Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. A very warm welcome to the full year 2023 results presentation of EFG International. Today we have a meeting in person in Zurich, and obviously we have, as usual, our conference call and webcast for the people listening from abroad. I'm very pleased to welcome Giorgio Pradelli, CEO of EFG International, and Dimitris Politis, CFO and Deputy CEO of EFG International. As usual, we will have presentations in the beginning, and afterwards we have enough time for any questions you might have. As usual, I point out the disclaimer in the presentation as being read, and with that I hand over to Giorgio. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jens, and good morning. Good morning, everyone. Also from my side, a warm welcome to this full year 2023 results presentation. Obviously, I would like to thank everyone who is in the room in person in Zurich and everyone who is following us remotely from the webcast. Now, in terms of the presentation, I think it's going to follow the usual structure. As you can imagine, we are very pleased to present to you this very strong set of results. I will start with the highlights about our performance in 2023, and then I will hand over to Dimitris Politis, our CFO and Deputy CEO, who will present a detailed review of our financial performance. I will close again with the outlook and the priorities for 2024 and beyond. Now, starting with the highlights, I would like to mention that 2023 was not a very easy year to navigate. To be fair, from a financial market standpoint, it was easier than 2022. This is fair, but as you know, we had a banking crisis in March 2023 on both sides of the Atlantic. We had geopolitical tensions that continued unabated and actually accelerated towards the end of the year in the Middle East, and overall the macro situation was not very easy to read ahead of the events unfolding. Having said that, for us, for EFG, 2023 was a great year. It was actually a record year, and as you can see on page four, we have delivered record profitability, and basically we are one year ahead in the delivery of our 2025 strategic plan. We have delivered an IFRS net profit in excess of CHF 300 million. This is 50% higher compared to the previous year, and in our view, this is due to the fact that our business model is very resilient. We have been executing in a disciplined way our strategy that is a strategy that we have as a growth strategy that we have since now 2019. We have a very well-diversified business, and also we have to recognize that we had some tailwinds in terms of net interest income, but also we had a recovery on net commission income. In terms of growth, in terms of NNA, we posted a CHF 6.2 billion growth, which is equivalent to 4.4%. This is within our target range, and we are quite pleased with this performance. It is the 10th consecutive semester where we have a positive NNA growth, and besides the statistics and besides the figures, what I always like to say is that if you are able to grow in terms of NNA, it is because clients appreciate your products and services, because otherwise if clients were not satisfied and potential clients were not impressed with or didn't find our offering attractive, we would not be able to grow. They would not bring additional assets to us. So overall, a record year, and in this positive year we were able obviously to deliver very attractive returns to our shareholders. We are proposing a dividend per share of 55 Rappen. This is 22% higher than last year, but I think it's also the highest dividend per share that we have ever proposed to the General Assembly, so we are very pleased about that. If you include also the buybacks that we have done throughout the year, you can see that the returns delivered back to shareholders are actually quite attractive. Now, in terms of return on tangible equity, we are at 18.2%. This is already a level that is in line with our ambition in 2025, so we are quite pleased on that. But it's not only about delivering returns to shareholders today. It's also about building the firm for the future, investing in the future, investing for future growth, and we have focused mainly on three areas. These are in line with our 2025 strategy, and the three key areas are people, digital, and content. In terms of people, we hired more than 140 new client relationship officers and financial advisors, but actually we have expanded our talent base not only in the client-facing areas but also in most of our corporate and support functions. We believe that in order to win, you need to have the best possible team. We continue to invest in digital. Obviously, we want to enhance the client experience and the experience of our client relationship officers. We want to improve the efficiency and the resilience, and we are very pleased that in 2023 we concluded the upgrade of our core banking system T24 to all, and I emphasize all, banking booking centers across geographies. This is obviously very important because when you have one platform, this allows you to have synergies and allows you to accelerate time to market for the other digital solutions. We believe that our clients like our service, but obviously they want content. They want investment solutions, ideas. They want wealth planning, etc. And we have invested last year a lot in investment solutions, wealth solutions, and wealth planning, and this year we are going to have a new leadership with Andre Portelli, and I'm sure that we are going to focus even more on this area to support the delivery of high-value products to our client. So to sum up, I think that 2023 for EFG was a very strong year. We have accelerated our performance. We have increased the delivery of attractive returns to our shareholders, and we have positioned ourselves well for the future. With this, I hand over to Dimitris for a detailed financial review of our performance last year. Dimitris. Thank you very much. Welcome from me as well. And I just wanted to start by saying that it is a great pleasure and a privilege to be able to present these record results for EFG to this group. As you will see on page seven, the reason that I'm honored and I'm privileged by doing this is not just the absolute quantum. We have CHF 303 million of net profit, which is the highest profit we have recorded operationally ever as a bank. But for me, the more important element of this is the quality of this result, and the quality of this result comes, as you will see in the last five years, from a very consistent delivery of a very solid plan from a team that has gelled together to be able to deliver these CHF 303 million. On the highlights from the financials, profits are up 50%. They went from CHF 202 million- CHF 303 million. We do have revenue outperformance. As Giorgio said, we have been supported by tailwinds on net interest income. I'll come back later because clearly in the last three years we had tailwinds, but there were also some certain headwinds that we had to face. We strategically took the opportunity, given what was happening in the markets, to invest in future growth, and that investment comes in the form of hiring talent, but it also comes in accelerating delivery of digital channels. And in the end of the day, we managed to improve our operational efficiency. Our cost-to-income ratio is at around 73% compared to 76% last year, which comes with revenues up 13% and costs up 9%. Return on tangible equity is at 18.2, which is above our target range, and as Giorgio said, it's the highest dividend ever paid. It's 55 Rappen on every share. It's an increase of 22% compared to last year. The plan does not stop here. The plan clearly continues. We have another 2 years ahead of us to conclude our 2025 ambition. Our idea is to use this accelerated performance in year one as a stepping stone so that we can further improve our delivery and our profitability going into 2024 and 2025. On page eight, we have a summary of all the key figures. I'll quickly go through them. NNA growth 4.4%, a revenue margin of 99 basis points, 141 new CROs that have been either hired, approved, or signed by the end of 2023, and revenue generating assets under management of CHF 142 billion. Revenue growth up 13%, cost-to-income ratio 73.3%, and a bottom line profit of CHF 303 million, 18.2% return on tangible equity. On a very important note, on capital liquidity, we managed to generate more than 400 basis points of gross capital. Our core capital ratio has improved to 17%. Our LCR has improved to 230%, and the dividend is up 22%. The next two pages, pages nine and 10, have more detailed financials, so I'll move straight to page 11 that gives you an idea of how we've managed to achieve this over the last five years. You'll see that this year we had a net asset growth of 4.4%. We are again within the range of the 4%-6% that we have promised the market after a year in 2022, which was a bit more challenging. In terms of revenue margin, we are at 99 basis points. We are well ahead from the 85 basis points that we put out as a target back in October 2022. The 85 basis points was an indication of a margin of an average through the cycle margin. Clearly, we are above that, and we do expect these margins to continue to be higher than the through-the-cycle average going forward. Cost-to-income ratio has been improving every single year. Every single year we have been creating operating leverage. That's a very strong delivery from this team. As you saw, we started something close to 85 or even 90% at the beginning of the cycle. Now we're down to 73%, and the target is 69% in 2025. Under return on tangible equity, we are already at or even above the range that we're putting as a target, and we are targeting to continue delivery at a very high level. Page 12 has a breakdown of the journey of net new AUM. CHF 6.2 billion of net new assets in the year. Actually, in the last semester of 2023, we had the strongest NNA performance in the last four semesters, so NNA generation has been accelerating. We do have a strong pipeline in 2024, and this is also linked to the teams that we have already hired and that we expect to deliver in 2024, 2025, even in 2026. Markets were positive this year, about CHF 5 billion plus. Currencies, with the Swiss strengthening against all currencies, as you see, has a CHF 10 billion impact, which brought the, in relative terms, the AUM down. So we closed the year at CHF 142.2 billion of AUM. One thing to note, because there is clearly a lot of discussion about net interest income being very high and supporting the revenue line. What you need to consider is that in the last two years we have lost CHF 26 billion in nominal AUM because of market movements and currency movements. CHF 26 billion on a balance of CHF 140 billion is a huge amount, and even if you do it at 85 basis points, that's CHF 220 million of lost revenue because of market and currencies. It is order of magnitude, same negative impact as the positive that we've had from net interest income. So clearly we have been blessed with higher interest income in 2023, but let's not forget the things that have gone against us and the things that we had to manage also during the last couple of years. In terms of growth and who brought the growth, I pointed to the right-hand side of the chart, clearly new CROs, and here in new CROs we mention all the CROs that have been with us just three years, so people hired in 2021, 2022, and 2023. The new CROs have been driving the growth in 2023. Approximately half of that CHF 5.1 billion comes from hires which were done in 2023, so the latest group of people hired within the year have had a very strong contribution to net new assets. On the other hand, our existing CROs, so CROs that joined before 2021, had a smaller contribution than usual. These CROs have also been impacted by deleveraging, which we had during the course of the year. So I think that we are looking forward to a more stable condition so that existing CROs will move back to a more historical average performance going forward. On page 13, we have the usual breakdown of NNA production and AUMs by region. This year, Asia- Pacific has been the leader in NNA production, CHF 3.7 billion. A couple of reasons for that. We had all three cylinders in that region ticking very well, so we had Hong Kong producing, Singapore producing, and Australia producing at very good levels. To some extent, Asia- Pacific benefited because the hiring that they did was more front-loaded or earlier than the other regions, so the new CROs had more time to actually produce during the year, and also the level of hiring was substantial. Two other regions, Continental Europe, Middle East, and Latin America, with double-digit NNA growth. As you will see, they have contributed significantly to the total. The U.K. has been impacted by deleveraging. It's probably the region mostly hit in relative terms in terms of deleveraging, and Switzerland and Italy have recorded net outflows, which was due to derisking and deleveraging. Moving on to page 14, which in a sense is our way of looking forward in part to how we can perform in terms of our NNA. We are clearly an employer of choice. We've hired 141 new CROs. These CROs came from several banks. If I add up the total list of banks, it's probably more than 20 banks that have contributed to these hires, and this hiring, which goes beyond what was our normal annual ambition in terms of hiring, was very strategically thought out. It was in part triggered by dislocation in the market, and we clearly expect that these new hires will be key drivers in our net new asset growth going forward. In the middle of the page, you'll see that we had 141. Not all of them have joined. We still have 26 of the 141 that have already joined in 2024 or will be joining in 2024. These are experienced CROs, a large part of them coming teams. Whenever we hire teams, we know that the success rate is higher than when we have hired individual CROs, and the other key element is that the business cases that these CROs bring are very substantial. So it's not just the number of CROs that we are hiring. The quality of the CROs that we are hiring has also been increasing throughout 2023. Just to remind you, our hiring ambition on a gross basis is between 50 and 70 CROs every year. 2023 at 140, 141 is clearly higher. We will maintain our 50-70 ambition going forward as a normal year. That does not mean that if we don't find talent, we will not hire it. I think that we have established EFG as a very good home for CROs, and we will continue to do so. Right-hand side of the page, talk a bit about the existing CROs and their performance. You'll see that the average portfolio of our existing CROs has been steadily increasing. If you take the chart back, you'll see that if you go to 2015, 2016, the number was about CHF 180 million of a portfolio per CRO, so this number has been steadily going up. For us, it is very important because it marks the quality of the CRO, but it also makes a huge difference to us in terms of efficiency because clearly CROs with higher portfolios allow us to be more cost-competitive as we expand the business. Page 15, let's talk about the revenue margin a bit. It is at 99 basis points. You'll see clearly that the increase versus 2022 is largely driven by the interest rate environment that allowed us to capitalize on higher net interest income. What is more important to us is that the commission margin increased by 1 basis point from 40-41 basis points, and that was supported by more recurring fees rather than transaction fees. So we are moving in the right direction in having a steady and high-quality revenue stream on the commission side. On a like-for-like basis, commissions were down 3%, and we also benefited in net other income by higher client trading activity in currencies, but also from higher swap income from our treasury operations. Life insurance added three basis points in terms of the revenue margin, and excluding the life insurance, our revenue margin would be 96 basis points. Moving on a bit to the actions that we are taking to improve the quality and quantity of our commission income. This goes back to content that Giorgio referred to in his opening. Here, we continued to focus on increasing the mandate penetration. You saw that we have a rebound. We had a small drop in the first half of the year, but we've managed to rebound in the second half of the year in terms of mandate penetration. We have actively relaunched discretionary and advisory offerings in 2023 to enhance our scalability, to enhance the high-value proposition that we have to our client, and also to improve our mandate penetration. We see it reaccelerating, and we're looking forward to achieving our target of 65%-70%, which is our 2025 target, and clearly at the same time, we are enhancing our fund business, and we are also enhancing other products which are in the high-value suite to our clients, which is about private equity structured products and also client transition equity strategy. I'm sure that a lot of the people in the room are wondering what's going to happen with our revenue margin given the fact that we are at a very high level, so we decided to give you some insights of how we think about it. You'll see on the left what has actually happened in the last three years. So from 71 basis points, we went to 81 and now to 96. Just as a note, this includes any contribution from the life insurance portfolio that we have, and the way we think about it is we split it in two areas, the areas that we control and the areas that we don't. Clearly, when it comes to net interest income, there are several parameters that we do not control. You'll see on the right-hand side, we have stated the interest rate sensitivity for 100 basis points down in all currencies. If that were to happen, we would lose CHF 63 million of revenue over the course of 12 months. The other thing that is happening, which is also a negative in terms of net interest income, is we see a continued shift out of sight accounts into remunerated accounts. If you see the timeline that we have here, you clearly see that we lost about CHF 7 billion from the end of June 2022 until year-end 2022. This is mostly dollar-driven changes. Then that conversion is continuing at a decreasing pace, and we do expect this to tail as we are entering 2024. Now, what really matters is actually what you can control, and this is at the bottom right part of the page. This is commission income, and the effort that we are making is to increase the penetration of our high-value products and to increase the revenues that we make on a more sustainable basis through recurring revenues. You'll see that between 2022 and 2023, we've managed to increase one basis point our margin from recurring revenues. This is from 32-33 basis points. The non-recurring has gone. We've lost a basis point. It's around the error in terms of what has happened. Actually, we've seen some improvement in transaction activity in the last couple of months of the year. To put the commission margin into perspective, I had to look at the last 10 years. The commission margin over the last 10 years has traded between 40-47 basis points, so at least it gives us a lot of confidence that going forward, with some transaction activity picking up plus the strong effort that we are making in terms of improving the quality of our services and the recurring side of the business, that we will be moving towards the average or even the higher end of that range in 2024 and 2025. Moving into the cost side, cost to income improves. At the same time, cost increased by 9%. Why did they increase? It's part of our investment into future growth. We had higher personnel expenses as we hired talent. You'll see that we have about 200 people more employed between the end of 2022 and 2023, but also because we have been profitable, the valuable part of the compensation to staff has actually increased in 2023. Other expenses were up 2%, and these were mostly driven by inflation but also by investment in technology, partly outbalanced by the cost management actions that we have been taking, which brings me to page 19, which is about cost management because we have been growing. We have been investing, but we have not forgotten about active cost management. And actually, if you look at the last five years, I think a lot of people have actually even put it in writing that we've had a pretty strong record in making sure that we actively manage costs. Here, the way that we think about it is that we need to always think about how we can improve our efficiency and how we can reduce cost. The reason for that is we need to make that room in our cost base to be able to grow because it's not a matter of just adding cost. It's a matter of taking out cost, becoming more efficient so you can further invest in the business. This is how we have been creating operating leverage all these years. On the left-hand side, you'll see what happened in 2023. Clearly, there was a sale of our subsidiary in Spain, which we had for six months, so for normalizing purposes, we need to be taking out. There is a higher number than usual in hiring and in investment. Clearly, apart from the hiring of people, we also accelerated certain projects given the overall situation that we're having in our P&L to make sure that we can come faster with some of the solutions also on the technology side that we would like to achieve. We have increases in variable compensation. Inflation was an element in 2023, but in the end of the day, we managed to also create CHF 25 million of cost savings, which is a 3% reduction in costs as part of our journey in 2023. As we've also stated back in October 2022, and as we have repeated, cost management is an area of focus. We have very specific plans. We had a CHF 40 million cost management plan, which we announced in 2022. That was increased to CHF 60 million already in previous announcements during the course of the year. We are on track on that project. We are probably somewhere around halfway there in terms of achieving the actions. These actions are spread out to 2024 and early 2025, so we are looking forward to reaping the benefits of these cost management actions as we move forward to our 2025 targets. Just also to mention that because of the accelerated investment in technology, we also took some impairment on intangible assets that had to do with technology solutions that were not useful any longer. Page 20 gives you the specifics of our strong balance sheet and a very liquid balance sheet at the same time. You'll see on the right-hand side that all the ratios have improved in 2023, so we are about 50 basis points up both on core tier one capital ratio and on total capital ratio in 2023. The leverage ratio improved to 4.7%, and the liquidity coverage ratio also improved from 205% - 230%. During the course of the year, we bought back about 8 million EFGI shares as part of our buyback program, and these buybacks are meant to fund the employee incentive plans. In terms of the journey on the capital, page 21, you'll see that, as you know, we are a capital light business. We managed to create 420 basis points of gross capital through our profitability. Capital light means that even though the growth on profitability is there, you don't need to invest a lot to support your squared assets. That gives us the ability to have the progressive dividend payout policy, which is targeted at 50% of net profits. That also allows us to do the buybacks. As I said, we bought about 8 million shares, which is 0.9% negative impact on the capital ratio. But in the end of the day, overall, what it does is it allows us to provide an enhanced return to shareholders because we can combine a high dividend yield, which is around 5% given the latest announcement for the dividend proposal, plus the benefit that shareholders clearly get by the buyback programs that we are currently running. So to finish, I think that the key takeaways from my side is that we've clearly had a very strong start in the 2023-2025 financial cycle that is really important to us in terms of giving us confidence about our ability to meet or even exceed the targets that we've set ourselves for 2025. As I've said, I have had some questions in the past about whether I believe that the financial targets should be revisited. Are they achievable or not? What I'll say is that they were very well-thought financial targets when we did the presentation back in 2022. Given what I know now, I am more confident than I was in 2022 about achieving these targets. Now, does it come easy? It never comes easy, and there are very specific priorities we have for 2024. These are three. One is business development, so continue to grow the business. The second one is reinforcing the recurring part of the commission income. This is our bread and butter. This is how we maintain a resilient top line as we move into 2024 and 2025. Clearly, cost efficiency is an element that we need to work on to make sure that we achieve the financial targets that you see on the right for 2025. On that note, thank you very much, and I'll pass back to Giorgio for his closing remarks. Thank you. Thank you, Dimitris. Very clear and comprehensive as always. Now, I would like to close the presentation today with some remarks about the outlook for 2024 and beyond 2025 and the priorities that are critical for us to face this year and beyond. Now, when we at EFG, we look at our strategic course and we reset and we plan for a year ahead. Usually, what we do is we go back, we reassess our strategic direction that we set, in this case, at the time in October 2022. We check where we are compared to the original course, and then we decide how to go ahead and what we need to adjust, what we need to accelerate, what we need to improve. Now, this is a page that you might recall. This was presented in the Investors' Day in October 2022. At the time, we were in the second wave, in the second phase of our profitable and sustainable growth story. At the time, the objective was sustaining profitable growth and achieving scale. The fundamental objective at that strategy was to bring EFG to the next level, and we have the ambition that we believe we can make EFG one of the best brands in international private banking and wealth management. This was, let's say, our vision. This was, in a nutshell, our strategy. As you can see here, it was predicated on a 15% net profit growth per annum. Obviously, if we look at what we have achieved this year, it is that on one hand, we are one year ahead. We have accelerated our growth. We have accelerated our delivery. So instead of a 15%, we have a 50% increase in profitability. But also, we have improved our competitive market position because we have invested in the future, in people, in digital, and in content. So from our perspective, clearly, we are on track. We feel, first of all, that our strategic course of October 2022 was correct. We feel that we have navigated well last year, and we are on a good trajectory to meet and probably exceed the 2025 ambitions. Now, obviously, what we want to avoid is that when you post such a record profit, the tendency is to, excuse me, look at the future with a bit of rose-tinted glasses, and we want to avoid doing that. And so obviously, we are conscious of the challenges that are looming on the horizon. Now, on page 25, basically, we have summarized what we believe are the two key trends that will have an impact on the operating environment in 2024. One is the expected change in monetary policy. Obviously, we see that interest rates, excuse me, have peaked, and this obviously will have an impact on our net interest income and net interest margin. And obviously, the geopolitical tensions will continue. We have half of the population this year going to the polls, and you cannot anticipate all the developments. So clearly, for 2024, Dimitris already alluded to that. We have identified four priorities that are critical. The first one has to do with managing the net interest margin. This is more a defense game. I think in the past, we have shown that we are pretty good in playing both defense and offense. This will be a defense game. Clearly, there are a lot of moving parts that we cannot control, but what is in our control, obviously, we will try to make sure that if there is a decline, this will be as slow as possible. Now, growth NNA, this has to be accelerated. We have done significant investments. We are very confident about the existing teams. We are very confident about the new teams, and we believe that clients like our services, like what we deliver in terms of content. So we are very bullish, I would say, about that. In terms of net commission income, it was mentioned earlier, this is a critical area. We are at 41 basis points. We have room to go to 47 basis points in the pre-2022 era. So we have significant space to continue to grow. As I mentioned earlier, we have also new leadership with Andre Portelli, and I'm sure that the old team across geographies will focus very much on delivering the best possible services and products to our clients, and this in general will also have an increase in our net commission income. Improve efficiency is last but not least. We know very well that to defend our profitability and to grow our profitability, operating leverage is key. We still believe that we have significant areas where we can increase the productivity. And again, this is a continuous effort. We never stop every year. There are new ideas. There are new technologies, and you can do more with less. So these are, I would say, the key priorities for 2024. Now, to close the presentation and maybe summarize what we have heard today in three key takeaways. The first one is about our step change in profitability. We are one year ahead of schedule. We are very pleased about that. This was also done at the same time when we had significant strategic investments that are expected to accelerate our sustainable and profitable growth in line with our strategy that we are pursuing now for five years. And as we mentioned, we are increasingly confident to be able to meet and possibly exceed the 2025 ambition. With this, I thank you for your attention, and I now hand over to Jens for the Q&A session. Jens, please follow. Thank you, Giorgio. Thank you, Dimitris, for your, as always, insightful presentations. We move now to the question and answer session. I think we start with people in the room first, and then we move to the phone. So if I have the first question in the second row, Michael. Thank you very much. Good morning, all. It's Michael Klien from Zürcher Kantonalbank. To start with, on the cost side, on the efficiency side, you mentioned the write-down of old IT systems. Can you highlight in terms of what investments you may be accelerating into 2023, how the investment side is going to look for 2024? Is there going to be somewhat more acceleration as well, considering the environment you are currently in? Second question is on the net new asset movements, in particular in Switzerland. You mentioned de-escalation and de-leveraging. Can you provide more details on what exactly you mean there and also what we should be expecting in terms of net new money movements in 2024 in Switzerland? And the third question would be on the dividend. I think you adhere to the progressive dividend policy. No change there. I think in the past, you guided towards a roughly 50% payout ratio. We are clearly much higher now in terms of the payout ratio. What's the guidance here? What should we be expecting in the future, also considering potential volatility in earnings generation? Thank you. Thank you. Maybe I take the first one on technology. Regarding what we have been writing off, there are obviously old technologies that we are phasing out. We are decommissioning. Regarding the investments that we have been doing and we will continue doing, there are basically few areas. Clearly, last year, I would say the key highlight of the year was the fact that we have rolled out the T24, the core banking system, to all the banking locations, booking centers worldwide. I think this is extremely important. We always start from the foundation, and this is clearly a critical foundation. Now, obviously, the other areas where we are investing is everything related to the digital solutions that will make the life easier and the experience of our clients and our client relationship officers better are all the investments related to improving the efficiency and the productivity of our, let's say, back offices. And we are investing on data because, obviously, the financial services industry is in a catch-up mode as far as data is concerned, but obviously, this is critical for the future. And finally, again, in terms of defense, the investments in cybersecurity will never stop. Actually, we'll accelerate given the environment. So these are, I would say, the five directions, including the core banking system, where we are investing. Should I take the second question on the derisking and deleveraging? I would say that the two most mature regions, I would say, that are the U.K. and Switzerland have had some de-leveraging by clients. Clearly, last year, interest rates remained high. The curve remained inverted. So when the interest rate curve is inverted, it is obviously that doing Lombard lending becomes more complicated. And clearly, some clients have decided that it was the right time to close the exposure. In terms of the de-risking, this is something that is a continuous process that we do. As I mentioned earlier this morning, I received the question. Obviously, we calibrate constantly our risk appetite. And so at times, we need to look at a portfolio and take certain steps. Regarding the outlook for Switzerland in terms of NNA, I think this was a follow-up question. Well, we believe that all our regions can grow within our target range, which is 4%-6%. Typically, Switzerland, if I look at the past, they've been more on the lower end of the target range, so around 4%. But we had a fantastic year in 2021 where actually Switzerland was at the forefront of growth. But again, we are confident that Switzerland will come back on positive territory. The last question was on dividend. Yes. Let me take that. The guidance we gave in October is, as you said, for a progressive dividend. We earmarked a figure of about 50% payout on the profit. The dividend we are proposing today is at 55%. So it's slightly higher than that. So I think that we are pretty much very close to the guidance that we provided back in October 2022. Now, moving forward, we are hopeful that we will continue along the same lines and continue with a payout which is close to 50% of net profit. I think the next question was from Mate, from over here, please. Yeah. Good morning, Mate. I'm at UBS. A couple of questions, please. The first one would be on investment solutions. Giorgio, you mentioned and that you clearly expect some changes and some improvement in that area. Could you elaborate a little bit on what you're working on there? I think you have relaunched the advisory and discretionary mandates over the last year. It seems like private market offering is becoming an important component of the product shelf. Any color that you can provide us there would be helpful. The second question would be on NII sensitivity, probably for Dimitris. Thank you for the updated CHF 63 million typical parallel shift in rates. Could you run us through the assumptions behind those numbers? Do you expect any mix shift, perhaps a reversal back to sight deposits as part of that, or that that's basically a very much like full whack number? The last question would be going back to capital allocation. Obviously, you have a 55% payout ratio now on dividends. You have a 17% strong CET1 ratio, and you have good net capital generation as well. So I would love to hear your thoughts on capital allocation going forward. Do you see opportunities for perhaps accelerated organic growth, be it through pre-leveraging, be it through in other means? Do you see opportunities perhaps on the M&A front in the market? And if not, any plans to perhaps work on that excess capital? Thank you. Okay. So the first question about investment solutions, maybe just a step back. I think I mentioned it, but just to set the stage. I think that I always said this the last 12 years, that I believe that in terms of service, our CROs are second to none in delivering service to our clients. And this is what made EFG become what it is today. Obviously, over the last few years, this has been always a bit the DNA, but I think we have emphasized it much more than the last few years. We have become much more investment-led. And obviously, clients, besides service, they want ideas. They want client solutions. We try to offer choice to our clients. We do not believe that we have a recipe that is a size fits all. And so when we talk about client solutions, we actually talk about four things. One is investment solutions, stricto sensu. We talk about wealth solutions. We talk about credit solutions. And actually, we talk also about the global market services. Actually, in the last couple of years, we had a lot of clients that love to trade, and they love obviously to have access directly to the dealing room, both in FX and various securities. So we are trying to have a suite so that clients, depending on their preferences, they can do business with us. In terms of investment solutions, we have revamped the old setup, starting from the investment process, going into discretionary, going into advisory. We have about, excluding Shaw and Partners, we have about 470 CROs, and we have about 50 investment counselors. How the investment counselors are integrated into the overall process is critical in our view in order to deliver the best solutions to the clients, the higher value-adding products and services to the clients, and ultimately, for us, the higher margin products. At the end of the day, you know very well, in our industry, there is a secular trend in compressing margins. And if you focus only on commodities, on plain-vanilla services, you have no place to hide. The only way is constantly to upgrade the offering and the solutions. So I would stop here. I think. I'll take the NII sensitivity page. Mate, as you rightly said, on page 17, we've given some indication of what would happen to our net interest income if rates in all currencies move by 100 basis points. It is a static simulation, so we don't assume anything else changing in terms of the impact. The 63 million is what we'll see hitting our P&L in the 12 months following the rate change. Given the way our balance sheet is structured, a lot of our assets and our liabilities reprice in the fairly short term. Most of them are in the zero to three-month bucket. What you'll see is going to be happening fairly rapidly, which is what we also saw in reverse when rates were going up. The 63 million is a total hit for 12 months. Now, as you said, we do not assume any positives in that number. So the trend in the sight deposit, with rates going down, I would expect that the trend in the sight deposit would definitely stop, probably improve a bit. When you have a drop in interest rates, you do have the opportunity to renegotiate some of your spreads, which have been compressed while rates have been going up. So there are actions that we can also take when it comes to net interest income, which can also support revenue going forward. Now, on the capital allocation, as you said, Mate, we have a 70% core, which is the highest that we've had. We have given in the past indications that if we are above 15%, we would reconsider what we do with this excess capital. We have been clearly on the lookout for meaningful acquisitions over the last five years. The last one we did was Australia back in 2019. So it's been a bit of a dry season, but it's been a dry season in general. From what we see and hear in the market, with interest rates being higher and with all the banks making higher profits, there is some more appetite for people to come to the market with more transactions. So at this point, for us, the best value-adding action that we can take is do the proper M&A. And the proper M&A has very specific characteristics for us. The first one is cultural fit. The second one is that we clearly need to make sure that we create value and synergies. There are very specific financial targets. We would only do a transaction which is in the private banking space, in our core business. We don't go beyond that. So there are very clear parameters that we follow when we review. Now, as I said, unfortunately, in the past, we didn't have many things to review. I think that with the market conditions being slightly better, there are two reasons people come to market: fear or greed. In the fear time, people did not come in. Now, with conditions being better, there might be some more transactions coming to the market. Great. We take one question in the room, and then we move to the telephone. Thank you. Yep. [audio distortion]. I have a question on the net interest income. Do you take a view on interest rates? So the question is whether you were kind of hedged on rising rates, which improved potentially your net interest income, or the other way around, do you have open positions when it goes down or take a positive act to protect the balance sheet? Let me split the answer into two parts. One is, what is the interest rate risk that we're taking on our balance sheet that is very, very limited? It's regulated. There are numbers like there is a good disclosure also in our Pillar 3 report, if you want to go through that. But the level of interest rate sensitivity that we take or exposure that we take is very limited. Now, when it comes to the P&L, there is no interest rate sensitivity in the P&L. We just record what we get. Actually, the only sensitivity that the P&L has is more a currency sensitivity because the revenues that we generate come in different currencies. But the interest rate part is nonexistent. Okay. Again, the second question will be on the cost side. Can you maybe tell us a bit more on where are the big parts of the cost you can still take out of the cost space you have? There is a constant cost improvement, obviously, but are there big parts you can say, "Okay, that's really the thing we have to do, and that gives you the most benefit to go to this cost-income ratio targeting"? Please. We've been in a long journey over the last five years. I'll say that in the beginning, it was easier to identify what needed to be done. As you move, it becomes harder. The main area that we are focusing now has to do with process optimization, automation, and adding more digital resources or IT resources that can help us in getting there. It is less tactical. It's a lot more structural. You need to revisit what you do. The very good thing is that we now have the same operating system in all locations, which means that if you have an improvement that you develop in one location, in head office or in one of the other booking centers, it's much easier to take that improvement and use it in all the booking centers that we have. I would say that the focus is digital automation and process re-engineering to actually get even more process and cost savings going forward. Great. Thank you. Can we have the first question from the telephone, please? The first question comes from Nicholas Herman from Citi. Please go ahead. Yes. Good morning. Thank you for the presentation and for taking my questions. I have four, if that's okay, please. One is just a follow-up on the M&A question. Could you just elaborate a little bit more about where you said you expect to see more deals coming to market? Can I just push you a little bit in terms of where you expect to see those deals coming through? Is that more like, say, U.K., Switzerland, Europe, or are we talking also Latin and Asia? The second question on hiring, I think you noted an intention to return towards the 50-70 hires from this year. I guess, does that mean that you now see the window for hiring as having now largely closed? On the margin side, could you please talk about what you have seen so far in January in terms of flows and client activity? And also, if you could talk through your exit margin, I guess, particularly on the NII side, NIM side, and exit swap margin. And then finally, just on the recurring margin, I think, if I remember correctly, repricing was always a key part of the attempt as well. On top of mandate penetration, repricing was also a key driver in improving commission, sorry, the recurring margin. So is there still scope to reprice as well as the private markets and improving the mandate penetration? Thank you. Sorry, Nick. This is Dimitris. Could you repeat the last question? Because I'm not sure I heard it well enough. It's a bit of a dead line. Oh, yeah. Sure. Okay. Is that better? It was about repricing. Can you hear me? Yeah. The question was the recurring margin improvement. Clearly, that is being driven by improving mandate penetration, private markets. Is there still also scope for repricing from here, or is that now largely done? Okay. I'll take the M&A. Just let me take the M&A question. My answer was a lot more generic than the regional split that you're asking, Nick. And it's also, in relative terms, as I said, we had a very dry season between 2019 and 2023. Now, from what I'm hearing is that some people might be thinking about coming to the market. So I wouldn't venture on a specific region or a specific bank or anything like that. I'm just saying that it seems that we have some more conditions out there to allow some people to think more about transactions than they would a year or two years ago. Maybe to add on that, I think if you look at our presentation in October 2022, we make it very clear, just to complement that, we want to focus only on the locations where we're already present if we would do any M&A. So as long as something happens where we are present, we are okay. Now, maybe I take the second question. If I understood correctly, it's about the hiring and whether the window is closing. Well, look, I mean, clearly, first of all, the hiring of CROs has been in our DNA and part of our growth strategy since the beginning. So this is something that, for us, is an integral part of our organic growth strategy. In recent years, we have focused more on trying to hire teams instead of individual client relationship officers. But at times, this continues. Now, clearly, we had a fantastic year in 2019. Then COVID came. The market dried out also in terms of hiring. So it was much lower opportunities. Last year was, obviously, given the dislocation, a great year. We don't have a target. We don't have a budget in hiring. For us, what is important is to find the people that fit. And the guidance we gave in October 2022 was between 50 and 70. Obviously, last year was double. But as long as we find the right quality, we will continue to hire. Is the window closing? This is difficult to predict. And as I mentioned earlier in an interview, I think that I mean, not I think. When I take the list of financial institutions where the new CROs come from, 2,000 is a big. So there are always situations in the market. But would I expect that the number would be lower than last year? Probably, yes. But as I said, it's a function of quality, more than quantity. In terms of the flows and the client activity and, obviously, the impact that that has to do with margin, clearly, if interest rates start coming down, this should be supportive to, in general, markets. This should be supportive to the soft landing scenario that it is the key scenario that our Chief Investment Officer focuses on. And so every time before this presentation, I always speak to all my regional business heads and heads of private banking to get the color. And what I hear is that, obviously, January was a bit slow, as always. But in general, there is a good activity and good expectation of client activity. So again, with the visibility we have today, we expect the client activity to improve. The last point was about repricing. I think that you are absolutely right, Nick. There are, obviously, two major trends to try to sustain and support and hopefully improve the margin. One is an issue of mix because the more we can increase the mandate penetration, and we have a clear target of 65%-70%, and Dimitrios presented a clear slide, the more we improve the mix, the better it is. But obviously, with the existing mix, there are always pockets of businesses that can be repriced. So we have done a lot in the last 2-3 years with the repricing project. We are quite pleased. But we believe that there is still scope because, obviously, in these projects, you start in the easier areas, and then you evolve. The answer is we will focus on both, on repricing and on trying to improve the mix of our offering. Very helpful. Thank you for the comprehensive answers. Congrats on a strong 2023. Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Nick. Any further questions in the room at this stage? There's a gentleman in the last. Mr. Blechner from Finanz und Wirtschaft. You said that you have a strong inflow of net new assets in Asia, Middle East, Continental Europe, and Latin America. Could you explain who are these clients? From which country are they coming? Are they mostly from Credit Suisse? Or who are these clients? And then second question, what are the lessons you will take from the Signa crisis at Julius Baer? Will you strengthen the risk management for the structured credits? Or are there any lessons you will take? And last question, could you give a comment on the everlasting rumors of merger with Julius Baer? Thank you. I have a cough, sorry. The first question is. Where are the clients coming for the growth? Yeah. So I would say that we don't give the kind of detail that you are asking. But in general, the clients that join EFG, especially in these regions, the great majority are entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs of first and second generation. Usually, our clients that either are known to our existing teams of client relationship officers or they used to be clients with the new colleagues that have joined us. So they are new to EFG but not new to the client relationship officers, to our new colleagues. And we have a lot of, let's say, word of mouth, a lot of clients joining because some of their friends are already clients of ours. So in terms of regions, I think that the three regions, obviously, Asia-Pacific, as Dimitrios mentioned earlier, are all the areas. We had a fantastic performance both of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia. So northern Asia, Southeast Asia, the subcontinent, and the Pacific, all three areas have benefited. We see a major growth in the world from the Middle East, the subcontinent, and Southeast Asia, and Singapore. I call it a belt that is growing very well. And wealth creation is impressive. Regarding Latin America, it has been a fantastic year for us. And we have done extremely well. And again, we are focused very much in Central America, in Brazil, and in Cono Sur. So these are the macro subregions where we focus on. The second point was on. Lessons from Signa? Well, yes, on the lessons learned. As I mentioned earlier, obviously, when you take a step back and look at your strategic course and look at the environment and you readjust your course, you try always to understand what is going on and what you can and what are the lessons that you can learn and what you can adjust. To be very clear from our perspective, and just to make it I said it this morning, but I repeat it, private debt is not part of our product shelf. And unlisted shares are not eligible collateral for us. I think that the only lesson that, again, it's not something new that we learned but is something that has reinforced something that we believe is important is that, obviously, you need to calibrate and continuously fine-tune the risk appetite and the risk management framework that we have. We have been saying now for over 10 years that regulatory compliance and risk management is a prerequisite to growth. Our strategy is basically a profitable and sustainable growth strategy. So in order to be able to have a solid strategy, you need to have a solid compliance and risk management framework and people and processes because otherwise, like in real life, you have an accident. You got to stop. You got to remediate. And you only slow down and lose time. Now, regarding the events, again, I don't want to comment. The only thing that I'd like to say is that, obviously, it's regretful for the financial center. But again, I am very positive, in general, about the solidity of the ecosystem in international private banking and wealth management for Switzerland. I pause here on this. And the last one was. JB. Well, again, rumors and discussions that we always said when we have been asked, both in public and in one-on-one sessions with investors, that this is not something that affects us. We are focused on delivering the growth for EFG. We are focused on delivering our strategy, our organic growth. We like to do M&A. We have shown in the past that we can do M&A. We can acquire and integrate. But we don't go beyond that. And we do not comment about this kind of speculations that we have heard now for over 10 years, so. Great. Thank you. I believe there are no further questions on the telephones. Any last mini questions in the room? I think that's not the case. Then I will hand over for the final comment to Giorgio. No. In terms of final comments, first of all, again, just to reemphasize that 2023 has been a record year for us. We have delivered ahead of the plan. We are one year ahead. We are delivering attractive returns to shareholders. We are investing for the future. We are very confident for 2025 and beyond. We are ready to face the challenges this year. And in closing, I'd like to thank the EFG team across geographies and globally for the commitment and the dedication. And obviously, I'd like to thank our clients and our shareholders for the support and trust over the years. Thank you.