. Now in the afternoon, when Judy presents, you will hear an affluent section that will talk about a very fast-scaling private bank. Today, we are a top 5 player in Asia, including Dubai in terms of AUM. Now with this fast growth, we have attracted a lot of ultra-high net worth clients. And these ultra-high net worth clients come in the form of individuals, family offices or multifamily offices. Their needs are evolving to be very, very sophisticated, right? And this is where we need to deploy the CIB solutions, right, to solution the corporates and also the trading teams that they have in their family offices. Now we -- to meet this demand, we have formed [ Vertex ], right? [ Vertex ] is a team, right? It's a sales coverage team for such family offices. And this is a big investment for the bank, right? We actually started 2 years ago, but we are really formalizing it this year, right? Tanuj spoke about one SCB, and this is exactly what one SCB is. The promoters, the individuals, the family offices, they want to talk to 1 group of people, right, instead of 2. So with one group of very specialized individuals that knows promoters, individuals, family offices, there are nuances in family offices. And also technical CIB solutions, we believe we can scale this franchise a lot, lot bigger. Now you can see that in the last couple of years -- I mentioned we started 2 years ago. There's a lot of strong 2-way referrals, right? You see that clients which are onboarded in CIB referred by private banking and the other way around has really grown by double-digit CAGRs. Now these clients have real needs. Right? These clients have companies, they have trading platforms, et cetera. And you can now see in the pie chart in the last couple of years -- and these are completed deals -- that we have facilitated many of such transactions within the bank. So private banking clients, ultra-high net worth, family offices, in the pie chart, these are the transactions that we have done so far in the last 2 years. Moving forward, we also have a very, very strong pipeline. In fact, year-to-date, right, I'm just counting the pipeline, right? We have probably 20 mandated pipelines just year-to-date with a bigger pipeline, which is we hope to be mandated. We will go into other solutions that CIB offers in terms of hedging, in terms of M&A and also bespoke lending. We spoke about RWA, and we have excess deposits for a lot of these promoters and individuals in their companies. If we bank them on both sides, we are safer. So with that, thank you very much, and I think we're open for questions.

Okay. Thank you. So we've got Roberto on the line. We also have Mark Bailey, the CFO of CIB, and we also have Ray. So I'm going to try -- we're a bit tight on time, so we're going to try and get around as many of you as we can. James, at the back, you haven't had a question yet.

It's James here from Rothschild & Co Redburn. Roberto, a question for you, please. Just on Page 70, you broke down the return on risk-weighted assets or financial institutions versus the corporate business. But given that the world is an increasingly uncertain place, we've got supply chain diversification, more liquidity preference, I think, especially since Liberation Day, do you think there's potential for that 6.1% return on risk-weighted asset on the corporate side to kind of move closer to the financial institutions bucket?

Thank you for the question. Look, the first thing I'd like to address is, obviously, we don't target the subsegment specifically because they are a continuum, particularly in a world where we're really focused on originate to distribute. The trades work because they're circular. And the value we provide to one set of clients is also because of the value we provide to other sets of clients with an intermediary. We've been on a journey to really improve corporate returns by decreasing our suboptimal book and really trying to cross-sell more, as I mentioned in one of the other slides, multiple products per client. So if you ask me as a manager of the business, I think there's upside with all our client segments. But the point you make that as the supply chain shift, there is more opportunity or more wallet probably to have fee income as opposed to sort of capital-heavy lending income for solutions as those corporates shift. So the answer is yes. I think there's an opportunity to do that and then raise the profile of our returns across both segments.

[ Aman ]?

Two questions. Could you help us -- what percentage of your AUM in your wealth business is a referral from the commercial bank would be really helpful. And the second is in relation to the 5% to 7% revenue CAGR you've given us at the group level, can you help us think about the contributions from the 3 main CIB business lines? So within transaction banking -- transaction services, global markets and global banking, what's the growth rate that you would encourage us to kind of model as the contribution towards the 5% to 7% at the group level?

Okay. So on the Private Banking, I'll turn to Ray. And on the 5% to 7% contributions, I'll turn to Mark.

Sure. So with regards to the referrals from commercial banking or corporate banking into WRB, it happens in 2 forms, right? The first is on the priority side, which -- where we do employee banking of our corporates into WRB. And there, we see a lot of traction, right? Because these are regular savings and salary accounts across a lot of our corporate companies, right? Now I don't have the specific number, right? But in every single year, we see a lot of these corporates being serviced, and the employees in WRB. For private banking, I think it has just started, right? You saw the numbers there, right? The last 2 years, we are talking about hundreds of clients, right, being referred from CIB into private banking. The AUM, again, in absolute terms, I do not have. But one thing that Judy will share is for all of the corporate referrals into private banking, the private banking AUM of these individuals are 4x larger than the average private banking clients, right? And this represents that we are truly -- and it doesn't happen overnight, right? When they first come, it's not 4x. But as we keep doing One SCB via platforms like this, when they get happier, they give us more on both sides.

Okay. I'll jump in. On transaction services, I really encourage you to think of we have spent an awful lot of time trying to build a kind of super connector that gives you the ability to do payments of volume at speed. Last May, we pointed out to the fact that this business had some headwinds because of rates. And if we look forward now, we've hedged the book very well, and we're more optimistic about the profile of that business. And then I would just sort of rewind your mind back maybe 12 months to what I said about the banking and market segments being fee engines for this business, O2D driving that kind of banking segment, you've seen some really good numbers coming out of that. And when you look at the flow business or the flow element of markets, you can see that differentiation coming through. So those are the sort of 3 pillars we think of.

Okay. Let's go to Amit.

It's Amit Goel from Mediobanca. Yes, maybe it's actually a bit of a follow-up. But just wanted to make sure I understand as well, when we talk about the target of supporting group 5% to 7% income growth, I think on the group level, there's obviously greater weighting into noninterest income and maybe on the WB side, more on the liability piece. So I just wanted to understand what you mean by supporting it. I mean, should you then expect the growth here to be stronger than the 5% to 7% or in line or just to check the thinking on that.

Well, by my question. So we're really committed to just delivering a group outcome. If you think about what Mana spoke about and what Dan spoke about in terms of raising liabilities and where we deploy them, the game the standard charges is to work as a group and to walk toward as a group goal where we're efficient in our balance sheet deployment. So we are not giving a specific target for you, but at a group level, you should be very confident in our outlook.

Chris Hallam from Goldman Sachs. Just 2. So first, you talked about global markets being capital-light. Maybe if you could just speak about the different levels of capital intensity across rates, credit, EM, both comparing those businesses to each other and also comparing those other franchises that people may look at as well. And then the second question on FX. I guess that 4% growth is maybe a little bit lighter than one would have assumed looking back in the past. So maybe where do you see the growth in FX going ahead? And what is Prism and custody going to do to support that growth rate?

So I think I'll pass that one to Roberto. Do you hear the question?

Yes. Thank you. So yes, our markets business, if you think of the continuum of FX rates and then to the credit business, that is the way you think about the RWA density going. Obviously, FX is very light, a little bit heavier than that. And then the credit -- the flow credit business, a little bit heavier than that. It's got some structured financing the repo business, et cetera, et cetera. The balance of those is something that we feel is very agile compared to other FICC franchises. There's very little asset-heavy business in them. And if you look at the flow businesses, the ones that are delineated in the flow chart, they are effectively largely going electronically, largely very low consumers of RWA. Occasionally, obviously, the macro business will have RWAs and deal contingent forward, things like that in the episodic space, but the business is largely capital.

It's Andrew Coombs from Citi. I had a question on Slide 63, which is on the network growth. you provided this exact same chart a year ago at the seminar. But one thing stood out to me, which is that the total FCIB income used to be the third highest bar on this chart. It used to be above the peers. And now you get slightly below. I'm assuming it's the transaction services business you just touched on the hedging. But perhaps you could just elaborate on what happened last year, why you think you saw slightly lower growth than the peers? And if that was driven by the nonnetwork side or a combination of both?

[ Mark ]?

Thank you. I think you've answered my question for me. So if you think of in 2023, what you saw is really a surge in the transaction services platform in terms of income. And then what we have done, and you can see this in our IRBB disclosures, you can see that we've hedged our portfolio, extended the WAM on our portfolio. And therefore, as we have done that, we've locked in forwards at current rates, but that means that you're not seeing growth in '24 or '25 at the sort of '22, '23 levels.

Okay. Joe?

One thing that seems to be changing is [indiscernible] trend fossil fuels versus renewables for a long time. If you look at the 5-year plan out of Beijing in March, clearly this is [indiscernible] partly in China. How have you sized the RMB international for the CIB is fairly shorter?

Manus, do you want to take them?

Yes. I mean that is a question that we could spend the next 2 hours on -- it's a very interesting question. So we think it is an unstoppable trend. And there's -- and in fact, we've made the announcement where we are actually having someone who will be one of my direct reports of the CIB management team who will focus [ Jerry Zeng ] on RMBI on public and as a P&L opportunity in its own right. So you can think of the macro environment in a couple of ways. One, the market is still short Chinese duration and RMB. If you look at by any sort of metric, the amount of government bonds of CGBs owned outside China and the amount of FX flows versus global trade percentages, all this sort of stuff is not an equilibrium. And so there's this trend towards equilibrium that will -- even at sort of everything else as air leads to an increase in R&D business where we have all the licenses. We're a very strong market maker in bonds and FX, and we're one of the leading banks that provide those in and out of China. So just the data environment from that -- reaching that equilibrium, I think, is very exciting for us. Now on top of that, when you add in digital assets, that's quite interesting. You have dollar stablecoins, which clearly are, in my view, a way to increase dollar money, right? They have backstop for U.S. treasuries. And they, in theory, can create instant settlement transactions to dollars whoever is trading. We don't have the equivalent of the trusted stablecoin dollar stablecoins now in -- out of China. And let's see what happens there. But clearly, as the world is evolving, you can see that, that's becoming an interesting space as well. So when I look at CIB or Chart's capability in China and RMB in general as a theme in our corridors, the importance of China in the corridors to various parts of the world and the growth in digital assets, which I don't know where digital assets end up. But I do know that if they become a primary source of the monetary system, I doubt very much China will not be part of that. If you look at these 2 trends together, and they see very excited for having significant growth in this opportunity for us. But ideally, we have the resources. We have the tech spend going from it. You heard from Noel earlier today, just before. So we find that, that is a very, very positive lever for operating leverage in our business.

And Joe, just to remind you, we have a separate breakout session on RMI later. Kian?

You don't have an equity business, but there -- and I'm not expecting to build one, but there are a lot of off-the-shelf products you can buy white label, I'm not advertising, but just trying to understand why are you doing that?

Look, I think there's traditional equity businesses, which we're not in and you're not asking why we're not in. We have a strong history of partnering with clients on a variety of inorganic transactions. We are users of equities and equity derivatives and structured solutions. And we feel that we have a very complete offering to our clients for their capital needs across the spectrum. It's -- if you look at the completeness of everything, it's a missing link. It's a very expensive link, as you know, to bring in. And going forward, that we will have an equities business. But if going forward, the right partner appears to do certain transactions, certainly in a space of technology, digitalization, et cetera, and distribution, we may well look at.

Perlie?

It's Perlie from Bank of America. So maybe just following up a little bit on equity markets. IPO market is red hot at the moment. So I suppose any way that you think you can benefit from that any product suite you want to build in order to take some advantage of that trend. And also, I suppose one of the trends we keep hearing is that a lot of realization will happen as a result of these IPOs and that would have an intern with the private bank business. So given that you're not so involved in the equity markets, do you think you've got those relationships anyway and that when these entrepreneurs become billionaires, then you have that relationship to bring them to the private bank. So that's number one. And number two, very quickly with Mark on income return on RWA. So target is now greater than 25% in '28. It looks to me that last few years were maybe flattish or if not down a little bit year-on-year. So when do we expect the inflection point?

Okay. Ray, could you take the first one?

Sure. So I guess the best example is Hong Kong, right, because Hong Kong is experiencing a big equity IPO, well, last year and this year. Actually, we do have a lot of relationships. And I think the relationships, right, for equities in the case of Hong Kong starts from China, right? We have a strong commercial banking, SME banking, right, business in China. And it's been there for hundreds of years, right? So the relationship starts there, where these are all smaller enterprises, right needing some maybe capital, before advisory, before they come in for IPO. So a lot of these, we do have the relationships. So what can we do without an equities franchise? We can't take them to IPO. But we have been doing a couple of things with them, right? The first is when they IPO in Hong Kong, right, they need salary accounts. So on the individual perspective, they -- we actually bank the employees that are based in Hong Kong, right? That's one. Two, for the companies that we know very well because we have known them for many years, with some level of balance sheet, we can also give them some financing before the IPO. And this financing could be maybe not to the company, but to the individual, right? Because they've been sitting in China's experience, a lot of tech-led kind of IPOs. They have been sitting on PO money for a long time, right? And what they do want is to buy maybe a simple insurance, right? And they need liquidity for that to buy, right? When they IPO, the lockup period in Hong Kong is 6 months, okay? The equity bank that will bring them for IPO does have the first of the cherry ring in terms of subsidizing their shares. But after 6 months, we, again, will knock on their doors to say diversify, right? Why would a promoter having now liquidated a few billion dollars put all their monies in one bank. So after 6 months, we are in the play again. So maybe a short answer to that.

Mark?

Yes. Thank you for your question, Per. So when we look at 2025 numbers, I think the critical sort of point that you're making out is that we dropped off from sort of $720 million down to $700 million. That is a factor of just the fact we had the 400 -- $600 million rather of rate headwind. So if you normalize for that and then you recognize that what we did is we deployed into the fee income of markets and banking, then it's perfectly rationable the actions that we took. As you look forward, we do see opportunities to now accrete from here. We've targeted a lot of time and resources to going after the suboptimal RWA layer. But as Roberto sort of spelled out, the target now is to kind of go up against the clients where we can go deeper with who we've got technological advantages where we have a history with those clients, and we think we can generate greater returns.

Great. I think we've got time for one more question. Can't say you've been waiting on time.

I have 2 questions. The first is on market business because for some trading activities, even if they are client-driven in some extreme market conditions, it might also have some earnings volatility on the banks, like we have said, we have seen of the summer trading on one of the U.S. top banks in the first quarter. So how do you plan your trading across different asset classes to try to keep a quite stable or less volatile earnings of the bank? The second is on the 2 map charts of the network income growth on Page 66 and 67. Yes, about the China MENA flow. On the FI side, there is a 8% jump. So I want to know what is behind this kind of big jump. But on the other hand, on the MNC side, there's no number I assume which could quite small. So I also want to know why the China to MENA MNC income is not that high because we know a lot of Chinese companies are moving there.

Thank you. So on your first one around how the market trading desk is set up, I'll pass that to Roberto. And on the second, I'll pass it to Mark.

Yes. Thank you for your question. So obviously, we have a very developed risk framework together with our second-line colleagues on where we deploy across our markets business. Obviously, what you say is correct, if there's massive market dislocation and one has large positions, that can create negative P&L event. However, we feel that over the cycles, you've seen in our numbers, we're pretty good at managing those. We don't tend to have short game positions. We're not enormous bulk traders in terms of structures like some other houses are, be it FX or equity derivative. And we kind of do most business based on very strong client flow. So to me, if I think of what I worry about for the market business and the flow business, it isn't massive volatility. As long as volatility is tradable, we tend to do very well because of the flows, our risk management system, our trading and sales collaboration, the incentives are completely aligned. So the collaboration on the flow business is the strongest I've seen in my career also because of that. To me, the thing that I don't like and none of our traders like is when clients don't do anything and nothing moves. that is more risky, I think, for our revenues. And we haven't seen that, I don't really foresee that than big sort of discrete volatility. So basically, we have a risk management framework and the kind of business that isn't really at risk to these big gamma shocks, largely speaking.

Thank you. Okay. Can I just add to that point and reference you to when Rebecca was talking about the single platforms that we have built. We spent a lot of time building a platform called SE, which is our market risk platform that allows us to see the risk across multiple products, which I think is talks to that thesis that we have of you build a platform and you replicate it and it helps you monetize flows. The second question that you had around network. What we have seen is clearly financial institutions from China investing into the Middle East. So the Middle East area has been traditionally kind of, I guess, investing into other areas, and we've seen that flow kind of change, and they've been attracting investment. When it comes to the corporates, what we have seen is the flows are kind of going from China into ASEAN, and we've seen them going into kind of Africa region, less so in terms of the Middle East for us at this stage. But we've seen a significant pickup in corporates in Africa and Middle East. So just to make one last comment. I expect that, that corridor of China into the Gulf, as I also mentioned in the presentation, to be a big growth opportunity going forward. The operational resilience spend, which we've already seen some announcements, for example, by ADNOC is going to be significant post this geopolitical situation. And I would expect China and some other North Asian countries to be front center in winning mandates to help infrastructure builds in the GCC in the years to come. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you very much to Roberto, Mark and Ray. I'm pleased to say it's now lunch. So... [Break]

Okay. Welcome back, everyone. We're going to have a short video, and then we're going to have Judy from WRB to present. Thank you. [Presentation]

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back. Hope you had a good lunch. I'm Judy Hsu, CEO for Wealth and Retail. It's a real privilege to be here to talk to you about our wealth and retail business. About 18 months ago, we had an affluent seminar. My colleagues and I talked a lot about our pivot to affluent wealth and international. At that seminar, we also shared with you a number of medium-term targets. Well, since then, we've been executing strongly with pretty exceptional results. Today, we have a much larger, higher returning business with very strong underlying momentum. More importantly, our growth -- sorry, I was supposed to click to the first slide. More importantly, our growth is built on a scalable and a durable engine, enabling us to capture the changing needs of our clients on the back of these very strong powerful trends that Bill and the team talked about. We sit at the intersection of structural wealth flows. Everybody knows this. In Asia, wealth is growing at a much higher pace than global average, creating a much larger base of clients, of affluent clients. a high percentage of those clients are business owners. And we see a very similar trend within our client base, and that creates opportunities for us to do more with our clients across both their personal wealth and their business. And that's something we're pursuing, and I will talk a little bit more later. Hong Kong and Singapore are emerging as the fastest-growing wealth hubs. We have very strong franchises in Hong Kong. Earlier, you heard Bill talk about us as being one of the no issuer. In Singapore, we are known as the fourth local bank. Now these positions are hard, hard to beat. More importantly, we have a trusted brand and coupled with our well-established domestic franchises in India, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, it really gives us a really privileged access to the wealth flows across our footprint. Intergenerational wealth transfer is accelerating, and you heard that from Anil as well. And that's creating demand for advisory, structuring and international diversification. We are investing behind those capabilities. And you heard from Ray, our private bank is growing very rapidly, and we are helping our clients in these very critical transitions. Younger investors are entering the markets earlier. We are positioning our 2 digital banks, Mox and Trust to capture that trend. I talked about us executing strongly with exceptional results. Let's start with optimization. We've been driving optimization of our business quite relentlessly. We've exited a number of markets, 10 markets to be exact. These are subscale off-strategy markets. We've also exited a large number of unsecured portfolios. These are really undifferentiated businesses where we don't think we can -- we have the right to win. We've also tail managed more than 2 million clients. Our RWA from unsecured is down $5 billion, and our headcount has been -- has reduced by 20%. So really a lot of work on optimizing the business and creating capacity to invest, and we are investing. At the seminar 18 months ago, we had told everybody that we were going to invest $1.5 billion over 5 years, and that investment is happening at pace in all the areas that we said we would in relationship managers and specialists, strengthening our international banking platform and of course, our wealth capabilities, extending our affluent segment to focus on private and priority private and of course, advancing our digital platforms and elevating our brand, especially in affluent. We've grown our AUM. We've doubled our AUM in the last 5 years. And as you can see, at a much faster pace over the last 2 or 3 years. Now executing such a transformation really requires everybody aligned behind a common North Star and a common set of goals. And you can see what we're focused on, acquiring the right clients, serving them well so that we can deepen those relationships, on capacity, but more importantly, productivity, digital transformation and of course, most importantly, continue to serve our clients and improving that client experience. And the results are very, very consistently strong. We've acquired 130,000 new affluent clients for 13 consecutive quarters. We've doubled our net new money to $52 billion, and we've grown our RMs by 18%. And these are all over the last 2 years. We've reduced our time for onboarding our clients by 2/3, working very closely with Noelle and the team. That's something we're really focused on. And this is what we're really proud of. We've achieved best-in-class Net Promoter Scores in 8 out of our 9 markets. We've done that in 3 consecutive years. Our clients are actively advocating for us. 1 out of 5 new-to-bank clients is coming through referrals from our clients. So we are firing on all cylinders and pulling in the same direction behind a very clear growth strategy. And those efforts are leading to very strong growth and improved returns. Our income is up 9% CAGR. Our Wealth Solutions income is up 26% CAGR, underpinned by very strong growth in our AUM at 28% CAGR. And earlier, you also heard from [ Menus ] that we are creating a much higher level of net liquidity for the group. RoTE is up 300 basis points to 19.4%, and that's on the back of our income having a bigger share from our affluent business now at 70%. You've seen some of these numbers earlier. When we are building a Wealth Business, it's just not about growing very fast, but it's also building a business that is sustainable, that is well diversified. And we have built a very well-diversified wealth solutions business. The double-digit wealth income number that I talked about earlier that I referred to is not coming from just 1 or 2 markets, 15 markets from across our network delivered double-digit wealth income. And we've done that by replicating success -- successful wealth capabilities, products across our network very, very quickly. So when something works in one market, we will roll that out in another similar market. And that is really, again, the strength of our network that you heard a lot about today. Our Wealth Solutions income is also very well diversified by asset classes, bancassurance, capital markets, investment funds and others. Now the capital markets, as you can see, the blue part of that bar chart, it's a very large part of our business. It's grown very, very strongly at 32%, but that is not consist of just one asset class. It's FX, it's fixed income, it's hundreds of different payoffs and structured products, it's investment funds. So it's very, very well diversified. Now this diversification has enabled us to maintain a very healthy return on asset despite our AUM being doubled. Somebody is doing this because they don't want me to say that I'm outperforming the market, right? I wonder who. No, we are outperforming the market in both AUM. That's grown 29%, double that of our peers in Asia and net new money also more than doubled. And we are taking market share. We are -- you heard from Bill, the third largest wealth manager in Asia. Now I'm going to spend a bit of time to talk about the how. I'm going to unpack how 2 mutually reinforcing engines are driving our performance. Starting with our client ecosystem. It is differentiated because we don't source our clients from any one channel. It's not dependent on any one channel. In fact, this client ecosystem gives us very steady, repeatable, high-quality clients from our connected network, network referral, from upgrading from our very strong client continuum, from SME and corporate connectivity. We do a lot of brand and marketing led marketing programs that bring in new clients, of course, RM-led client growth. And we're also adding in, as I mentioned earlier, the 2 digital banks to our client continuum. So at the end of the day, it's also not just about more clients, about higher-quality clients at a lower cost of acquisition, again, creating that operating leverage that we've spoken about. This is our client continuum. I believe some of you may have seen this in the affluent seminar. We serve more than 2.6 million affluent clients across the continuum. This gives us a repeatable, scalable pipeline for upgrades along the continuum. The largest segment is our Priority Banking segment. This segment contributes to 50% of our income. It's a rich source of sticky deposits and of course, a feeder to our next segment, Priority Private. Now we've been investing in the top end of our wealth continuum, Priority Private and the Private Bank, anchored on our international banking proposition. These 3 segments are doing extremely well, and I'm going to go through each of them with you. Starting with International Banking. We stepped up our activation of our network, and that has led to very strong cross-border network referrals, which is up 30%. Our international banking clients is up 40%. We now have 400,000 international banking clients. That's led to our income growing 50% in this segment, net new money 2x, and more importantly, 1/3 of our international banking clients use us in more than one market. And in fact, you can see from these bar charts, when they use us in more than 1 market, the AUM goes up 2x, 3 markets, the AUM goes to 2.7x. And more and more of our clients are using us in more than 2 markets. Global Chinese is a big thrust for us, just given the opportunity. But if you look at our net new money mix, it remains very well diversified, 1/3 from global Chinese, 1/3 from domestic. We have a very strong franchise in Hong Kong. So we continue to grow our domestic business here. And another 1/3 from other international clients like Global Indian, ASEAN, et cetera. So it remains quite diversified. Priority Private. Priority Private is our high net worth segment that sits between priority and private. We've launched Priority Private in 7 markets across our network to just phenomenal success. Earlier, you heard from Ben, this is our newest yet to open Priority Private wealth center. He didn't mention to you that wealth sits at the heart of the shopping district of [ Coway ] Bay. We chose this place because of the fabulous Feng shui. We're not doing the Feng shui for ourselves. We're doing the Feng shui for our clients. When they bank with us, when they place their wealth with us, they want to go to a place where they feel, hey, this is a good place. It is a good place. These wealth centers, now we have 20 of them across our network. This is where we hold a lot of client events, market updates, networking sessions, lifestyle events. And we encourage many of our clients to bring their friends, relatives, associates. And this is another -- a very strong source of member get member when clients come here and they bring their friends and we open many new accounts, priority private accounts. But the biggest source of our -- as I mentioned earlier, the biggest source of Priority Private clients is upgrade. 3/4 of our priority private clients come from upgrade, which makes this model highly, highly scalable. As you can see, the income here is pretty amazing. It's up 80% priority private, net new money 10x, number of clients, 70% up. And when a client move up from priority to private, their AUM with us triples. This is one of our highest returning segments. And over time, we have the scope to double this client base. You heard a lot about the Private Bank already from Ray. We are fast scaling the private bank. We are now #5 in Asia. We're investing in RMs. Our RM base here is up 30%, working closely with our colleagues in CIB to better serve our ultra-high net worth clients. It's a very exciting segment. Our private bank is profitable and highly accretive. RMs, very often, when I do these investment seminars, people always ask us about RMs. I'm going to talk a little bit about how we think about RMs. We've done very well in terms of bringing in new RMs. As you can see, we've grown our RMs by 18%, and we have disproportionately invested in more senior RMs. Now that population has grown by 40%, double the number of the overall growth. But it's not just about adding RMs and growing linearly. When we bring in RMs, our job is to support them well so they become productive and successful as soon as possible. And we've done that. You can see that our RM breakeven is very, very healthy. This is really important because when an RM joins a new organization, if he or she becomes productive quickly because we enable them with onboarding, very strong onboarding client support, giving them training, giving them specialists, they bring other RMs on board. In fact, 30% of our RMs are referred by our existing RMs. And that's a fabulous -- I think that speaks incredibly about our reputation in the market and the momentum as an employer of choice. And you can see our RM value proposition, actually one of which is our international and internal RM mobility. We don't only have a client continuum. We have a talent continuum. Many of our RMs grow with us as well, which is super important. I talked earlier about the opportunity to bank business owners across both sides of the bank. The biggest opportunity, I think, would be China Plus One. We're seeing more and more Chinese SMEs, mainly MEs are expanding their businesses overseas. And given our strong corridors and network, we've been supporting them in that expansion. And as they bring their businesses overseas and they create wealth overseas, we are then, of course, the natural partner for helping them manage their wealth. So I see that as a really big opportunity. Now 20% of our SME RMs are already our affluent clients. And when they give us both sides of their business, their AUM goes up by 5x. So again, it really speaks to, I think earlier, Ray also talked about CIB and the private bank. So doing more with clients really helps us increase that wallet. We have our SME RMs and our affluent RMs working together to visit our clients and our referrals are -- the referral is up 3x. The digital banks, Mox and Trust, they have reached meaningful scale. And in the next phase of growth, they will continue to bank the mass market, retail clients in Hong Kong and Singapore. But at the same time, we're strengthening the digital wealth capabilities to really be the attractive place to be, the platform to be for their investments. And we see both Mox and Trust as the incubator of next generation of wealth clients for the group. Leading wealth engine. This is the other engine of our 2 engines that I talked about. I think you're more familiar with this. We have been investing a lot in our CIO capabilities so that we can provide much deeper, much broader insights for our clients. So that's the brain. Our open architecture product platform is a real differentiator. We work very closely with our partners, be it asset managers or investment banks to innovate, create exclusive products first to market, and we've been doing that very well, and you can see that driving a lot of our sales as well. We've been digitizing many of our journeys. I gave you some numbers earlier. And now we are adding AI to power our entire advisory process. This is the engine that drives speed, scale delivery and performance for our clients. Speaking about AI, and you're going to hear more from my colleagues, Mohammed and [ Lei Chu ] in the breakout room. And of course, you heard from Noelle earlier. What we're building is an operating model that will leverage our Agentic AI to support the entire life cycle of a client from prospecting, onboarding, advisory, deepening and servicing. And through that, we believe that it will create even greater value for the business. You hear more and really welcome you to look at what we're thinking around this area. Okay. Moving to our targets. Our strategy is working. Momentum is strong. I think we have a very, very strong, resilient business. And we are committed to reach $200 billion -- cumulative $200 billion net new money from 2025 to 2028. Also, we're committing to delivering double-digit wealth income from 2026 to 2028 and bringing forward 1 year in reaching our assent income of 70% of our total income by 2028. And that, of course, will help the group deliver our 15% RoTE by 2028. I just want to end by saying that we are extremely proud of what this franchise has become. And we are super, super excited, my colleagues and I about what where we will go from here. And now I would like to invite Jean for Q&A. Thank you. By the way, sorry, Jean is the CFO for WRB.

Yes. Thank you, everyone. We had a couple of questions earlier that I think might make sense to start with first. So the first one, I think it was in [indiscernible] management's section, which was around the net new money and how sustainable that $50 billion could be beyond 2028, but also the potential for that to drive higher. And there was also a second question, I think, around the margin on the assets under management and how sustainable that was. So maybe, Jean, you could take the first and then -- sorry, Jean take the second.

Yes. Net new money is a result of us growing our clients and keeping that relationship. So if I look at the net new money, the strong growth in the last few years, it is really from both new clients and existing relationships. The other driver is also the mix of our business. We've invested heavily in international. at Priority Private and the Private Bank. And what we've seen, and you saw from my slide that those segments are growing very, very fast. And I think the momentum we are seeing in the business is very strong. And hence, we're confident to upgrade our target to reach the $200 billion now, bringing that target 1 year forward. Just keep in mind that this is a pretty aggressive target. We are growing faster than our competitors. We are taking market share. And I think it's also important to grow quality rather than quantity. So I hope that answers your question on net new money. And Jean?

Yes. So turning to return on AUM, you saw the chart which Judy shared before. We have been hovering around 130 to 140 basis points over a fairly large number of years. But more recently, as we converted a few client mandates in custody to AUM, our ROA levels are now at 1%. Underlying this, we see strong monetization of our AUM and deepening of clients. What will drive sustainability here is essentially the diversification of our business. We are building very strong affluent franchises in multiple markets. You saw the double-digit CAGR growth in wealth income in more than 15 markets. Judy talked about the diversification of our products, which both capital market products and managed investments growing strong, double digit, 30% plus. And finally, it is our client continuum. We operate across the client continuum with different profile of clients from investors, transactors, savers. And together, this will help us to maintain sustainability in our ROE.

Great. So okay. I'm going to go to James at the back.

James [indiscernible] from Redburn. I've got 2, please. The first is on the custody portfolio, you transfer, I think, very much for kind of calling out exactly the impact that it's had. But that's still a big chunk of AUM. How long does it take that to get fully invested because that could be really quite a material movement on your revenue line if you get it up to the kind of [ 140 ] adjusted level. And then the second question is your affluent business, everything you say about, it sounds really good. But then I guess what it implies is that the mass market retail is much less profitable -- what are the plans there do you have? You've still got, I think, $130 billion of loans in WRB. I presume that not much of that relates to the affluent. So where do you take the mass market business from the openings?

So I think on the first one, I'll ask Gene to come in on the custody portfolio. And on the second, Judy.

Yes. So coming to the custody portfolio. These are long-term relationships, right? And we don't expect them to fully monetize. Really, it depends on the client needs and what he wants to do with that portfolio. In the short term, sometimes it is about using it for leveraged lending. But in the longer term, as they think about diversifying the well, that creates opportunities for us to move them across asset classes. But larger custody mandates typically held by promoters take a fairly long period of time for monetization. And before I pass to Judy, in terms of our lending book, $130 billion, A large part of that is mortgages and secured lending. The unsecured as we already talked about running that business down.

Yes. exactly what Jane said, our lending book is predominantly to -- now to serve our affluent clients mortgages and secured letting wealth lending, which is a growing piece. As to our personal banking or mass market segment, Singapore, Hong Kong, these are attractive markets that we will continue to pursue. We are bringing, as I mentioned earlier, the 2 digital banks into the continuum to capture the growth in this opportunity. In the other markets, what we're doing is, as we -- you heard from Manny as we are exiting the single lending relationships like personal loans, many of the books we've decided to exit it. We are reallocating the resource to actually go out and acquire upper end of the personal banking clients, creating a much richer source of clients for upgrade into priority. So you can say that everything we do now is quite focused on supporting the growth of the affluent business in the long run.

Do you want to just comment on the proportion that mortgages?

Yes. So yes, I can share. So around 20% of that is wealth lending, the leverage rental lending we talked about. The remaining around 50% plus is mortgages and then there's a little bit of SME and rest is our unsecured CCPL. That's kind of the broad mix of the...

The largest is mortgages.

The largest is mortgages, yes.

[indiscernible].

No, we're not exiting-- we're not exiting. Yes. Okay. Yes. Yes. And many of the mortgages are, like I said, supporting our affluent client.

Okay. I'm going to go to Melissa. I don't think she's asked the question yet.

Melissa from Goldman Sachs. Just in terms of market share, you said you have been increasing over time. In terms of your targets, do you see yourselves being able to overtake the next position in terms of market share? Or do you think like you do it slowly and just because it's growing as a pie will all be growing together. The other thing is within the segment and global Chinese other international and domestic. Where do you see as the biggest growth cycle in the next like 5 years as we see it? And also in China as property markets get better, are we a bit more concerned whether or not the -- coming here. So it's that a bit?

Okay. So I think the -- well, I think both of those probably to Judy. So the first one around AUM. So we're -- I think you were referencing AUM, right in terms of our ranking and how soon we could get to number 2? That was the question.

Yes. And the third is the -- where do I see the opportunity Well, we are closing the gap with #2. And we would like to close that gap faster. But we also acknowledge that this is a highly competitive market. We are investing. We're growing fast, and we hope to accelerate that closing of the gap.

Can I just -- in terms of posting the gap, is there any consideration for acquisition of portfolios to accelerate that a little bit more all organic?

Well, if there are opportunities and we're always reviewing, we will definitely explore. But as Bill mentioned yesterday, currently, we don't see anything yet also because I think you can see, organically, we're growing really, really fast. On the second question on the diversification. I think the global Chinese will still be a huge I think, part of the future growth in the next 5 years, not necessarily from growth -- the flow from China into Hong Kong and Singapore. We talked about the IPO earlier that's one that the wealth is -- of course, that liquidity sort of event is one. But I talk about the business -- the large number of businesses coming out of China into ASEAN. In fact, Malaysia, I don't know, people are familiar with Asian. The Malaysian government has this program called Malaysia my second home. And recently, we had a global Chinese event in Malaysia, where we had more than 200 global Chinese attending that event. They may all business people, we're banking them on both sides. We have SME, and we have affluent franchise. In fact, we have extended our global Chinese proposition to Malaysia just because there's such a large and growing population of Chinese often community. So I still see that and they're doing business outside and growing their wealth. ASEAN is growing not as fast, and we are taking market share in parts of Malaysia, Indonesia, but that Vietnam, right, but we have to be very selective. -- in terms of -- Vietnam. So I think that Global Indian, so I would still think that these are the larger client segments that will continue to be the biggest thrust for us from an international banking perspective.

Thank you very much. I wanted to check, so the framework that you've painted for thinking about Wealth Solutions revenue growth, the double digit. I think that's a pretty consistent framework that you've presented for a few years, which is double-digit AUM formation, some view of margins and that kind of underpins the double-digit revenue guide. But you're clearly materially outperforming that a sustained period of time. I mean looking at your wealth invested assets in Q1 are up 1% year-on-year. Obviously, you revenue growth rate was 35% higher year-on-year within Wealth Solutions. So can you help us kind of marry the disconnect, the massive disconnect, which is between the double-digit revenue CAGR in the medium term. and the current outsized level of growth that we'll deliver. And is that simply driven by transactional activity, brokerage revenues, what's driving it? And I guess, when we're trying to project forward, should we continue to think an upward SKU versus whatever this double-digit revenue CAGR is? And the second question, I was just wondering, in terms of your net new money, could you help us kind of roughly break out how much of that is coming from your existing customer base versus the new to bank customers, if you've got a rough split, that would be really helpful.

Okay. So I think on the first one, I think I'll turn to Judy and on the second one on the split of the net new money for Jean.

So when we think about our double-digit target, it's really a medium-term target, right? And it's not trying to predict the next quarter or even for 2026. We want to grow this compound business in double-digit growth rate. And that's the vision for this business. There will be some quarters where you're going to see higher growth rate and there will be some quarters where you won't. There are uncertainties in the markets, inflationary pressure and other potential shock that we would want to take into consideration as we set the double-digit target. But right now, the underlying momentum is strong. We are getting net new money. We're deepening with existing clients, which I think that's the next question that Jean can share with you. And we continue to be very excited around the opportunity of how this business will continue to grow. And hence, we are committing a double-digit CAGR and really is from 2026 to 2028. So it is an upgrade of our target actually.

Yes. So coming back to your question, first of all, you can split it into 3 client types, right, new to bank, upgrades and then the existing plans. When it comes to upgrades last year, 10% of our net new money, around 8% of our AUM came from upgraded clients. When we measure new to bank clients, we typically look at their contribution to our growth. So around 2/3 of our net new money comes from a little less -- when it comes from new-to-bank clients. And they also delivered 2/3 of our wealth income growth. Of course, the absolute comes from the existing client base as well. So that's how we kind of think about the mix of our business.

But let me just define the new to bank. New to bank is not somebody who just came in yesterday. We count you to bank as somebody who's been onboarded for the last 12 months because it does take time for us to onboard the clients, build a relationship deepen. And so the net new money and even our wealth income is a bit of a lag, right? So the leading indicators would be are you onboarding new clients. The other thing I want to add is we're changing the mix of our clients. right? So today, it could be 2/3 from new clients, but we're continuing upgrading the quality of our clients as we pivot to affluent and more of the net new money will come from existing clients because we also upgrading the mix and the quality of our existing clients. So I just want to add those 2 points.

[indiscernible] Bank of America, you mentioned that the market is quite competitive. But just to understand your proposition is a little bit better because as I can tell, a lot of success comes from a lot of lifestyle branded initiatives, including the very famous tape partnership. So can you help us understand, first of all, the economics of these things, I can't imagine that partnership will come cheap, but also just in terms of proposition, it's sort of a lifestyle element. Is that one of the ways to think about it? And also like giving miles in terms of like I think the payroll accounts as there are a lot of these initiatives I would love to hear a bit more about it?

Sure. So the initiatives you talk about those initiatives for us to acquire local clients. The Cate car is fabulous partnership. It's true. It's not cheap, but it more than the return on that is fabulous. And if you look at our partnership, we've aligned our propositions within the Cafe cards. It also has a priority private card. I hope you have that one. Anyway, it's a fabulous card. You earn miles. We get a lower -- when we buy miles because of the bulk that we buy, we're able to acquire those miles obviously at a lower rate than the retail clients. And then we use our mile clients who bring in net new money, right? And it's entirely accretive. We don't give that to anybody. We are very, very -- one of the KPI is not just growing clients, grow the right clients. we look at the channels, new clients from various channels, the quality, the return, the ability to deepen and we get better and better at going out then to target the right client, right? So channel acquisition, the position in which you target our marketing program as well as these rewards is very, very important for us to break even on a lot of these lifestyle privileges. So those privileges are predominantly for local clients. Now international clients, the acquisitions is is generally a lot of referrals through the ecosystem that I spoke about.

It's Gary Lam from HSBC. The question is more on bank insurance. We noticed that bank insurance growth has exceeded agency growth in Hong Kong for a couple of years. among the leading banks around versus the 2 larger bank the presence here. The other 2 banks have an in-house insurance manufacturing arm. So as Standard Chartered grow in scale, would you consider strategically to explore an in-house manufacturing durability? And maybe the second question is on the data, it shows the time deposit growth materially exceeded your competitors who focus more on CASA. I was wondering whether it's a related observation that because your competitors sell more insurance policies, versus in Standard Chartered maybe you've been selling more structured deposits That's how to explain the difference in the deposit growth?

You're talking Hong Kong, right?

Yes.

First one for Julian for a second, I think for Gene, we also have a separate session on Hong Kong and Thursday as well.

I think we -- in our management team, we talked about should we think about becoming an asset management firm many times, given that we are focused on wealth. And should we also think about becoming insurance. But at this point, we're growing the business and focusing on serving the affluent clients, working with CIB on the CIB product capabilities. We have a great partnership with Prudential that's like more than 25 years. We've outpaced the agency model because they -- this partnership, they know who we are. They understand our clients, they understand the needs -- we work very, very well together, and that partnership has grown. So from a client perspective, from a product capability perspective, I don't think we need to go into insurance just to support the clients. So I guess, in other words, no. According to...

Yes. Coming to the deposit mix. I think if you see every quarter, we published a statistic, right? More than 50% of our deposits are in CASA. More recently, when the rates were higher, yes, we saw a faster growth of TDs and a bit more migration from CASA and to TDs. But our CASA mix remains healthy at over 50%. In a high interest rate environment, there are different ways in which a client could take advantage of the rate environment, TDs is one of them. It could be fixed income products. And of course, it could be savings products, which come from our bancassurance team. So really, it's a function of where the -- how the client wants to benefit from that rate environment. From our perspective, we grow strongly in deposits in Hong Kong. We have a very high market share, including Mark. I think it's close to 10% here.

I have this question is about PB because I think one of the...

Private bank?

A private bank, yes. One of the takeaway for me is that I didn't know that Stand is that strong in PB because perception-wise, that strong? Like that is not the focus, right? So my questions will then be how did you get to #5. And then what is the competitive advantage of Stand's Private Bank? Because I think private bank clients are very well sought after by every player on the streets, right? So what is your competitive advantage. My guess, I don't know if it's right or wrong, will be that very good -- and is very good at like, say, safe -- leveraging and CIB capacity by servicing FI clients, some of the products you may be able to take and make for the -- client versus the other shops may not have that capacity. I know if that is one of those capacity. So can you elaborate a bit on that? How did you get those clients and then grow the AUM at a much faster rate than the number of client growth, right, for PB? The second question is a minor one. I saw that there's a 20% reduction in headcount. But then on the other side, you also have 80% increase in RM. So how do you reconciliate that spend? Is it -- does it mean that in terms of, like, say, the back office, the middle office, you have a lot of reductions on that part? And then so that you can grow your RM and reduce the overall head count?

Yes. So I'll answer the second question. Nobody knows this better than Ray. He built the business -- is it okay if Rey answers the private bank question. So I'll just quickly talk about the headcount. The 20% is overall WRB. So it's a bigger number. The 18% is just the relationship manager, which is, I would say, 15%, 20% of our headcount.

It's a historic figure clear.

And that headcount includes our operations. So we -- in WRB, we have a larger operations team as well. It was also driven then and mass market branches. And mass market branches. Yes, yes, exactly. So the 20% is not the same denominator as the 18%. Ray, do you want to?

Yes. So on the private line, we've been growing rate -- if you set back, I think, in Judy's slide, top 5 today, right, 2 years ago, 8, right, 5 years ago, 4, right, in terms of AUM days. I would answer it in 3 parts, right? One, people, process, right, and product, right? From products, I think we have -- the auto platform really comes into play for private bank. You see just now capital markets. So what do private banking clients -- one? They want shop, right best execution. So capital markets, when your open platform for the high network -- all-time network, they're really rate-sensitive, right? So see, right, and best execution and sharp rates come from open platform rather than buying in-house. So that's products, process. I think process is super important, right? Because for affluent client, you really cannot afford to make mistakes. So with Noel and -- morning, like you see a lot of the investment into our platform and process. And that's not -- this is quite unique. I came from a pure play a couple of years ago, right? The level of dollar investment on product and process for pure play is far smaller compared to a universal bank letters because we have scale, right? So we can leverage best practices and scale and digitalization for process. So speed is one. Now the last, I guess, it would be people, right? Probably the most important. When you go from 14 to 18 -- to the RMs out there, they notice is, right? So success beat success. So people under how you can grow so well, and they come knocking to say, "Hey, actually, what's your formula, right? And we have seen other RMs come here and succeed very well. So more will come. It's not only the Rx, I think the seniority of the managers also the MT, right, when we go for events every year, the whole GMT is there, right? Think about that. The whole bank is really coordinated. And now with Vertex, I think we will just go even further.

Great. Think we've got time for one more question before we need to move to the speed dating sessions campaign.

I have a very quick question about numbers. About the 400,000 international clients. I assume all the global Chinese, global Indian and Global ASEAN clients are within that number, right? So we have some breakdowns of this international clients across the 4 layers of the affluent client base. both in terms of the numbers and AUM and incomes.

I'll just say which is the fastest-growing which is global Chinese and global Indian. I won't -- we don't disclose the mix. But the fastest growing is global Chinese and global Indian -- and these are our 2 biggest thrusts. We have designed a very curated and targeted propositions to help our global Chinese. In fact, our program for the global Chinese is called departure hall to arrival haul. So we support our clients when they move to Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam to make sure that, that whole experience onboarding is seamless. So you can see where we're investing. But we don't disclose the mix. Thank you.

Okay. With that, I think we are closing this session, and we're going to move to the speed, but thank you very much.

Thank you.