Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Q2 2024 Fixed Income Conference Call and Live Webcast. I'm Moritz, the Chorus Call Operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing Star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press Star and 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Philip Teuchner, Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Good afternoon or good morning, and thank you all for joining us today. On the call, our Group Treasurer, Richard Stewart, will take us through some fixed income-specific topics. For the subsequent Q&A session, we also have our CFO, James von Moltke, with us to answer your questions. The slides that accompany the topics are available for download from our website at db.com. After the presentation, we will be happy to take your questions. Before we get started, I just want to remind you that the presentation may contain forward-looking statements which may not develop as we currently expect. Therefore, please take note of the precautionary warning at the end of our materials. With that, let me hand over to Richard. Thank you, Philip, and welcome from me. After another quarter where we made progress across the businesses on our strategic initiatives, we are clearly on track to hit our financial targets. Our progress continues to be recognized by rating agencies this quarter, either through rating affirmations or by Morningstar DBRS changing our rating outlook to positive in June. Let me discuss some of the drivers of our first half results on slide one. Pre-provision profit was up 17% year-on-year to €4.7 billion, excluding the impact of the Postbank takeover litigation provision. We also demonstrated positive operating leverage, a core element of our strategy execution. We grew revenues in our core businesses by 3% year-on-year, while group revenues were up 2% on a reported basis. We saw strong growth in commissions and fee income of 12%, which demonstrates clearly that our strategy to grow our capital-like businesses is working. We continue to deliver better-than-expected NII performance in our banking books, which provides additional comfort to our revenue path for 2024 and in the years thereafter. We reduced our adjusted cost by 2% to €10.1 billion year-on-year, and we continue to deliver savings through our operational efficiency program. Now, let's look at the franchise achievements across our businesses on slide two. In the first half year, the Corporate Bank delivered a 16% increase in incremental deals won with multinational clients compared to the prior year period. Our successes with our clients were also rewarded with a series of high-profile awards. The Investment Bank made significant advances across the franchise. Origination and Advisory increased its global market share to 2.6% in the first half year, a gain of more than 70 basis points over the full year 2023. Fixed Income and Currencies revenues were up 3% year-on-year, supported by a 7% increase in financing revenues, even compared to a strong prior year period. The Private Bank also continued to build momentum with EUR 19 billion of net inflows in the first six months, supporting growth in assets under management of EUR 34 billion. In Asset Management, we grew AUMs by EUR 37 billion to EUR 933 billion in the first half year. Now, let me turn to our strategic objectives on slide three. We continue to make progress across all three pillars of our global house bank strategy. Starting with revenue growth, we have delivered a compound annual growth rate of 5.7% since 2021. This underscores the benefit of a well-diversified and complementary business mix. Stable NII in our banking book segments was supported by strong non-interest revenues following investments in our growth initiatives. Looking at the drivers behind commissions and fee income strength in the first six months, we saw growth mainly in our capital-like businesses. We will continue to build on these developments, and with business volumes growing, we are confident that our revenue trajectory will remain strong in the second half of the year. While the impact from the expected NII normalization will be lower than initially anticipated, we expect full-year NII in our banking book segments to be broadly stable to the prior year level. We will see continued commissions and fee income growth mainly in Origination and Advisory, Corporate Bank, and Asset Management. This puts revenues of EUR 30 billion clearly in sight. We continue to deliver on our EUR 2.5 billion operational efficiency program, having completed measures with delivered or expected gross savings of EUR 1.5 billion, 60% of our target, with around EUR 1.2 billion in savings already realized. This gives us firm confidence that we are on track to deliver on our commitment of a quarterly run rate of adjusted costs of around €5 billion in 2024, and that we will further reduce this run rate to closer to €4.9 billion by the end of the year to meet our non-interest expense objective of around €20 billion for 2025. On capital efficiency, we achieved a benefit equal to a €4 billion RWA reduction in the second quarter through data and process improvements. As a result, cumulative RWA reductions from capital efficiency measures have already reached €19 billion. Let's now turn to provision for credit losses on slide four. Provision for credit losses in the second quarter was €476 million, equivalent to 40 basis points of average loans. The sequential increase in stage one and two provisions to €35 million was mainly driven by the net effect of overlays and model enhancements, which were partly mitigated by quarter-on-quarter portfolio movements. Stage three provisions remained at an elevated level but reduced slightly to €441 million. The decrease was mainly driven by the Private Bank, while provisions in the Investment Bank remained stable and were largely related to commercial real estate exposures. Provisions in the Corporate Bank increased, which was driven by two larger impairment events. Looking ahead to the second half of the year, we're now seeing some stabilization in the broader U.S. CRE sector, though U.S. office remains broadly unchanged. Overall, this should lead to lower provisions compared to the first half, but our U.S. office CRE portfolios will continue to be impacted. We also continue to conservatively manage our loan book with lower growth rates, including active management of single-name concentration risks through well-established comprehensive hedging programs. Reflecting on these items and considering developments in the first half of the year, we revise our full-year guidance for provision for credit losses to be slightly above 30 basis points of average loans. Moving now to the developments in our loan and deposit books over the quarter on slide 5. All figures in the commentary are adjusted for FX effects. Overall, loans have remained stable during the second quarter. Within that, we have seen encouraging momentum in key strategic growth areas such as FIC F inancing and Wealth Management, but also a net reduction in mortgage products in line with the strategy. For the remainder of the year, we expect these broader trends in our loan book to continue. Our high-quality deposit book increased by EUR 5 billion compared to the last quarter. Balances in the Private Bank grew by EUR 3 billion, mainly driven by growth in fixed-term deposits in our Private Banking and Wealth Management segment. Corporate Bank deposits increased by EUR 2 billion in the quarter, or EUR 10 billion year-to-date, which was materially supported by growth from certain client accommodation activities that are temporary and expected to normalize in the fourth quarter. In the appendix, we provide further granularity around the quality of our loan and deposit portfolio. Let us now have a look at our net interest income on slide six. NII was essentially flat across all of our key banking book segments at EUR 3.4 billion, slightly above prior expectations. Corporate Bank NII is stable sequentially, with higher deposit volumes and low margin expansion offsetting the expected beta convergence. As in the prior quarter, the Private Bank continues to benefit from a slow pace of beta convergence and ongoing hedge rollover, while our FIC Financing business continues to deliver stable results. Our base case is that our quarterly NII run rate will remain broadly stable, and we reiterate that we expect to improve on our earlier guidance for the full-year banking book NII. The group number, reflecting accounting effects, decreased by approximately EUR 100 million compared to the previous quarter to EUR 3 billion. This effect is offset by an increase in non-interest revenues and has no overall revenue impact to the group. Moving to slide 7, highlighting the developments of our key liquidity metrics. With a daily average liquidity coverage ratio of 131% during the quarter, we operated with a sound liquidity position at our targeted level. The quarter-end stock of €221 billion of HQLA, of which about 95% are held in cash and level one securities, was essentially flat compared to last quarter. Quarter-over-quarter, our spot Liquidity Coverage Ratio was also unchanged at 136%, representing a surplus above the regulatory minimum of €58 billion. The Net Stable Funding Ratio at 122% reflects the stability of our funding base and corresponds to a surplus of €110 billion above the regulatory requirement. The available longer-term stable funding sources for the bank remain well-diversified and are mainly supported by a strong deposit franchise, which continues contributing more than two-thirds of the group's stable funding sources. We aim to maintain this funding mix going forward. Turning to capital on Slide 8. With 13.5%, our second quarter Common Equity Tier one ratio was up slightly compared to the previous quarter. CET1 capital improved slightly, reflecting low regulatory capital deduction items and strong net income for the quarter, largely offset by the Postbank takeover litigation provision. Risk-weighted assets increased from business growth, together with higher operational risk RWA, including the impact of the Postbank takeover litigation provision, mostly offset by reductions from strong delivery of capital efficiency measures. Our capital ratios remain well above regulatory requirements, as shown on slide nine. The CET1 MDA buffer now stands at 231 basis points, or €8 billion of CET1 capital. This is broadly unchanged to the prior quarter, as the impact from the higher CET1 capital ratio was largely offset by higher countercyclical capital buffer settings, notably in the Netherlands, Ireland, and Belgium. The buffer to the total capital requirement increased by 38 basis points, driven primarily by our AT1 issuance, and now stands at 279 basis points. Moving to slide ten. At the end of the second quarter, our leverage ratio was 4.6%, 13 basis points higher compared to the previous quarter. 12 basis points of the increase was driven by higher tier one capital due to the Additional Tier one capital issuance in June. We continue to operate with a significant loss-absorbing capacity, well above all requirements, as shown on slide 11. The MREL surplus, our most binding constraint, increased by EUR 1 billion and now stands at EUR 17 billion at the end of the quarter. We had to absorb a slightly higher binding MREL requirement from the SRB in the second quarter. Higher RWA and higher countercyclical capital buffer requirements added to higher MREL demand. This was more than offset by higher MREL supply from the issuance of AT1 and other eligible liability instruments. Our surplus thus remains at a comfortable level, which continues to provide us with the flexibility to pause issuing new eligible liability instruments for approximately one year. Moving now to our issuance plan on slide 12. We stick to the guidance to issue €13-€18 billion to meet our 2024 funding requirements. Year-to-date, we have issued €13 billion, equal to the lower end of our 2024 plan. After a very constructive first quarter, we continued to take advantage of the favorable market conditions and issued more than €5 billion in the second quarter. We issued a €1.5 billion AT1 note in June, which improved the leverage ratio by 12 basis points, as already mentioned. Further highlights included our inaugural €500 million social bond in senior non-preferred format, our third and fourth Panda bonds comprising €6 billion in total, as well as a multi-tranche Japanese yen transaction. The social bond refinanced assets in the areas of affordable housing and access to essential services and further expands our ESG funding footprint. The residual funding activity for the year remains focused on senior non-preferred and senior preferred notes, both in benchmark format as well as private placements and retail targeted issuance. Many of you have asked for our intentions regarding potential calls of AT1 instruments in 2025, so let me outline how we think about this. We look at the cost of refinancing versus extending the instrument, and here the refinancing spread versus the reset spread is a key input, as well as any additional carry costs we would incur. Furthermore, we think about any other financial impact from a call, such as the FX revaluation impact when calling at an FX rate which differs from that of the issue date. As always, we will take all relevant aspects into consideration. To be clear, we have not yet made a decision, and as you know, calls of capital instruments require regulatory approval. Therefore, you can expect us to take a decision closer to the call date. Before going to your questions, let me conclude with a summary on slide 13. The performance in the second quarter and first half of the year demonstrate the successful execution of our strategy, and we remain confident that our businesses have strong momentum and are positioned for further growth. So, our full-year guidance for revenues and adjusted costs has not changed, respectively at EUR 30 billion and around EUR 20 billion. Provision for Credit Losses for the year are now expected to come in slightly above 30 basis points of average loans. Regarding issuance activities for the year, we are well advanced, which provides flexibility regarding timing of new issues. Overall, our full focus remains on the execution of our strategy and the progress made in 2024 positions us well to achieve our 2025 targets. With that, let us turn to your questions. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch-tone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to use only handsets and eventually turn off the volume from the webcast. Anyone who has a question may press star followed by one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. The first question comes from Lee Street from Citi. Please go ahead. Hello, good afternoon, and thank you for taking my questions. I have three, please. Firstly, you mentioned the FX revaluation impact when calling AT1 securities not issued in euros. Aside from not calling, is there anything you can do to actually mitigate or avoid that impact? Secondly, on the slightly increased loan loss guidance for the year to just above 30 basis points, is there any broader read across? I know there were a couple of specific loans in the quarter, but is there any broader read across to the book at large? That's my second question. And then finally, I remember a few years ago the comments made about being an industrial logic to banking consolidation in Europe. Now, obviously, with your restructuring successfully completed and lots of excess capital forecast to be made, would you consider using your excess capital for M&A as opposed to shareholder return? And if yes, under what conditions? That'd be my three questions. Thank you. Thank you, Lee, and thank you for joining. Maybe I'll take the AT1 question, and maybe I'll let James take the CLP and the M&A question. So I just want to end the FX revaluation impact and what we can do about it. So our AT1 securities, which have a temporary write-down feature, are accounted as equity under IFRS, meaning the AT1 FX is frozen at the time of issuance, and any FX impact is realized upon any termination, for example, a call, a buyback, or at maturity. Under the current structure, there is no natural instrument to hedge that economic risk, as well as the accounting risk, which means we have a choice to make between quarterly P&L volatility and RWA impact, or we mitigate that, but at the cost of, or we eliminate that, but at the cost of FX revaluation upon termination. I just note that any impact is taken through capital rather than through the P&L line. We've made a decision when we issued these to avoid that P&L volatility into quarter for the life, but that just comes with that economic risk that we talked about in terms of the revaluation impact. We recognize that different AT1 structures, for example, with an equity conversion rather than the write-down, are an interesting alternative and allow for debt accounting under IFRS. This would avoid this issue as the security would be accounted for as, if you like, a normal bond. But I've noted that requires a few changes, in particular shareholder approval. A switch, if we were to pursue that further, would have a certain lead time. Then I guess in terms of the rationale behind the AT1 issuance we did in euros in early June, so one is the market was pretty conducive for euro AT1s across the street, but also for our own name the first half of the year. So there was an element of opportunism given the demand we were seeing and the depth of the market. But the primary reason was just to manage our leverage ratio, given what we're seeing in terms of internal demand. You should see it in that vein rather than any intent to sort of de-risk the calls we have coming due in 2025. So hopefully that answers your question, and maybe I'll pass on to James for the CLP response. Thank you. Lee, thanks for the question. Look, no read across, really. Our guidance was initially 25-30 basis points. Incidentally, there's a bit of a denominator effect as well. We'd assumed more loan growth in our original guidance than we've seen, so we thought we'd be closer to EUR 500 billion on average than sort of EUR 480 billion. But leave that aside. Look, there have been a handful of events in the first half of the year that have taken us above what we think is a pretty stable run rate of credit loss provisioning in the portfolio. So above a call at a run rate in the businesses of around EUR 250 million per quarter, we've been running at a little bit above now, EUR 100 million or so on commercial real estate. And then the first half, we had a couple of larger corporate credits that defaulted, as well as the overlay action that we also disclosed in the second quarter. And so we stripped those things away, the last two. The first half was relatively in line with our expected sort of EUR 350 million run rate. Now, we continue to see, well, our expectation is that the second half will revert to that type of level, which is why at this point we've moved the guidance up a bit. But really, our expectations for the second half are more or less unchanged. What's driven us up in the first half are either, as I say, corporate positions that are hedged in CLOs, so our net exposure has been much smaller than the gross amount that's reflected in the CLPs and the overlay that I described. So the read across is stuff happens, and that's mostly in the rearview mirror. Obviously, we're watching credit carefully in the German books, in commercial real estate, but by and large, our outlook remains that the second half should see improvement on the first. Then in consolidation in Europe, look, I mean, it's been on the come for a very long time, and I think from our perspective remains that way. There have been a series of barriers, but for us, we've mostly focused on the need to put DB into a much stronger position in terms of our internal controls, our technology, our capabilities before we would consider that. So there's more homework, as we've referred to it, to do. And the barriers to consolidation, such as they are, you can think about the fair value gap, for example, that are on the balance sheets today in Europe, remain in place. So short answer is we remain focused on delivering against the objectives that we've laid out, the commitments we've made to shareholders, and we'll see how the world evolves much further down the road. All right. Thank you very much for those very good answers. Thank you. And the next question comes from Daniel David from Autonomous. Please go ahead. Good afternoon. Congratulations, and thanks for taking my question, sorry. I have three. The first one is just on AT1 and just goes over some of the points that you made to Lee just a second ago. So should we think about the AT1 you've printed as refinancing the 7.5%? I know that's got a higher reset and also got a lower FX impact on the call date. So I guess that leaves the 4.789%. And I guess my question would be, would you consider any more AT1 this year if the market was willing and open? And would you consider an LME alongside, which is something we've seen some of your peers conduct? The second one's just on leverage finance, and clearly we've seen the headlines. I'm just interested in just any update you've got on leverage finance, but also kind of the interaction with the Pillar 2R add-on. So I guess what I'm thinking is, could we see potentially more provisioning but being offset by a change in your capital requirements as a result of that Pillar 2R add-on dropping away? Anything you could say, that would be great. And then finally, just on MREL, there's been a bit of talk with regard to subordinated MREL requirements linked to the CMDI package. I know that you've always maintained quite a high subordination percentage in your MREL, so you kind of fill your MREL with fully subordinated debt. I guess irrespective of what the regulators decide to do, is there ever a scenario where you would lower the amount of subordinated MREL you target, so are you filling your MREL requirement with more senior preferred? Just interested to hear your views on that. Thanks. Thank you, Daniel. So again, maybe I'll take the AT1 questions, the MREL questions, and then I'll pass on to James to give a bit more color on leverage lending. So I guess around how to think about the issuance, so I'll de-link the call strategy for next year, and the issuance is my first statement. So as I kind of said in my earlier remarks, the AT1 we kind of did in June is really to solve for ensuring we can meet the incremental demand that we need and the capacity we need to take advantage of the opportunities we see in our business. And so we shouldn't be seen as linked to any sort of future sort of de-risking the calls we have in 2025. So that'd be kind of the first point. I think when it comes to calls for next year, A, we haven't made any decision on that at all, and we're kind of waiting to close the call date. As ever, we're very mindful of how the market views these products, where we kind of feel makes rational and common sense first to take action, but we're also very mindful of our overall stakeholders and make sure we act in the interest of all of them. And then I think in terms of liability management, we've always seen that as an interesting tool. It's something we've used in times gone by. But as you know, for me to announce what I might be doing in liability management kind of defeats the point of liability management. So yeah, we find it a useful tool where we think it makes sense. Of course, we'll take a look at it. So I think when it comes to MREL, I think you might see CMDI, I guess negotiations or conversations continue. The trialogue is later on this year. We don't really see much movement in kind of what this means from a formal perspective for another couple of years. But yeah, we're comfortable with our MREL levels and the mix that we have, and so we don't have any intention to restructure the stack at this stage. James, do you want to pick up the leverage lending piece? Thanks, Richard. Yep. So look, leverage lending, it's very hard to judge at this point any actions that may come from the industry review that's been underway, and we sort of await to hear the feedback. As I said yesterday, we've been engaged over many years in a dialogue with ECB about leverage lending, the practices, the ways that we can improve definitions, methodology. We look forward to continuing that engagement, which has been very constructive. It's hard to say what the interactions are between P2R and any other sort of actions or tools. As you may recall, along with a couple of other banks, we did receive a P2R add-in two years ago of 20 basis points, which was reduced to 15 basis points last year, which we viewed as good progress and constructive. Just to give you a sense of the nature of this business for us, what I'd call the funded loan book, the whole book, as we've disclosed before, is about 1% of group loans and 4% or so of loans in the IB. So to give an order of magnitude of the whole book there. And then the commitment book, it goes up and down based on volumes in the market, but can run anywhere around 20%, let's say, of the total funded exposure on the IB balance sheet. So those are orders of magnitude, again, depending on the market environment. Now, one thing to bear in mind is that the risk management practices we have around that book, I mean, it starts with it's an originate-to-distribute model. And so our focus is, of course, on a strong origination, first of all, underwriting and then distribution capability. In addition, we hedge portions of the portfolio. We also, and then on the funded book, there can be loan loss provisions. Some of it's also held in the fair value book. And so you see market valuation adjustments go through revenue. So it's an interesting book in terms of how it performs and how it's also risk managed and how the risks associated with it flow through the income statement. But I thought giving you a little bit of color on how we think about it and manage it and its relative size in the group might be helpful. Thank you. Could I just ask one follow-up? Is the 15 basis points RWA Pillar 2R add-on linked in any way to the 10 basis points on leverage? No. They're completely separate sort of considerations that have gone into that as far as we're aware. But obviously, we think their origins are completely different. Thanks. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one at this time. And the next question comes from Louise Miles from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Hey, thanks for taking my questions. It's Louise here. Just two from me. So on slide 12, you talk about the issuance plan. It looks like the biggest gap so far relative to your year-to-date issuance is on senior non-preferred. Can you give us a bit of a feel for what currencies maybe you'd prefer to issue in for the senior non-preferred, if possible? And then just a quick question on the fundamentals. I mean, can you give us a little bit of color as to how you're seeing the performance of German commercial real estate development loans or just European development loans more generally? I know you speak about U.S. commercial real estate a fair amount in the presentation earlier in the week, but it would be good to hear about developments as well. Cool. So thank you for the question, Louise. So maybe I'll take, I guess, the issuance question. So yes, look, the remaining plan is going in the senior preferred and the senior non-preferred space just to sort of close things out. Like I say, we've already done EUR 13 billion or so year to date. So if you're in pretty good shape. So I think it's about EUR 1 billion or EUR 3 billion to go, and we'll just likely issue it in the cheapest currency. So as you've seen, we've kind of tapped a number of different markets this year across dollars, euros, and renminbi, and yen. And so where we sort of see the sort of most demand and what makes economic sense for us is where we'll issue. But it will be in sort of the main currencies is our current thinking. And Louise, very briefly on development loans in Germany. Look, our German commercial real estate exposure is relatively small, and within that, the exposure to developers even smaller. We don't see concerns in that portfolio at all. We tend to sort of gravitate to the highest quality of that spectrum, and hence it's not been a noticeable point for us. Great. Thanks. As a reminder, anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one at this time. So it seems there are no further questions at this time, and I would now like to turn the conference back over to Philip Teuchner for any closing remarks. Thank you, Moritz. Just to finish up, thank you all for joining us today. You know where the IR team is if you have any further questions, and we look forward to talking to you soon again. Goodbye. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.