As the world changes, so do markets constantly. This brings both challenges and opportunities. In the blink of an eye, everything can change. Even when times get tough, every cloud has a silver lining. We are here to persevere and fulfill our fiduciary duty to our clients, especially when the storm arises. Now it is up to us to go one step further and demonstrate what we are made of to find the right solution for our clients. Whatever comes next, we face the future. DWS Capital Markets Day 2022. Good morning and welcome to our Capital Markets Day 2022. My name is Oliver Flade, and I'm Head of Investor Relations at DWS. It has been five years since our IPO and three years since we had our last Capital Markets Day, and now we are six months with our new CEO, Stefan Hoops, and we thought that would be a good time to discuss with you our path forwards. Before we start, I wanted to draw your attention to the QR code that is in front of you on your desk, where you can download our presentation. I was also advised that you will find a nicely looking disclaimer at the end of the materials. Now let's focus on the agenda. Stefan Hoops, our CEO, will start, and he will explain our strategic ambition until 2025 and beyond. He will be followed by Manfred Bauer, who's heading our product division, and he will clearly talk about our product capabilities. Manfred will be followed by Vincenzo Vedda, who's overseeing the active part of our investment platform, and he will speak about our way to continuously deliver high performance for our clients. Dirk Goergen, our Head of the Client Coverage Division and the designated CEO of our U.S. franchise, will pick up by explaining how we serve our clients around the world and how we intend to grow the franchise. Last, but definitely not least, our highly valued CFO, Claire Peel, will close the round of formal presentations by taking a deep dive into our financials and targets. The presentations will be then followed by a very short break. We need to rearrange the stage a little bit for the Q&A session. I also wanted to remind you already now that questions will be limited to investors and analysts, either physically here in the room or if you have signed up for it online beforehand. Now, without any further delay, please let me hand over to our CEO, Stefan Hoops. Thank you. Good morning. Welcome to our DWS Capital Markets Day 2022. For those of you on the screen, thank you very much for zooming in and spending the next couple of hours with us. For those of you who have come to Frankfurt on a pleasant December morning, thank you very much. It's very nice to put faces to names and see old colleagues again. Welcome to Frankfurt. What Claire, Dirk, Manfred, Enzo and I wanna discuss with you over the next couple of hours is how our diversified business model, so the combination of our valuable core and a differentiated position in high growth products, is creating tremendous shareholder value. Now, as a fiduciary asset manager, we are passionate about servicing our clients, about following markets, navigating turbulences on behalf of our clients, and then creating superior investment performance. With a broad set of capabilities and, you know, frankly, we feel we have upside potential in sharpening our value proposition to clients. We are also confident that we can deliver on our plan because we have a variety of self-help enablers at our disposal. How do we create shareholder value? The most important financial target for us is clean, unadjusted, what you see is what you get, earnings per share of EUR 4.5 in 2025. We will remain laser-focused and disciplined on cost, targeting a cost income ratio of 59% or below 59% in 2025. I've seen that some of you are like asking what the assumptions are. We simply assume normalized markets, which we would define as the market consensus materializing. Clearly, we also want to pay out more to our shareholders. We want to pay. We're committed to paying a growing dividend coming from EUR 2 in 2021, paying a growing dividend for 2022, 2023 and 2024. We target like a payout ratio of 65% approximately starting in 2025. As we've said, we will either invest the excess capital, that Claire will discuss in more detail, impactfully creating shareholder value, or else pay an extraordinary dividend of up to EUR 1 billion at the AGM in 2024. Let's dig into our capabilities. Manfred, as our Head of Product, will go into more detail later. What I'm trying to do is break down our AUM by asset class, region and client type. We are one of a handful of asset managers with more than EUR 100 billion in equity, fixed income, multi-asset, passive, and alternatives. I actually feel that our size and significance in alternatives is one of the best-kept secrets about DWS. When you look at the regions, obviously Germany is our home base, accounting for roughly 40%, a little over 40% of AUM. We have roughly a quarter each in EMEA, ex-Germany, and the U.S., and we still manufacture products in seven markets in Asia-Pacific, accounting for roughly 5% of our AUM. When you look at the client types, we are obviously known for retail. That's our heritage. Actually more than half of our AUM stems from institutional clients. One particular area of strength is the insurance space, where we are the fourth-largest independent asset manager for insurance companies. What do clients see in us? We are a leader in Europe and the clear number one in Germany. We feel that we have a deep understanding of investment preferences and regulatory regime across client types. We talked about the diversified product capabilities, and we're also passionate about investing, and that's demonstrated by our creation of alpha with about three-quarters of our funds outperforming the benchmark on a five-year basis. We have a wide network of distribution partners, most of them in Germany, but also outside of Germany. That overall kind of explains why clients trust us with their money. What is noteworthy when you look at all of that is that we had those capabilities for quite some time. The question when you look at our capabilities and our AUM, I think the fair question is whether we are in the right weight class AUM-wise. When you look at the history after the acquisitions of Bankers Trust, Scudder, and RREEF in the early 2000s, we were actually the 4th-largest asset manager in the world by AUM. Unfortunately, since then, when you look at the markets that we competed in, so by asset class, client type, and region, unfortunately we have sort of under tracked market share grow or market growth by 2x, or in other words, we've only grown at half the speed of the overall market. There are plenty of reasons, but I think the most significant reason is that during that time we were a division or just part of a division of a big universal bank. Like lacking the focus on what's needed for an asset management company. Fortunately, that changed when Deutsche Bank took the decision to IPO us in 2018. Since then, I believe I'm confident that the management team has built up tremendous credibility, and what I find most impressive is the improvement of our cost income ratio by more than 10 percentage points since the IPO. I feel that the ability to control cost is incredibly important with a tough CFO, and it's important this environment in which, you know, inflationary pressures are all around. We've also beaten market and AUM growth in the last couple of years, which Dirk will go into more detail on. When you look at our revenue picture, the fact that we have a very diversified franchise has suited us well. We are aiming for flattish revenues, 2022 versus 2021, and our outlook for 2023 is also for broadly flat revenues. As the liquid products were slightly weaker this year, alternatives has picked up, right? The same is expected for next year. We will also going to have some tailwind because of net interest income, more on the capital later. What has kept us busy as a management team is ESG. Let's just address the elephant in the room. At the press conference we just had, not surprisingly, roughly 70% of the questions were on ESG, you can read what we said. Let me just repeat and kind of walk through the past, present, and future of ESG at DWS. I think our past is reasonably well covered, right? What I can confirm is that working with the authorities to resolving the investigations has the highest management priority. We are nearly complete with our internal investigations, we can confidently state that we stand by all of our disclosures, financial disclosures and prospectuses. Obviously, as you dig through 2.5 million documents, because we obviously want to continuously improve, we've already announced a new governance structure for ESG, which we discussed at the last quarterly earnings. Right. Going forward, we'll have a three-pronged approach where the strategies or all of the unconstrained thought leaders will continue to report to me. There will be much more accountability on the parts of the businesses to deliver ESG, we introduced a sustainability oversight office to control as a control segment of defense function, control how ESG is delivered. ESG can be a difficult topic because it's highly politicized. You have new regulation on a regular basis. It's more and more becoming a geopolitical tool. We also want to be crystal clear that we remain fully committed to ESG. You will not hear me use the terms leader or world-class. We shouldn't compete on that, but we want to continue being one of the flag bearers for ESG in Europe. Because I think it's quite important that despite everything that happened over the last couple of quarters, that clients, but also frankly, society sees us remaining committed to this really important, you know, part of kinda, you know, the world that all of us live in. What we want to focus on at DWS is climate and engage, meaning we really wanna make sure that no industry, no client, no corporate, but also no country is left behind. What is the environment that we expect for asset management companies over the next couple of years? I don't... I mean, that's the world we all live in, so I don't need to kind of walk you through the volatility in markets, or the fact that we have geopolitics and a like trend towards block building. Obviously we have an ongoing margin erosion in our industry and, you know, constantly have new regulation. I think that's well known. The question, and again, Dirk will go into more detail later, is what does it mean to our clients? In an environment in which you don't really have a global economy anymore, but require much more localized, specialized knowledge, in a world in which you don't have general market beta with asset prices going up, clients will require much more nuanced, much more specific advice. Obviously an environment which doesn't offer general market beta with asset prices going up, the demand for alpha is going to go up from clients. Fortunately, we feel that there's good news because alpha can be created in such an environment. As dispersion increases, that allows active asset managers to pick the right stocks and bonds. We call it a renaissance of active asset management that Vincenzo Vedda will touch on later. When you look at passive, if you think about there not being broad indices going up, that would also imply that index replication is not really a source of success, but bespoke passive is really what you have to focus on. We believe that over the next couple of quarters, private markets will probably be choppy. They will probably catch up to public markets when it comes to price movements. We also believe that the secular growth trends in alternatives is intact and will also create alpha for clients. Given this context, right? The market we expect, the capabilities that we believe we have, the expectation of our clients, what is the specific DWS strategy? The next slide is pretty complex, so I'll give you a minute to let it sink in. One of the biggest challenges in large organizations is that people want to have all bases covered, right? You don't want to miss any investment opportunity because if you do, you will sit in some business review meeting where somebody said, "Competitor ABC has grown tremendously. Why didn't you invest in alternatives, passive, Asia?" Whatever it may be. Which means you run the risk of stretching yourself too thinly, kind of being everything to everyone, and then ultimately not really knowing where you want to really be world-class and really deploy your resources. What we've done over the last couple of months is really look at every single component of our franchise and ask pretty simple questions. Who, meaning what client type needs us for what? Meaning which competencies, which asset classes, where in the world, why? Because we have track record, because of scale, because of client access. Why are our products bought? At what price, right? Can we actually charge what it will cost us? We kind of looked at the various parts of our franchise and were very disciplined, very fact-based, you know, sometimes pretty ruthless in simply calling it what it is, right? There are certain areas in which we are really strong and they deserve additional investments. There are certain areas which are really strong, but the markets are not growing, in which case there's no point in investing massively more into those. There are some parts of the market where we are very strong, but we haven't been able to build scale, right? Those you should just part ways with. That is obviously tough, but that's what we've done over the last couple of months. When you look at the quadrants, starting with value, those are really those businesses in which we enjoy a good market position, but the markets are not growing very much. Strong capabilities, not strong market growth. I'm sure all of us are remembering the BCG matrix we learned at university, so it's not dissimilar. There was hard work going into it. The growth part are those areas in which we feel we have a differentiated position, and that's really just Xtrackers, passive and alternatives, and the market is growing, right? We are strong and the market is growing and it's worth investing more in. There are certain areas in which we want to build, right? You will see me talk about it in a second. Very specific areas where we feel it's worth seed funding and building those capabilities. Obviously you also need to self-fund growth and build, which is why there's a reduced bucket, and let's start with that. What we want to do is through a combination of selling certain businesses, delayering the organization, which will also mean giving up on certain skill sets, and new cost initiatives to self-fund the investments in growth and build. This is not essentially a cost exercise, but we just want to give you confidence that we can actually afford the investments which I will talk about in a second. Right? It's important that we talk about how we save before I give a pitch of how we intend to use it. You wouldn't expect me to actually put things on shelf, right? It probably wouldn't be helpful for the prices if I said, like, "These businesses are up for sale." What we wanted to do in order to give you confidence is we will save about 2 percentage points of our cost income ratio, so about EUR 55 million in 2023. We give a quantum and a timestamp which will be reinvested in growth and bid. We'll give you updates on that over the next couple of quarters. If we dig a bit more into the cost picture, overall, the efficiency gains will be EUR 100 million over three years, so EUR 55 million in the 1st year, EUR 100 million overall, Claire will go into more detail, of which EUR 70 million overall will be reinvested. When you look at our adjusted cost income ratio, I understand that nobody likes cost income ratios that go up to then go down. I appreciate that. However, 2023 is the peak of our transformation to become an independent asset manager. Right? We've talked about it often. In 2023 is the year in which we have double cost because we still use Deutsche Link services, and I have to pay them for it, but already have our own people that will pick up those tasks. I think you would agree that you just do not stop a transformation project, we have to get it done. Aim, target, have clear path to a cost income ratio of 59% in 2025. I'm now moving to the value component of our portfolio. Those businesses, asset classes, equity, multi-asset, and our quant solutions and fixed income account for roughly 60% of our management fees. They have a very low cost income ratio, are highly profitable, and those are the businesses that really pay our dividend. Enzo will go into more detail. I just want to give you my view on those, starting with equity, which is our single most profitable asset class. It's also really the heart of our company when we found it, like, 66 years ago. We feel we have strength across capabilities, but still have ambitious plans to grow and improve that franchise by focusing on thematic equity and expanding our ESG offering. You look at multi-asset, I think that everybody knows large flexible funds like Concept Kaldemorgen, but we have way more. We have EUR 140 billion across multi-asset and quant solutions, really across a variety of strategies. We also want to grow that by offering a modular investment platform which Enzo will describe in more detail. Fixed income is back, right? Fixed income is finally paying income again. It's also when you look at our, you know, AUM after the third quarter, the largest part of our franchise, right? Roughly a quarter of our AUM. What we have to realize is that in fixed income, our performance, our track record over the last couple of years was not what clients deserve. Together with Enzo, I will also be personally involved to rebuild some of the offering and rebuild some of our multi-sector strategies. Let's move to our great Xtrackers franchise. I would like all of you even more if you call it Xtrackers going forward, not passive, because I like what BlackRock is doing with iShares, always getting free advertisement. We would really refer to it as Xtrackers going forward. Obviously, passive is a great business because once you've built sufficient scale, it's highly profitable. It's also great business for everyone, right? We are not the only one investing in passive, right? The question is really: what is our right to compete? What we have to accept is that we have a great brand, Xtrackers, but we've underinvested outside of Europe for the last couple of years. When you look at a market where your competitors are investing a lot, you really only have two options, right? You can either also invest or get out. There's no point in starving a business when all of your competitors are investing. What I can tell you, we approached the question pretty open-mindedly, but always told the team it will be binary. You will either get full sign-off on your investment ask or not, but we will not allow you to just exist without sufficient funding. Ultimately, we decided to fully fund the investment case for the Americas. I think Europe was an easier decision, and for the mandates component of the franchise, because for U.S., we had confidence because of the brand. Actually, the track record in the U.S., where we've been for quite some time in passive and Xtrackers, and our focus is on bespoke passive, right? It's a interesting niche where you focus on currency-adjusted Xtrackers, you have very thematic ETF. When you think about or if you agree with the, with the point that there's not broad market beta, then really those bespoke passive solutions will be alpha generating and will be in high demand. Right? What we want to do is see that business grow by 12% on average per year over the next couple of years, of which roughly 1/3 is expected to come from market appreciation and 2/3 from flow. 12% CAGR on average, 1/3 from market, 2/3 from flow. When you look at alternatives, I think you would be equally hard pressed to find any CEO without a compelling, convincing story of why alternatives is the thing to beat. Similarly as in passive, the question is what is our edge? Like, what's our right to compete? What gives us confidence is that we have a great foundation. I called it our best-kept secret earlier because we have more than EUR 100 billion of AUM. We have been doing it for more than 50 years. We have clear strength in commercial real estate and infrastructure and liquid real assets. When you think about the expected market dynamics over the next couple of years, we feel they will be playing to other strength we have as a franchise. We agree with the assumption that private markets overall will grow, and if you look at pretty much your research, it says the two biggest sources as like supply and demand. You will have more demand from retail, and you will have more supply because you will have banks providing less balance sheet funding to the real economy. Now, we feel that we understand consumers and retail clients pretty well, have strong existing distribution channels through wholesale, and we also feel that we have access not just to Deutsche Bank, but also other bank partners whose sourcing channels, whose existing relationship managers we want to leverage. What you see us do is add a private debt muscle. That's the one part which we have sort of missed in the 2010s. With our existing capabilities in real estate and infrastructure, we are already offering the debt versions of that. You have seen that we've announced Paul Kelly as our new head of alternatives, who comes from the market leader in private credit. He will ensure that, you know, we add appropriate resources to really grow alternatives. Overall, we want to grow by 10% CAGR, so 10% per year on average until 2025, of which about three-quarters will come from net new assets and a quarter is expected to come from market appreciation. One of the things you have seen us announce yesterday is what we want to do for European Transformation. I need to avoid getting a like pulse check from my Apple Watch because that's a topic I'm really passionate about. All of us, you know, there are a lot of Europeans in the room, I think it's the first time we see Europe really take on the necessity to transform. Those are not just investments in transition to a greener future. That's also diversifying our supply chain, so near-shoring. It includes more R&D, especially with midcap corporates. We need to focus more on digitization if you compare what Europe is offering versus China or the U.S. You'll see significant investments in a combination of infrastructure, green transition, mezzanine equity financing for corporates, and much more, like private-public partnerships and so on. The challenge that Europe has always been facing is lack of access to private risk capital. Obviously, our markets are not as deep as the American market, and, you know, we have a government that's less involved than the one in China, for example. We've always lacked risk capital for these transformative investments. Actually, the challenge we have is a double challenge because it's also quite tough to get the capital into the right places. Just imagine you want to provide mezzanine financing to German midcap corporates. It's not like you can just raise money and then fly from New York to Frankfurt, meet 50,000 in one room, hand the mezzanine capital, and fly back, right? These midcap corporates are scattered all across Germany, you know, which I've learned over the last 4 years. It's not just raising the capital, but also getting it to the right places. On the one hand, we have the existing capabilities in infrastructure, real estate, and so on, which obviously will come handy to add solutions for financing the European transformation. We also want to leverage, well, our majority shareholder, Deutsche Bank. The advantage that Deutsche Bank and DWS have together is really three steps. DWS, together with wealth management of Deutsche Bank, can raise the risk capital. The corporate bank and the investment bank of Deutsche Bank can source the risk. In my old job, I had 2,000 relationship managers. If banks provide less balance sheet lending, which I would not confirm for Deutsche Bank, so don't take that as a quote, but obviously they have existing relationships that should be leveraged, and that's something that we intend to do. Now, thirdly, that all needs to be brought together by a fiduciary asset manager because there's obviously an inherent conflict of interest. We, as DWS, will be that asset manager. Those are the people we recruit to really then leverage the sourcing, raise the risk capital, well, and like add value to the European transformation. You will have seen the announcement yesterday, is really a family of funds because obviously infrastructure is quite different to mezzanine. We wanted to call it the European Transformation Fund, similar to the Vision Fund, but ultimately it will be a fund family, but, you know, everybody likes family, so that's what we'll focus on, and again, that will be a key cornerstone of our alternatives franchise for the next couple of years. Let's move to the build component of our franchise. Honestly, it's tough building things at large organizations, right? I can tell you from my own experience, looking after the corporate bank, rebuilding online payments, it's tough. You need conviction on very specific topics and then tenacity to just get it done. Once you build these new things, it's incredibly rewarding for clients and shareholders. Now, do not expect a large financial contribution from any of that in the first half of our planning period. I can assure you that we will use something that we call success-based CapEx. Success-based CapEx, where the teams will only get funding once they fit certain milestones, and we will only invest in these once we have freed up the capacity from the reduced bucket. There are three specific areas that we want to invest in. The first one is I think all of us observe a change in the way that consumers access products. Many of us access products through platforms. That value chain is obviously something which we simply have to accept, that we have to embrace, that we have to become part of. The first milestone is to be API ready, so to be able to connect to those platforms. Ultimately, the vision is that in that embedded asset management, we want to be the synonym for trust. We want to make sure that people say, "In this embedded asset management product, I want a DWS product because that kinda symbols strength, trust, quality." For those of you that, you know, similar to me, bought that first PC in the late nineties, there was always a sticker on it, Intel Inside. I had no idea what it meant, even though I bought my first computer at Aldi, it's like one of the cheapest supermarkets in Germany, just having Intel Inside gave you confidence and helped me buy that product, right? We want to have a similar symbol of trust in the embedded asset management space. Second is that a lot of our clients or future clients have wallets, but not accounts. We simply have to get our products on the blockchain. This is not us saying that crypto is great. It's not. There are certain components that make sense, blockchain technology, this is not us going into crypto. This is simply us ensuring that our products are accessible on blockchain by people having wallets. The first milestone is for us to create digital twins of existing products. The vision is to be the home of the Euro Stablecoin. I would love if anybody asks me a question what that means during Q&A, but I don't want to spend too much time on it. That's something which is currently missing and the ultimate vision. The third area is that we believe the market structure that we know will change over the next five to 10 years. If you just think about the steps between investor and investment, you have like eight to 10 middlemen. Between a retail investor, you may have an insurance company, DWS, a broker, an exchange, a custodian, a trustee, an IPOing bank, a bunch of lawyers. You have plenty of participants, some because of regulation, some like us because they provide great advice, some purely because of convenience. We believe that this is going to be disrupted and, you know, we would like to be one of those disruptors. In order to prepare for a change in market structure, the first milestone is to build or buy necessary components. The ultimate vision is to be the tokenizer, which means you will need to have a couple of parties credibly representing that what you buy in tokenized fashion is actually what you think you buy. If you securitized, tokenized this building, somebody needs to be the trusted instance that said, "Yes, it does have, whatever, seven floors, and it has been the host to awesome capital markets days like the DWS 2022 one." And that is something that you wouldn't, you know, just expect a couple of 25-year-old techies to do. We believe that there's going to be a place for a couple of trusted parties to be the ones representing trust in the blockchain on the blockchain. Now, what I've done over the last couple of minutes is to walk through our franchise from an asset class and client perspective. Now we want to look at regions. It's tough to go all the way over there. Starting with Asia-Pacific, which obviously is the region with the biggest growth. One of the toughest decisions that you have to take as a management team is if you look at the market which is growing really fast, you just realize that you cannot access it independently. What we had to realize is that over the last 10 to 15 years, we simply haven't built sufficient scale, right? In great markets like India, we don't have a license or a brand. We have awesome, great partners. With Nippon Life and Harvest and a couple of others, we have really, really strong partners in Asia-Pacific. What we will do going forward, Dirk Goergen will talk more about partnerships overall, is really focusing on growing with our existing partners, but there's way more that we can do both ways. We can only be a leader globally if you have strength, a pole position in your home market. We obviously want to remain a leader in Germany. In EMEA ex-Germany, we're already reasonably strong, but believe we can grow further with additional partnerships and by growing Xtrackers, and we discussed the European transformation. In the U.S., what gives us confidence is that we were, not too long ago, the fifth-largest asset manager in the U.S.. Right? We still have a lot of the bread and butter capabilities, so fixed income, money markets, and so on. With Dirk moving over, and running, being the CEO on the ground, we have ambitious growth plans also for the Americas, really with a focus on alternatives and Xtrackers. What we've covered so far is the market environment that we believe we operate in, the client preference changes, our DWS strategy, but it's still an ambitious plan, as some of you have pointed out. What gives me confidence that we can actually deliver on that plan is that we have a bunch of self-help enablers at our disposal. We have great partners, and I will in a second talk about all these in turn, and want to do more with them. We view Deutsche Bank as obviously it's like a multifaceted relationship, where we will continue to focus on becoming an independent standalone asset manager while still reaping low-hanging fruits, which I will discuss in a second. Tech is not a cost center. It is an enabler, and we're looking forward to having Angela Maragkopoulou on board on Jan 1. high-performance culture is something that every asset manager needs because our clients deserve the best possible performance. obviously, clients also need to ensure that their money is safe, right? you need to have the combination of a high-performance culture that's really focusing on risk management and controls. you know, somewhat biasedly, I am convinced that we have a great management team because ultimately all of you will have to trust us that we can actually deliver that plan. talking to each of them in turn. the clients of our distribution partners account for roughly a quarter of our total AUM. Right? this is not just a nice-to-have, this is a key part of how we drive our business. We want to grow it further, and we have specific KPIs and executive board sponsorship with all of them, so you will see us grow with our partners. I expect, and during the press conference, the questions were basically ESG or Deutsche Bank, looking forward to those questions later. I think what is clear is that our relationship with Deutsche Bank is multifaceted. I think that over the last couple of years, there was too much focus on getting away. Just to be clear, we will remain laser-focused on being independent from a governance and a platform perspective. The reason why you would want to have a standalone asset manager, because you want us to have the rules, the controls of an independent asset management company. That is something that Karen Kuder is laser-focused on. You also rightfully want us to be fully independent from a platform perspective, from a tech perspective. That is something which we are also fully focused on. When you look at the upside that we haven't really harvested over the last couple of years, it is too big to ignore. When you look at the private bank, we have a well-established interaction with the private bank. They have open architecture, so, you know, that's not going to change. It's a well-established interaction with the private bank, which obviously serves both parties very well. With the corporate bank and the investment bank, our interaction can best be described as sporadic. I, you know, can tell you that from my own experience, having run sales in the Investment Bank and having overseen the Corporate Bank over the last couple of years, it is sporadic where people know each other. We feel that there's way more that we can do for corporates, corporate pension solutions, for example. Obviously, what we discussed around alternatives and the European Transformation will also, you know, be juiced or be energized, be fueled by a closer interaction with the Corporate Bank and the Investment Bank. That's more to come. You know, what we've definitely told everybody is to continue to be laser-focused on the necessary steps towards independence, while at the same time reap low-hanging fruits for our clients and our shareholders. As I said, tech is an enabler, and there are really three things that Angela, that our tech folks are focused on. The first one is simply seeing through that independent platform and move our applications to the cloud, right? For the tech colleagues that have dialed in, sorry that I sort of like summarized three years of hard work in 1 sentence, but it's important because it's the foundation of what we do. Now, secondly, we need to have much more agility between tech and our businesses for a variety of reasons, which I think are quite obvious. We're convinced that humans will continue to take decisions, but they should be better augmented with data. There will be much more focus on data science going forward. One of the things that I think is really important about the asset management industry, that if you want your clients to have the best possible investment performance, you need to strike the right balance of having a high-performance culture, but at the same time, it needs to be built on integrity and discipline. Enzo will go into more detail later. The starting position of that is diversity. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but you need diversity of thought in order to make sense, it's like in this crazy world that we all live in. We're convinced that diverse teams will simply take better investment decisions, better decisions around tool to cover, better decisions around all parts of our franchise, and that then starts with recruiting. We will be very focused on recruiting from diverse backgrounds because people need to have been educated differently. Those talents need to be trained, they need to be nurtured, and we also need to have the right incentive structure, which is more than before rewarding outperformance for clients, while obviously factoring in all of the requirements of a fiduciary asset manager. What makes me comfortable that we can execute on our strategic plan, that we can be disciplined when it comes to cutting costs and self-funding, that we have the ability to maintain leadership in the value part of our franchise, that we can have a proper growth mindset for Xtrackers and alternatives, and that we can be bold when it comes to building new things, is our team. I'm confident that we can pull it off because of that team. What I could tell you is that the team is diverse and experienced and has a getting-it-done mindset, but I'm sure that every CEO would tell that about their team, right? You would probably discount it. What I want to do as a millennial CEO is tell you why I personally like all of my team members. Firstly, I want to add or thank Mark and Stefan for significant contributions over 24 and almost 40 years to the DWS franchise. With Dirk Goergen, our head of coverage, we have a hands-on strategist. That is the rare combination of somebody who's been trained as a consultant but is just focused on getting stuff done. Karen has a very pleasant demeanor, but she's a fighter. Karen grew up in Eastern Germany. She was 16 when the wall came down. She was the first generation that conquered the West. I met Karen when we had to get Frankfurt post-Brexit ready, which didn't make us fan favorites in London. I can tell you when things get difficult, you want to have Karen by your side. When you look at Angela, you know, in this circle of trust, I wanted to bring my own person from the corporate bank, right? I'd focused on tech and ops for the last four years, wanted to bring my own person. Interviewed Angela, I was just blown away by her passion for tech, data, platforms, transformation. She hasn't worked in the financial industry, but at Vodafone Deutsche Telekom, she definitely learned what's needed to build an awesome tech franchise. She obviously also oversees ops and other things. Manfred Bauer, our head of product, is a trained tax expert. What you may know is that there are more books written about the German tax system than about all tax systems of all countries combined. I'm glad that we have somebody like Manfred's massive brain overseeing our products and wrappers and, you know, the various markets we operate in. When I'm with Claire, I can just relax. Claire is so incredibly knowledgeable about every number that we've ever had and calm at the same time, that later when I'm at Q&A, my heart rate will drop by 20 points just being next to her. She's really the perfect CFO overseeing the execution of that plan. We also have a great next generation of leaders, right? You will see Vincenzo Vedda later today, who I actually covered as a client when he ran global trading for DWS. He then ran EMEA coverage before being promoted to our head of active asset management. Look, overall, I'm just convinced it's a great team. It's fun to work with the team, and I'm convinced that we will pull this off. What will we pull off? This is the last slide. We've almost made it. I'm not going to have you go through like one of those summary slides where I say everything I've said so far, because rather than summarize it, we just want to make it very clear why we do what we do. We want to aim to create value for our clients in order to create tremendous shareholder value. As I said, the most important financial target is clean, unadjusted, no BS earnings per share. We remain laser-focused and disciplined of cost, targeting below 59% of cost income ratio in 2025. We want to give you two specific growth targets alternatives, and Xtrackers, just for you to understand what DWS will look like in 2025, by aiming to grow our Xtrackers franchise by 12% CAGR over the next three years, and alternatives by 10% over the next three years, CAGR on average. Right, so EUR 4.5 EPS below 59% cost income ratio and specific growth in those two areas. Now, we've also heard you loud and clear on other things we should do in order to make our stock more attractive. On the one hand, you have things like strengthening the position of our minority shareholders or improving the liquidity. Most of those decisions are not actually in our hand, but in the hand of our shareholders. There was a request for much more transparency, insights into the Harvest stake or also excess capital. Hopefully, what we'll get across today is that we view excess capital as your capital. It's your money. We aim to either deploy it sensibly or return it. I'm sure by now everybody has done the math of us committing to a growing dividend from EUR 2 in 2021, a growing dividend for 2022, 2023, 2024, a payout ratio of approximately 65% starting from 2025. Either a compelling shareholder value creating way of deploying capital or otherwise an extraordinary dividend of up to EUR 1 billion at the AGM of 2024. With that, I want to thank you and hand over to our Head of Product, Manfred. Thank you. Thank you, Stefan, and good morning, everyone. Let me explain how our product capabilities position us for growth. Industry forecasts show the global asset management industry continues to grow. We expect assets under management to reach about EUR 170 trillion by 2030, which translates into an annual growth rate of about 6% since 2021. Net new assets contribute about 2 percentage points a year to that growth. This is slightly slower than in the past, but asset management continues to be a highly attractive industry. The question is, how can we compete successfully in this environment? At DWS, we have a competitive edge in three ways: our product mix, our global fund platform, and our product range strategy. Let me start with the product mix. The breadth of our capabilities continues to be a real strength. We are one of four asset managers globally to be ranked among the top 20 by assets under management across active, passive, and alternatives. Given this diversification, we can manage shifts between asset classes while maintaining stable revenue streams. We have not always achieved market growth in the past, as Stefan said, but our product mix today is skewed towards growing markets. If you apply market growth assumptions to our specific mix of asset classes, client segments, and regions, it results in a forecast growth for net new assets of more than 3% per annum. This is significantly higher than the overall market growth of 2% I have just mentioned. We will continue to leverage all our capabilities to realize this potential. Our performance since 2019 shows we can do this. Our global fund platform is another factor enabling our success. As of today, we are able to launch wrap products in 11 countries, offer up to 23 types of vehicles, with client invested from 46 countries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. We expand our reach around the globe to our major product hubs and cross-border registration. This also delivers economies of scale. In addition, we offer separately managed accounts to our institutional clients. Moving on to our third strength, our global product strategy, which has 3 main goals. First, we launch products based on a joint view across divisions. We will focus on both our core capabilities and innovation. This enables us to capture a significant share of net new assets through new funds. For example, new funds have contributed about 2/3 of our overall net new assets since our IPO, EUR 48.7 billion. Second, we aim to scale funds to increase profitability. As of Q3, we had roughly 100 funds above EUR 1 billion of AUM. While this is a good starting point, we think we can convert a higher percentage of our funds to the Billionaire's Club. To do so. We are working closely with our Client Coverage Division and our strategic partners. Third, we actively manage the life cycle of our products. We have a clear view on profitability and have merged or closed more than 8% of our funds across the liquid platform, always in line with our clients best interests. We have also repositioned more than 30% of our funds, mainly driven by the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation. This led us being ranked number two in Article eight by Morningstar. The development of our own independent achieve platform will give us the ability to take our life cycle management further and increase profitability. I will now take you through our priorities for active, passive alternatives as well as digital. Let's start with active. Funds with high assets under management are a key driver of profitability. In active, we have more than 40 funds above EUR 1 billion and several funds above EUR 5 billion of assets under management. As I said earlier, we have funds we can convert above EUR 1 billion given their performance and market demand. For example, we want to leverage our position in both core and sustainability fixed income strategies, and we continue to grow thematic equities. Just as important is capturing flows from new funds. To address client demand, we update our offering constantly based on market dynamics, internal strengths, and again innovation. In our 2022 pipeline, we concentrate on thematics such as a new metaverse strategy as well as on sustainability, including net zero and climate transition. In addition, our global farm platform enables us to export successful strategies from one region to another. We are about to offer our successful blue economy concept in the U.S. These funds invest in companies that contribute to the health of our ocean. We developed and launched it in Europe in close cooperation with the World Wildlife Fund, WWF, now soon to be launched in the U.S. We will also invest in expanding our capabilities when changing market conditions led to new opportunities. Due to rising interest rates and the renaissance of active, we are exploring fixed maturity strategies, one of our success stories of the past. Enzo will elaborate on active in more detail later on. Moving on to passive or better Xtrackers. We all know passive has been a strong driver of industry growth in the past. Equally important, ETFs have proven stability in times of market volatility. We believe passive will continue to grow, and our aim is to achieve continuous inflows. Building on our existing expertise, we want to grow our European Xtrackers platform. In 2023, we will expand our product range focused on UN Sustainable Development Goals and climate transition benchmarks. In addition, we are targeting a broader client base with increased marketing for Xtrackers and new digital channels. Offering digital twins is one milestone in our journey to a digitized offering. In the U.S., we want to build on our Xtrackers presence with targeted products. Our ETFs have a high market share in specialized categories such as China A-shares or currency hedging. Going forward, we see additional opportunities in thematic and sustainability ETFs, and we aim to leverage our strong active investment expertise in ETF wrappers, active ETFs. Lastly, we see continuing demand for customized solutions from institutional clients, which we are matching with a global index development team. Turning now to alternatives. Forecasts for alternatives continue to show strong growth rates despite a challenging environment in the near term, there are clear opportunities in this high margin business. We aim to realize our potential in three ways. First, our flagship offering. To position ourselves for growth, we will expand our successful vintage series and open-ended fund offering across infrastructure and real estate with new products coming to market next year. In the United States, we will launch a new real estate strategy in order to establish another flagship fund. In Europe, we will raise funding with a new sustainable infrastructure growth strategy for institutional clients. Second, we want to capitalize on the democratization of private assets, as Stefan said earlier. We have a strong wholesale distribution network, especially in Germany and Europe. Combining this with our alternatives expertise will put us into a super strong position to grow. To gain further traction, we will launch a new European infrastructure fund early next year, mainly targeting retail clients in our home market. Third, we want to grow our liquid real assets business, which is delivering very strong investment performance. In order to continue our growth, we have replicated our successful real asset strategy from the U.S. in Europe. This is another good example of the potential of a global platform. To emphasize again, mobilizing private capital for the European transformation is one of our top priorities. We feel uniquely equipped to access the key players through our strong partnership with Deutsche Bank and our links to the public sector. This will enable us to create real impact. One important area of transformation is digitization. Let's move on to our own digital strategy. Stefan already outlined our vision, so let me pick up on that. Consumer behavior is evolving. The increasing adoption of digital and mobile technologies is already changing now how our clients select our products and where they buy them. This means we have to seamlessly embed our products and services into digital channels. Today, in our traditional ecosystem, we want to provide an asset management as a service offering, which can be integrated seamlessly and at scale via application programming interfaces or APIs. Our first focus will be on API-powered content delivery. Over time, this will include additional services such as model portfolios, tokenization, or accounts. We are also seeing increasing adoption of the token economy. We plan to take our products on the blockchain to distribute them to wallet-based investors. For this, we aim to go live with our digital twins next year. You heard already about them. In addition, there is a market need for blockchain-based money. We want to play a key role in the development of a Euro stablecoin to fill this gap. We can also realize efficiency gains through blockchain technology and smart contracts, for example, by investing in tokenized real assets. In the future, we envision a world where major parts of the asset management value chain becomes tokenized, allowing us to offer new services and to expand our current business model. In particular, we see significant opportunities for DWS to become a trusted tokenization provider. There are plenty of opportunities ahead of us, and we are ready to win. Let me summarize our priorities to drive growth by 2025. For active, we aim to grow our funds above EUR 1 billion by 20%. In Xtrackers, our target is to grow assets under management above 12% per annum on average over the next three years. In the higher margin alternatives business, we plan to grow assets under management above 10% per annum on average over the next three years. Finally, regarding digital, we will carefully balance short-term opportunities with building foundations for the future to establish a digital value chain by 2025. Thank you very much. I will now hand over to Enzo, who will bring us to the active investment capabilities. Thank you. Thank you, Manfred. A warm welcome, everyone. Active. Active is our largest book of business, and we're convinced there will be a renaissance of active, especially in current market conditions. We start from a strong position. We have about 300 investment professionals across 13 hubs, giving us a truly global and integrated active platform. We run about EUR 500 billion across all major asset classes and many different investment styles, from fundamental bottom up to quantitative strategies, and from retail investors to highly sophisticated institutional investors. Our business is highly diversified across asset classes, regions, and client segments. You can see how this translates into performance. 73% of our active strategies outperform their respective five-year benchmark, and 35% of our funds are rated four or five star by Morningstar, which is above the industry average. Having said this, we have areas where we can improve, as mentioned by Stefan earlier. Our goal is to continue expanding on the share of our top performing strategies. What is the foundation of the success to date? We rely on highly experienced teams. The average tenure of our portfolio manager is above 10 years, and we have been managing client assets for over six decades. Our proprietary research and our highly disciplined investment processes are key. We have strong risk management capabilities across a range of market conditions and have done especially well in difficult markets. Let me show what I mean by touching upon three of our flagship strategies. All of them sit in the top decile of their respective peer groups of what we believe will be growth areas in active. I'll start with our largest fund on the platform, our equity income strategy called Top Dividende. Given its value tilt, it is no surprise that this fund went through a pretty difficult time during the biggest growth run in history. As the tide turned this year, we have delivered strong performance by staying true to our approach. History has shown that the mean reversion between value and growth is very likely. We expect a prolonged outperformance of value very similar to what happened 20 years ago, the last major mean reversion. In these circumstances, we would expect Top Dividende to do extremely well as the largest global large cap value in Europe. My second example is our Asian Bond Fund. We've done extremely well on the back of excellent duration management and avoiding exposure to China, especially the Chinese real estate sector. This is what we really think of as taking active risk. Complementing this with our overall strength in credit, we believe we can take advantage of an asset class that historically delivers strong returns in early stages of the cycle. My third example is our flagship fund, Concept Kaldemorgen, along with the full suite of total return funds. These have proven themselves capable of navigating all kinds of market conditions, and this outperformance in down markets usually bodes well for future flows, and we expect continued growth in these strategies. We have shown why we can do well in the segments of active that we believe will grow. Why do we think there will be an overall renaissance of active? We have entered a new market environment in which we face challenges such as geopolitical risks, deglobalization, inflation, and climate change, just to name a few. It is beyond the scope of this presentation to go through our market views, but there are some important takeaways for active asset management. With central banks having to fight inflation to the detriment of growth, the time of ample central bank liquidity and backstops is over. If you add an economic slowdown into the equation, we expect more muted asset returns for quite some time. In a world like this, we expect bigger tail risks, higher dispersion, and changing correlation patterns. In other words, in a low beta world, alpha on a relative basis will be more important to the overall return. It's only an advantage if you're confident, as we are, about your active management capabilities. Why do we believe we will do well? I've already shown our strong track record and capabilities, especially in growth pockets of the active market. We have also taken steps towards a more integrated active platform. In the past, and this is true for the entire industry, portfolio management teams operated within silos. This meant duplication and different quality standards from team to team. Over time, the industry has implemented more horizontals to mitigate these disadvantages. We believe that this trend towards a capability-driven or modular investment platform will continue. Striking the right balance between innovation and stability on this journey will be very important for future success. What are we doing in this respect? First, we have started to create investment modules for our multi-asset teams. These allow portfolio managers to take advantage of direct access to our first-class capabilities, as an example, when it comes to stock or bond selection. Currently, we run about EUR 3.5 billion across 17 different modules. These range from Euro Sovereigns all the way to equity quant. We have created an implementation platform that will foster collaboration between our portfolio construction and execution teams. In this way, we have been able to centralize processes such as foreign exchange hedging or cash management. We continue to leverage our data to improve investment performance. As an example, running a pilot that looks at portfolio manager behavior to improve their timing decisions. This trend will require us to further develop data and technological capabilities, and will also impact on how our people operate. We need to foster a culture that incentivizes collaboration across former lines. A culture in which everyone contributes to performance. A culture in which everyone can trust their fellow teams to deliver a first-class capability. That is why we're focused on creating a high-performance culture, as mentioned by Stefan earlier. What does this mean in the context of active? Diversity of thought is especially important for making the best investment decisions in active. That is why we are strengthening collaboration across asset classes so that people with widely different skill sets contribute to those decisions. We also need to complement our skill set as data analysis and technology becomes more important. All of this means recruiting the very best people we can from diverse backgrounds and broad skill sets. Finally, collaboration calls for incentivation that rewards teamwork. A high-performance culture means recognizing and rewarding outperforming teams and individuals who deliver outperformance to our clients. Obviously, always in line with our fiduciary duty as an asset manager. In the context of active, obviously, this is very measurable. In summary, first, we have a well-established track record of delivering a strong investment performance to our clients. Second, in a lower beta world, alpha will play a bigger role, so we expect a renaissance of active. Third, in this market environment, plays to our strength, especially in growth areas. At the same time, we're focused on building the best operating model with a high-performance culture, so we're well-positioned for the future. Thank you very much. I would like to hand over to Dirk, our Global Head of Client Coverage. Good morning, everyone here in the room and the screen. Pleasure to meet you. For the next 15 minutes, I will talk about what matters most at DWS, and that's our clients. I also want to give you the conviction that we can deliver on the ambitious numbers we are having ahead of us. Surely we want to make a difference in how we serve our clients, how we listen to them, how we turn this into focused action and profitable growth. You've heard this, clients are facing a complex world: digitalization, inflation, geopolitical challenges, increasing regulatory burden. What do clients expect from us? First and foremost, clear advice and guidance. When we at DWS talk about markets, it's not just the pure investment market, it's also the industry our clients are working in. What our clients appreciate that we are bringing this together and deliver thought leadership to our clients. Second, clients require that we understand the specific situation they are operating in, so they are looking for tailor-made solutions, kind of bespoke solutions, not one size fits all. Clients want to have interaction with the entire franchise. We from the Client Coverage Division, and that's a very important component, we make sure that we orchestrate the franchise, making sure that they have interactions with our investment platform, the implementation teams, to get the best out of our franchise to our clients. Last but not least, service. Clients are looking for swift onboarding, great reporting, even embedded in their own ecosystem. Here we can make a difference. Let me talk about our client base and give you some more color. At the end of September this year, we managed EUR 833 billion. You have heard from Stefan at the very beginning. Our client base is, you know, equally kind of splitted, 44% on the wholesale side, 56% on the institutional side. More important, if you look at the pie chart, it's well diversified. We have implemented two and a half years ago, a distinct client tiering. Our distribution partners are accounting for 25% of our asset base. We have identified 50 so-called platinum clients. Those are the clients we are typically serving on a global level, and those clients account for another 20% of our asset base. On regional levels, so-called gold clients, in total 200, and those clients account for another 200. In total, roughly 250 of our clients account for two-third of our asset base. How do we serve them? The coverage teams across the globe consist of 600 people. They are centered around four regions. It's our home market, Germany, Austria, it's EMEA, it's U.S., and it's APAC. Our interactions on the wholesale as well as on the institutional side are globally coordinated. We have in line with our growth strategy, dedicated specialists on the Xtrackers side as well as on the alternatives side. We are globally aligned but regionally suited because ultimately the business is happening locally. From a coverage perspective, and this is now a very important item, we act as the advocate of our client. We are bringing the voice of our clients in the organization, making sure that it's. it's heard loud and clear, and making sure that we are matching the demands and delivering really the best of our franchise to really match also the requirements they're having by the bespoke solutions. Let me give you some tangible evidence how this approach set up has worked out over the last years. First, flows. We have delivered since the IPO until September this year, EUR 58 billion of long-term asset flows, meaning excluding money market, the cash business. If you strip out 2018, since 2019 until September this year, we have raised EUR 77 billion of flows. We will, in line with our strategy, continue that path, and you can see the momentum here on that chart. Second, it's not only about flows, it's also about the margin. Claire will talk about this in her speech. We have been able, over the last years as a DWS, to keep the margin relatively stable if you also compare to the industry. Why? From a coverage perspective, this is also going back to the mindset of delivering profitable growth to the organization, meaning we want to achieve higher margin on our cross-inflows and lower margin on our cross-outflows. In 2020 and 2021, we had been extremely successful by adding to the top line based on our flows. Lastly, super important for the long-term perspective of the franchise, it's the satisfaction of our client base. We have conducted this year in October, against the background of a challenging year, we have asked our most important clients, the platinum clients, including the distribution partners: How satisfied are you with DWS overall? The feedback we got was a Net Promoter Score of 50. You can compare this to an industry average of 28. Since our most important clients are a cornerstone of our future growth ambitions, this was a nice feedback. Of course, we have to some extent hoped for it because we have asked our most important clients. More important than the score itself, it's really that we ask our clients and that we are getting insights across the entire value chain. Where do we need to get better? Where do we need to improve? That's our aspiration. We understand the overall satisfaction, but most importantly on the reporting, on the implementation side, on the coverage side, on the performance side, where can we improve? We want to roll out this in 2023 to the entire client base, to make sure that by 2025 we are in full swing and get this on a, on a regular basis and of course we keep you updated. Stefan made the point, partnerships. Before I go into game plans on wholesale as well as on the institutional side, let me spend one minute on partnerships and to make one point. Of course, we have very strong partners. Wholesale side, institutional side, long-lasting relations, trusted dialogue, dedicated account teams connected on the top of the houses. For us going forward and where we want to continuously improve is: How can we drive change together? How can we create joint solutions that are making a difference? How can we drive those solutions for scale? The overall strategy is very much centered around be it our strategic partners as well as the client tiering I mentioned, because it goes back to our mindset of listen to the client and deliver a solution, that best works on a foundation of trust and mutual understanding. Game plan on the wholesale side. Let me talk about the wholesale business. The wholesale business is clearly embedded in our DNA, so it's our home turf, I would call it. We are market leader in Germany. We are having a strong business in Southern Europe, strong business in APAC, especially with private banks, but also our business in the U.S., the mutual fund business. The strength is very much centered around the advisors. Be it private banks, be it professional fund buyers, be it distributors, right? They like, they like of course, our investment platform, our flagships, our service, but most importantly that we speak the same language that the retail end clients do. What we deliver to those advisors and wholesale partners is the whole package. It's the, it's the product, the solution itself, but it's also topics like be it marketing, be it training that are extremely important, and when it then comes down to how can we accelerate the momentum we are having on the ex-active side into Alternatives growth, that's extremely important. Of course, the world is changing and our challenge and at the same time opportunity is: how do we carry this strength into the digital environment? What we have done over the last two years is focused on neo-brokers. Neo-brokers, nice business. We have grown our passive business saving plans, and we will continue to do so. Expanding partnerships in that space. Let me pick up the example Manfred and Stefan made, digital twins. Why is this important from a coverage perspective? Because it's opening up completely new client segments. Clients that are having today a wallet instead of an investment account, and that are the clients we want to tackle going forward. Of course, this kind of transition we need to manage that needs those enablers we want to build. Embedded asset management, how can we, you know, get the full suite to the retail clients by modularized solutions based on APIs? That is the enablers we need to deliver on this transformational journey going forward, and to capture the opportunities in our home turf business. On the institutional side, our starting position is slightly different, Stefan made the point we had open and honest discussion in our management team. If you look at catalyst for the institutional business, where we need to get better is: how can we create a scalable platform? I talked about swift onboarding, fast implementation, easy to understand in-investment processes. That's something what we will focus on and something we will invest into. The second item, global consultants. Global consultants became more and more important over the last years. They are acting as the kind of interface between us and the institutional end client. We have done a decent job over the last years. To give you a number, in 2018 we have five consultant-rated products. By today, we have 50, and this is really a catalyst. If the consultants are rating our products, bringing those to the institutional clients, that is a real catalyst for the business, and we will invest into our coverage teams to improve the service we are getting to the consultants because we perceive this as a big leverage. We want to leverage the strength we are having, for example, on the insurance side. The fourth largest independent insurance asset manager. Clients give us feedback. They love our one-stop offering. The advisory also on ESG net zero we are giving to them. When we want to leverage this positioning on the basis of scalable platforms, strong positioning with consultants to underline our growth ambitions when it comes to active fixed income is back, on the alternative side as well as on the passive side. Pensions and corporates, great relations across the globe, Europe, APAC, as well as in the U.S. and here in Germany. Let me take the example around the European Transformation Fund family because that's the mindset we need to grow that business, bringing together the ultimate strengths. Deutsche Bank sourcing the risk, we are fiduciary managing it, and then, you know, also raising the capital with the corporates and the pensions. That's our future plan to grow that business in a growing segment, but I can tell you having nice game plans, strategies, and Stefan described me as a hands-on strategist, that's nice, but I can also tell you to execute on plans, it comes very much down to the right mindset. We have framed it over the last years in the client coverage division around two key statements, and I will give you some insights around it. We call it win as one team, meaning you need to have a winning attitude. You need to have a growth mindset. Clients see this, they perceive it. They see in us also the guys, how do we stretch ourselves? Most importantly, and Manfred made the point, it comes down to team play. Team play matters most. If you want to deliver the best out of your franchise to your clients from a coverage perspective, we need to make sure that we team up across all the divisions, be it product, be it tech, be it ops, be it the investment platform and the coverage guys, to deliver on the requirements our clients are having and to get the right solutions out of DWS. Secondly, we need to drive change. Change is part of today's world, and this comes very much down to having clear processes and preparation. Sometimes we call it creating this ongoing internal urgency, right? Having a good backward planning. If you're falling short on a timeline to reach out to the colleagues and say, "Hey, what can we do? How can we scale up and how can we get faster?" And measuring this based on clear KPIs. Two very important components, winning as one team, change to grow. That's the way how we describe it, and I'm really proud of the teams, how they are living this every day with our clients and internally. To sum it up, we have a game plan on the wholesale as well as on the institutional side. More important, we have the right mindset and we will keep this spirit up. Thank you very much for your attention. I now hand over to our CFO, Claire Peel. Thank you, Dirk. Good energy to follow there. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Frankfurt. It's good to see all of your faces. As the team has outlined today, DWS is very much advancing forward on its corporate journey, and this is underpinned by the strength of the financial position that we have today. I'm going to go into more details on that. Before I do so, let me recap on the corporate journey so far. Since becoming publicly listed in 2018, we can measure our progress according to two distinct phases. In phase 1, we focused on efficiency to stabilize, turn around, and reshape our business. This enabled us to navigate difficult market conditions and uncertainty, especially during the pandemic period, and to achieve our adjusted cost-income ratio and our net flow targets that were set at the IPO one year earlier than planned in 2020. This positioned us well for phase 2 of our corporate journey to transform, grow, and lead, but without again compromising on efficiency. While there have certainly been challenges that we've faced in 2022, the stability of our global and diversified business model is continuing to serve us well and keeping us on track to meet our financial aspirations. Between nine months 2020 and nine months 2022, we've reported a compound annual growth rate or a CAGR of 12% in total adjusted revenues, supported by a resilient management fee margin over this period, and delivering a CAGR of 17% in adjusted profit before tax over the same period. While total adjusted costs have increased and risen since 2020, the ratio of our adjusted costs over assets under management has been stable at approximately 19 basis points. Our adjusted cost income ratio has reduced over time. Whilst we have continued to invest in growth over this more recent timeframe. This has resulted in adjusted cost income ratio of around 60%, consistent with our guidance for 2022 and supported by stronger revenues. This is testament to our continued focus on efficiency whilst targeting growth, which is also reflected in the development of our net flows. Over the past 24 months, we've attracted a total of EUR 43 billion of total net inflows across the three pillars of active, passive and alternatives. Cash has reported slight net outflows over this period, with significant volatility as we've seen investors using this asset class to respond to market uncertainty. More importantly, our targeted areas of passive and alternatives have accounted for 85% of total net inflows during this period. Also to note, alternatives flows do include capital returns to investors following the disposal of real assets from the closed-end funds that are coming to the end of their life. This capital that has been returned to investors is often being reinvested in the asset class and helping to support net new revenue growth. Looking more closely at revenues. As of nine months 2022, DWS has recorded EUR 2 billion of total net revenues, representing a 12% CAGR since nine months 2020 and 7% growth since nine months 2021. This has been driven by a resilient management fee margin and strong management fees, which we distinguish here between value and growth. Value is referring to our actively managed asset classes across fixed income, equity, multi-asset, SQI and cash. Whilst growth is comprising here of passive and alternatives. In nine months 2022, our value asset classes have collectively accounted for almost 60% of our management fee revenues. In particular, retail flagship funds in active equity and active multi-asset have supported our stable management fee income, which we will continue to focus on to help retain a strong position in active value strategies, as outlined earlier by Stefan and Enzo. Our growth strategies have represented approximately 40% of our total management fee revenues over the same period, primarily driven by alternatives management fees, which have increased by 26% year-on-year. This has been driven by investors who are increasingly turning to infrastructure and liquid real assets to diversify their portfolios and deliver higher returns in response to industry pressures and inflation. Alternatives investments are also key drivers of performance and transaction fees, which we have seen grow by 11% in nine months 2021. Other revenues also provide an additional revenue stream, including contributions from our Chinese investment Harvest, which I will now look at in more detail. For more than a decade, we have participated in a successful joint venture with Harvest Fund Management in China, where we have a 30% equity stake together with China Credit Trust and Lixin Investment. In terms of financial performance, Harvest has recorded a 20% CAGR in AUM between nine months, 2020 and nine months, 2022, and further supported by EUR 14 billion of net inflows over the same period. Looking back to 2008, Harvest has generated EUR 561 million of cumulative equity pickup returns up to nine months, 2022, delivering recurring revenues for DWS. This is captured in the other revenue category and contributes to our overall revenue growth. Moving on now to outlook. For full year 2022, we expect approximately EUR 2.7 billion of total adjusted revenues and a slower pace of revenue growth over the next three years until the end of 2025, as we assume single-digit market growth over this time horizon. In 2023, we anticipate potential revenue pressures amid ongoing market uncertainty and sector valuations, but we continue to expect our diversified assets to provide us with some protection against these challenges and resulting in essentially flat adjusted revenues year-on-year. Further, we will benefit from higher rates on our corporate cash balances. Beyond 2023, we anticipate stable and strong revenues from our value active strategies, and we expect our growth asset classes of passive and alternatives to make up a greater proportion of our overall revenue composition by the end of 2025. We expect performance and transaction fees to account for between 3% and 6% of total adjusted revenues going forward as we continue to invest in growth and scale up our business. With the support of growing assets under management, which we'll now look at a bit more closely. In nine months, 2022, our total global assets under management increased to EUR 833 billion, growing by an average of 5% from nine months, 2020. Net new assets represented almost 60% of organic AUM growth, primarily driven by growth asset classes of passive and alternatives, which collectively accounted for 85% of the EUR 43 billion of global net inflows over this two-year period. With client demand for both asset classes expected to remain strong, we anticipate continued flow momentum to support an AUM CAGR of above 12% for passive and above 10% for alternatives over the next three years. We assume for a passive approximately two-thirds of future AUM growth to come from net flows. For alternatives, we assume approximately 3/4 of future AUM to come from net flows. This will help us to deliver higher AUM in 2025. Moving on to transformation and efficiency. To keep DWS on track to achieve a sustainable and efficient cost base, we have spent the past two years creating a new blueprint to transform our IT platform and infrastructure. Our transformation efforts began in 2021 with the primary focus to implement a DWS-owned and managed infrastructure using cloud-based technology and a new set of corporate functions. As we have advanced on this initiative, we recognize these efforts have an added importance and an opportunity to help mitigate against heightened industry risks such as cost inflation and cybersecurity. This has resulted in higher investment costs as we continue to intensify and accelerate ongoing work to recalibrate our platform. By the end of 2022, we expect to incur approximately EUR 55 million of transformation charges after shifting into program execution this year. These expenses will reach their peak in 2023, when we will operate on a dual platform as we continue to establish our own capabilities while still running on Deutsche Bank-operated services with upward cost pressures as the Deutsche Bank charging structure increases. Note that almost half of our 2023 transformation expenses will be driven by license fees related to our new cloud-based technology and associated applications. By 2025, we expect the new platform to be fully embedded, enabling a saving of approximately EUR 40 million as we operate from our own infrastructure platform with DWS hosted applications and corporate functional capabilities. More importantly, this will allow us to respond to clients' needs with greater flexibility and agility, whilst also giving us focus on greater cost control and how we can operate as a firm. Moving to look more broadly at cost dynamics. At the end of 2022, we continue to anticipate an adjusted cost income ratio of around 60% as previously guided. We will continue to invest in growth areas of Passive and Alternatives by making around EUR 70 million of cumulative incremental investments over the next three years, with the aim to drive future AUM and top line revenue growth. At the same time, with our attention on scaling and delayering selective businesses, focused cost initiatives and an optimized platform, we expect to create approximately EUR 100 million of total cumulative run rate efficiencies by 2025. In 2023, we forecast an adjusted cost income ratio of below 65% as we reach the peak of transformation progress, coupled with conservative revenues and inflationary pressures. As we benefit from the efficiencies derived from our cost optimization initiatives and results from investments, we will target an adjusted cost income ratio of below 59% in 2025. Moving now on to capital management. We manage our capital to ensure a sound capitalization base and of course, adherence to regulatory requirements. We use tangible equity as our key internal metric as it bridges the accounting, economic, and regulatory perspectives of capital supply. Tangible equity also serves as a common denominator to measure Pillar I and Pillar II capital requirements. In the third quarter of 2022, we held approximately EUR 3.8 billion of tangible equity, which is derived by deducting goodwill and intangible assets, dividend accruals for the current year, and selected other items from our reported EUR 8 billion of shareholders' equity. We have set an internal target capitalization level of EUR 2.5 billion as sufficient tangible equity to support our capital requirements, including maintaining buffers aligned to our risk appetite and planning. The level of our internal target capitalization is periodically reviewed to ensure that we have continued alignment to business strategy and risk profile. Excess capital represents a surplus of tangible equity above our internal capitalization level, and stood at approximately EUR 1.3 billion in the third quarter of 2022. Excess capital is available to be deployed for organic or inorganic growth or distribution to shareholders, this of course remains a key commitment to us. As Stefan has explained earlier, we are committed to creating shareholder value, which is fully represented in our earnings per share. Since 2018, we have consistently delivered an increasing and attractive earnings per share. To reinforce this commitment, we are targeting an EPS of EUR 4.50 in 2025. In addition, we intend to continue building on our increasing dividend. Over the past four years, we have returned EUR 1.4 billion in dividends to investors, which is an average payout ratio of approximately 61% since 2018. From 2025, we expect a dividend payout ratio of around 65%. We intend to deliver an extraordinary dividend of up to EUR 1 billion in 2024, subject to pipeline for capital commitments to organic or inorganic growth initiatives. We remain very much committed to transforming and optimizing our business at DWS, and we consider that we are well-positioned to continue delivering against growth in what is an ever-evolving environment. By recalibrating the way we work, we are strengthening our ability to navigate market and geopolitical dislocation, which is extremely important to succeed as we have experienced in recent years. As a result of this, we have refined our financial targets. Over the next three years until 2025, we will target EPS of EUR 4.50, supported by an adjusted cost income ratio of below 59% and an AUM CAGR of greater than 12% for Passive and greater than 10% for Alternatives. We expect a slightly higher adjusted cost income ratio with a peak of platform transformation in 2023. We are confident that the changes we are making will give us greater operational agility in the future while sustaining efficiency. There is certainly some work to do. We are very much committed and we are making meaningful progress. This is supported by the strong financial health of the platform today and underpinned by value and growth strategies. I thank you very much for listening and your attention. This brings us to the end of the formal presentation part. We'll shortly be moving into Q&A. We will just need a couple of minutes to reconfigure. Thank you very much. We are ready for the Q&A session now. If I might ask everybody to take a seat and to prepare for the final part of today's Capital Markets Day, which is Q&A. Please let me remind you, it would be fantastic if you would limit yourself to the two most important questions at the time to give as many people a chance to participate as possible. It would also be great if you intend to ask a question if you would raise the hand, either physically here in the room or if you would use the raise hand function if you are attending online. It would be also nice if you were to state your name and your firm when you intend to ask a question so that we can then start here. Are there any questions here out of the room? I see Hubert. Please would you start? Do we have a microphone for Hubert over here? Thank you. Good morning. It's Hubert Lam from Bank of America. Thank you very much for the very comprehensive presentation. Just a couple of questions. Firstly, on flows. Seeing that you dropped the flow target, what are your flow assumptions going forward, particularly on the active areas as you've given it for alternatives and passives, and what kind of flow vis-visibility do you have on the pipeline going forward? That'd be helpful. That's the first question. Second question is on Xtrackers, which is obviously a big part of your strategy going forward. It seems like you're quite ambitious on it in terms of regaining your share in Europe, competing in the U.S. in a very saturated and competitive market. Like, I know you talked about it, but generally, where do you think you can do things kind of differently, particularly in the U.S., and will you compete on lower pricing? Is that something that you would do? What are your assumptions on a passive fee margins going forward and maybe also for the group? Thank you. Thank you for the question, Hubert. I'll start on the point around flow guidance. We have previously had a net flow target, and we're now refining that to focus on AUM growth and specifically AUM growth through our growth areas of Xtrackers, I will now start calling it, and alternatives. We have given guidance on how much flow is embedded within both of those respective asset classes, and I recognize you're asking specifically about active. We do expect to still see flows over this time horizon, of course, inactive. We recognize that over the time horizon, we can see some volatility and movements across those different respective areas. Across fixed income, equity, multi-asset, we are also assuming that we will see net inflows over those asset classes over the period, but just not with a specific definition. Manfred's presentation gave an indication of what the industry flow guidance look like, and we of course, are looking to be in line or beat and gain market share from that market level. Maybe if I start on the second question around Xtrackers fee margin, and then we can move on to the growth factors. We've guided to margin compression, fee margin compression passive around 2 basis points historically, and we have tended to see that, albeit that has slowed down a little bit this year. We do not expect to continue seeing 2 basis points of dilution going forward. We think that will taper from that level. We do still expect to see some margin compression overall in passive over the next three-year horizon. I'd say more in the near term and then stabilizing in that medium-term horizon. Hubert, just to add to that, and I think Hubert would get a third question because you called it Xtrackers, so there should be some benefit to that. He always gets. I think our capabilities we've had for quite some time, and our assessment was that we've simply underinvested for the last, you know, five to 10 years. I mean, that's the point I've made. Your question is like, why do we think that can change going forward? What the team asked of us was essentially three things: people, marketing, and improved time to market. People is reasonably straightforward. I mean, we need to get those people. That's mostly on distribution side, some product people, but that's reasonably specific what the team needed. I think the marketing piece, is something that, you know, we had to sign off on, right? That was really the discussion we had. Is it worth doing it? We figured that the brand is strong, and so far we hadn't invested in marketing in the U.S. for Xtrackers, and that will increase. The third point, and that's something that Karen Kuder and, you know, Mark for now, and then Angela when she's here, will really have to help the business, is to just improve the time to market. When you think about what our focus is, where it's not broad index replication, but bespoke, thematic, currency adjusted. In that case, you know, typically, we are not the only one having a certain idea, but there will be competitors. It was quite fascinating for me to understand the biggest like the difference between the first to market and the second to market of a specific strategy, right? Therefore, the kind of the less tangible, but a lot of focus from us, was really on how to improve the time to market with the team. It gives us confidence in the, you know, growth rate, and, you know, great confidence in the team. Thank you very much. Jacques-Henri in the first row, please. Yes, good morning. Jacques-Henri Gaulard, Kepler Cheuvreux. Lovely CEO. Congrats on the presentation. I have two questions. The first one is on culture. It's a bit weird to look at the old value section slightly de-emphasized because, you know, at the time of the IPO, looking at the business for 20 years, that's actually one area that kept the business afloat to some extent. It's just a little bit weird to see it slightly de-emphasized. In terms of organization, I wanted to come back on slide 40, which is not necessarily completely clear to me when you go to the modular trend. Is it something you want to actually get to? Is it something that the market is at the moment? Clarify in what is a capability-driven ecosystem. I'm not going out that much, so I apologize. The second question is on the dividend, extra dividend for 2024. Here I'm a bit surprised. Is it a commitment? Is it a conditional commitment? Can we have probability-driven view about how is it likely to actually you paying this dividend in light of probably acquisition opportunities you see right now or lack thereof? Thank you. I think I will take the first one and then you take that second one. Just to make sure I understood the question correctly, it was really on modular. What we talked about in multi-asset and whether it's something we see from clients. Was that the question? Yeah. We've memorized all of the slides. I understand which slides you. Look, it's something that we-- I think the reason for that is twofold, and then we can kind of walk you through, how we'll do it. One, it's obviously demand from clients for multi-asset, for a variety of components. I mean, I think that's like the demand side, which Dirk focused on. Let's say I don't necessarily want to call it supply, but when you think about the complexity of the market we're currently going through, the idea that you will have not every portfolio manager having to be an expert on every market and every asset class, but to simply say we have distinct experts for specific topics and they will run the account for a certain module. That's something which we feel kind of the market environment is demanding, right? To answer the first part of your question, like why? It's partially because clients demand it, but also secondly because in this environment it just makes much more sense to have it. I'm happy to summarize how we do it, but I think that you can, I'm sure, like so conceptualize, where we have specific experts for modules, fixed income, equity and so on. Within multi-asset, we'll have, let's say, portfolio managers that will combine the different modules to the end product. I could go on and explain how that's relevant for managed asset management, but that's the thought process. On the second question, on the extraordinary dividends. We're giving an 18-month timeframe for that. That's obviously taking us to the AGM in 2024, where we would propose to make that extraordinary dividend for approval. 18 months doesn't feel too long away. That certainly is a firm commitment to make that capital return. At the same time, we of course continue to look at if the appropriate opportunities can arise to deploy that inorganically. I would focus again on the fact that we consider we have a very well-diversified, strong, healthy, stable business. We're not looking to disrupt that in any way with, you know, inorganic opportunities that maybe aren't fitting for our structure. We are active in exploring, you know, the right and appropriate combination, but at the same time very much committed to returning capital to shareholders. We are switching to our online participants now. The next question that I have is from Arnaud Giblat. Arnaud, can you hear us? Okay, if not, I would switch back to the room here. Can I see you, Tom, in the first row, please? It's Tom Mills from Jefferies. Thanks for the presentation as well. I think, Stefan, you might have alluded to it in your kind of opening section, but I guess there's been some press speculation before the event that the KGaA structure could be considered for retirement. I understand that may not be entirely your decision. I'm just wondering kind of how conversations may be evolving around that and whether it is something that's indeed on the table. You guys also talked about the potential for net interest income to flow through. Obviously, you know, the Euro rates picture's changed pretty dramatically. Could you give us some steer around the corporate cash balances that could generate that and kind of what the sensitivity to rates we should be thinking about there is, please? Thank you. I will start, and then Claire will obviously take the second one. Unfortunately, I have to disappoint you that I cannot say much more than something reasonably scripted. What I can say is that many of you have given us feedback, and Oliver is on a regular basis telling us, like, these are the things you have to do in order to make this stock even more attractive beyond financial targets and so on. Some of that was transparency, insights, harvest, capital, and so on. Certain components were like, what else would make the stock more attractive? That included alignment of interest between the management and the company. That included increasing the free flow, changing the company structure and so on. With regards to your specific questions on the company structure, I think we do acknowledge that the KGaA, it's a pretty specific German structure, which gives the majority shareholder certain specific rights, which we understand minority shareholders don't necessarily like. Now, obviously, it's the duty of us as the management team to consider everything which is going to be helpful for our shareholders, but ultimately would be up for vote at the AGM, where every shareholder has a vote, right? Therefore, ultimately depends on the view of Deutsche. I think the second question is really with Claire. Thank you. Yes. We do have a liquid business, so we have up to EUR 3.6 billion of liquid assets that we are carrying. Obviously, not all of those are bank deposits necessarily, but also in HQLA and other methods of generating income for us. Coming from a period of obviously interest rates that are not giving us a return on those balances, we move into a situation from the end of this year, next year, where those certainly do. I would point out that that's a nice new introductory revenue stream. Again, there's different movements that we see in the revenue base year-on-year, given the outlook that we have. We're guiding to broadly flat revenues overall in 2023. We're trying again to switch to our online participants, and, in this case, I would ask Angeliki Bairaktari from JP Morgan to ask your question. Thank you. Thank you for taking my questions. On the cost side, can you please explain to us where those EUR 100 million cumulative cost efficiencies are coming from exactly? I think you paid around EUR 160 million back to Deutsche Bank for Deutsche Bank services in 2021. I was just wondering, where is that number going to land in 2025? That's my first question. Second question with regards to the investments, I do appreciate you don't want to point out the exact businesses that you have in mind, but I did notice that the active platform in the U.S. did not really receive any mention. I was just wondering what your plans are for the active part in the U.S.. Thank you. Okay. Thank you for the question. I'll start with the color on the run rate savings, EUR 100 million of savings that we are expecting by 2025. I would split that broadly 60/40. EUR 40 million to be coming from the IT platform transformation program and EUR 60 million to be coming from other efforts, cost initiatives, delayering across the platform, and specific business reviews, potential business disposals. On the platform side, that links to the current charges that we incur from Deutsche Bank for services for technology and corporate functions, and we outline those on page 60. You can see there in 2021, we had Deutsche Bank service charges of EUR 114 million, excluding VAT and other charges. That is declining in 2022 as we have insourced some of those capabilities and taken those into our own cost base. In fact, is actually increasing going into 2023 as the charging structure from Deutsche Bank is increasing. There's a few moving parts going on within the transformation effort. To simplify all of that, including the Deutsche Bank charges, we expect EUR 40 million of run rate savings in the future, and we expect the Deutsche Bank charges in 2025 to be de minimis. Other than that, we have the remaining EUR 60 million of which we expect up to EUR 55 million of that to be achieved during 2023. Angeliki, on your second part or second question, essentially the active platform in the U.S. I believe I referred to it when I called it the kind of the bread and butter products that we have. Meaning fixed income, you know, the money markets, equity offering, which we've had for quite some time. You know, the mutual fund platform, obviously we purchased 20 years ago. When you think about what we currently have, it's really combination of the products, the wrappers and teams managing it. Now, in fixed income and money market, the AUM is actually pretty large than we have in the U.S, and there's zero interest to overall pull out of active in the U.S., right? Just to be clear. It's a significant part of what we have, and especially in catering for insurance companies, many of those are U.S. clients. The U.S. money market business, however, is very volatile, as all of you know. That's something that we are looking at, not necessarily to dispose of, but to simply see how we can strengthen the franchise, diversify the sources. When it comes to U.S. fixed income, that's probably an area in which we would want to increase focus, and we definitely have to improve our performance in U.S. fixed income. Okay. We stay with our online participants, and I would ask Bruce Hamilton from Morgan Stanley to ask the next question. Hi, Bruce. Hi there. Thanks very much for the presentation. Can you hear me clearly? Yes, absolutely. Perfect. Excellent. Cool. The first one, just on, kind of M&A priorities. I mean, if I've understood correctly, it's great that you've got a commitment. If you haven't spent the money in 18 months, we get EUR 1 billion back. Has there been any change in the sort of, the commitment to, you know, to acquire, to look for organic growth opportunity? I think that your predecessor, Stefan, was clearly quite front-footed about, you know. You wanna participate in industry consolidation. Second question, in terms of the Deutsche Bank relationship, it sounds like what you're saying is the opportunity is really to leverage the origination capabilities and help in areas like, you know, private credit, rather than you can get a lot more sort of client growth out of it. I just wanted to double check that. Also understand how big Deutsche Bank is within that 25% of the strategic partners. Would you see that increasing on the next sort of three, four years, or would that be sort of fairly stable, which is obviously linked to the same question. Thank you. Perfect. Thank you, Bruce. When Claire and I agreed who would take which question, M&A fell into her category, but given that you called me out directly by potentially change a narrative from a predecessor, maybe I start. I think generally speaking, M&A should be done and not talked about. Once you start speaking about it's very, very difficult to just backtrack. Therefore, you know, you simply have heard me speak less about it, which doesn't mean that we are not equally focused on M&A. If you look at our track record, we haven't done big, significant transformative M&A in 20 years, right? Hence us basically saying, "Look, the next 12 to 18 months should offer interesting opportunities simply because of choppiness of markets and so on. At some point, we need to return what's not ours, right? The excess capital, the money is not ours, it's our shareholders. That's why we made that commitment. What I can tell you is we're currently looking in three different categories. I think any transformative big bolt-on, of course everybody's looking, but I think it's pretty difficult to pull off any of that. I think what's more interesting secondly is then team lift outs, for example, in Alternatives, and I would imagine there being teams that are willing to come to a larger platform in current market environment. The third would be what I described in the digital space, where, you know, rather than building certain capabilities, you could buy them. Right? That's, kinda the focus. With regards to your second question, we do not disclose how much of the 25% of our AUM, which is our partners' clients, how much of that is Deutsche Bank private banks portion. We don't disclose that. As you would imagine, it's significant, but, you know, not the majority, not even remotely. You're right in your assessment, when it comes to interaction with the corporate bank and the investment bank, there's probably some additional benefit in working, providing solutions to their clients, to corporate clients for pension solutions, for example. The most significant opportunity is to really leverage the origination force of the investment bank and of the corporate bank that comes with the, you know, inherent conflict of interest, right? I mean, how do you pay for sourcers, and how do you ensure that they source things that you like and that our clients like? That's, you know, why we as a fiduciary obviously don't just have right of refusal, but we only take in our portfolios what we like. Look, the point I made earlier, in the corporate bank, we used to have when I looked after it, 2,000 relationship managers, and they have long-standing decade-long relationships. That's a sourcing engine that any U.S. private debt fund can only dream of. I mean, just look at the number of sourcers that my U.S. competitors have, right? If they have 100 across Europe, that would be gigantic, right? We have 2,000, right? That's why we feel by properly leveraging that, well, we obviously have to you know, properly fulfill our duties as a fiduciary, but that's, in our view, tremendous upside. Great. Thank you. Okay. I would switch back to the room here in Frankfurt. Are there questions here? Over here. Thank you. It's Jochen Schmitt from Metzler. I have one question on transaction fees. You mentioned the target of performance and transaction fees amounting to 3%-6% of adjusted revenues on average. Given that you expect major net inflows into alternatives in the next year, which I assume will probably lead at least partially to transaction fees rather immediately, may we assume the lower end of the aforementioned target range to be rather cautious? Thank you. Yes. Thank you for the question. Yes, that's a reasonable question. We certainly have the ambition for the upper end of the range at 6%. I think within the three-year time horizon and with the cycle of some of the asset raising of some of those funds and activities, we can dip to a low end of 3%. I would certainly hope that that is absolutely a low range. We have increased the guidance from what was previously 3%-5%. Yeah. Please, Herr Pfaender. Yes. Hello. Roland Pfaender, Oddo BHF. Two questions from my side. Firstly, you mentioned you want to improve the performance of your fixed income business. Could you elaborate what your plans are and how fast it could turn around? Secondly, looking at your internal target capitalization of EUR 2.5 billion, in the text it's mentioned, you have some buffers inside for, yeah, risk appetite and planning. Maybe this planning also is part of or includes some M&A activities. If you carve that out, what is the real underlying needed economic target capital you would need to have? Thank you. Thank you. I will take the first one, and have great confidence in or on the path that Stefan put us on Stefan Kreuzkamp that Vincenzo is now really focused on as the new head of active asset management, and I will basically just assist him where needed. Can't really go into much detail. Happy to plagiarize Dirk's quotes of win as a team and change to grow. There will probably be a couple of changes needed, because at some point, if your track record is not what our clients deserve, maybe at some point you will have to make changes. Otherwise, probably the teamwork in that department, given that the markets are much choppier now than over the last 10 years, is probably also something that we would see Vincenzo focus on. On the internal capital requirement, we obviously measure our Pillar I, Pillar II requirements following regulation, then we look at our internal capital requirements, also taking into account an ICAP, the internal capital adequacy process. It's very much based on our current footprint that we have today in terms of our global footprint, our product set. We're spanning, of course, alternatives as well as active strategies and all the risk factors that we take into account in the underlying portfolio that we carry. There's no forward-looking M&A element or buffers attached to the internal capitalization. We consider it to be reasonably stable, but we review that periodically for macro factors. Okay, we're switching back to our online participants, and the next question comes from Andreas Schmidt from SDK. Hello, everybody. It's Andreas Schmidt from Schutzgemeinschaft der Kapitalanleger, thanks a lot for the great day we had so far. Two questions. One is, if I look on your IT cooperation with Deutsche Bank, my gut feeling is it's not really a fair profit sharing. You can save a lot of it's indicative that they overcharge you. What makes you sure that your future revenue stream and cooperation with Deutsche Bank, which you will intensify, gives you a fair profit sharing? Second question. In your target to the cost income ratio of below 59, if we assume passive is going further on, let's say to a share of 60%, 70%, 80% within a few years. Is your organization in passive or within the total company sufficient and efficient enough to conquer the ongoing margin pressure in passive and the over proportional growth in passive to allow you finally end up with below 59% cost income ratio in, within eight years time or 10 years time? Thanks a lot for taking the questions. Thank you. I'm happy to start on that. The Deutsche Bank agreements that we have for any services are very much categorized as arm's length and third party. We have to have, you know, a reasonable pricing structure that is fully governed and managed through master service agreements and so on. No different to any other third-party vendor that we would be operating in. In fact, we probably even have heightened attention on ensuring that governance is very robust. I think we are comfortable with the charging that we do have for the services that we purchase for IT and corporate functions today, and hence we're very transparent that there is upward cost pressure on those services in the future. At the same time, we consider that we can operate more efficiently once we insource those, once they're right sized to what DWS requires, we can be more agile and more flexible. I think that addresses the upward pressure that we see and how we manage that. I would say that's in reference to any services, of course, that we have from a third party as well. On the cost income ratio point, and in passive in particular, I think scale is certainly important in the passive business, and we do think we have a scalable platform. There is certainly, of course, upward cost pressures when AUM grows in passive. We will see incremental costs attached to that. We also have a strong, you know, manufacturing capability that can scale without seeing incremental upticks. At the same time, we want to invest in platforms, in more marketing, in capabilities and in product launches to continue to make us competitive. Ultimately, I think passive is efficient, it's scalable, and it contributes to our below 59% cost income ratio target. Okay, next question. Thank you. Christoph Schmidt. Next question comes from Nicholas Herman at Citi. Yes. Good afternoon. Can you hear me okay? Yes. Perfect. Very good. A clarification on two questions, please. Just to clarify, the period of targets that you're referring to, is that 2023-2025? On market effects, I think you said market expectations. That seems to be 5%-6% equity markets, 2%-3% fixed income. I'm just surprised your alts market assumptions appears to be about 2%-3%, so a bit lower. Just interested around that. Moving to the questions, one on cost and one on regional split. On cost, how much of the EUR 100 million savings is already in the P&L? Do you see yourself having additional cost flex if markets aren't what you hope them to be? The other part is in terms of the fee or the mix of by region, Americas is currently 27% of AUM and 20% of fees. I mean, given it is a clear focus area for you, where do you see this going by 2025, please? Thank you. Thank you. I'll try and catch all the parts to that. The AUM CAGR is a three-year CAGR over the years 23, 24, 25. It's including those three-year time horizons. The market guidance that we give for the outlook, it's consensus driven, so there's nothing more involved really than that. Probably what you can also, you know, take a view on, but it's single-digit. I would observe that September, October, November, December, there's been quite a lot of volatility, so it depends a little bit where you take that cut. Mid-single-digit is the right guidance. Effectively conservative is the assumption that we're making on market growth. Mixed by region, we wouldn't expect that to move, particularly I think for both alternatives. We have strong alternatives businesses in both the U.S. and in Europe. We have in the U.S. real estate and liquid real assets, and in Europe we have real estate and infrastructure, all of which we're looking to grow. I wouldn't expect that to move the regional mix too considerably. Passive, of course, Xtrackers is much larger in Europe. I don't think it's going to move the dial in terms of cost mix. There was another question on if markets don't raise, what does it mean for costs? Yeah. How much of the EUR 100 million is already in the P&L? Then, and then cost mix if markets are weaker. None of the EUR 100 million is in the P&L today. That is very much to come, albeit we have. Obviously, we have the actions in flight, we have confidence that we will be able to deliver against that. Some of our expenses are market linked. If the markets don't move, we won't see that variable uptick. There is near-term pressure on inflation, we can't of course hide from that. We have pay rises and so forth to contend with next year as does everybody. There is near-term inflationary pressures that we will have to manage as well, and hence needing efficiencies to ensure that we can meet our below 59% target. Nicholas, just to quickly add to it, because cost is obviously not just a CFO topic, but really important for the CEO, right? Just three quick additions. For our investment talent, we will always pay market because our clients deserve the best possible performance, and that will be driven by humans and that's why that's simply necessary. When you look at our platform component, given that a huge chunk of those super capable people sit in Germany, we'll probably expect less inflation than, you know, for those competitors that have a majority of their people in the U.K. or in the U.S.. Right? That's kind of like an inherent benefit, which I'm sure the head of our workers council wouldn't like me to say. I think inflation is simply greater in the U.K. than in Germany. I think the third point, just for all of you to hopefully give me benefit of the doubt that I can be cost disciplined and not just a former CIB, you know, growing businesses sort of person, just look at the cost development of the corporate bank over the last couple of years, right? That was tough because we had to take out costs in a difficult environment. You can imagine when I took over that business in 2018, right, that nobody could have foreseen what happened in 2020, right? With rates going to zero, trade finance breaking down, and we definitely had to apply more of a cost break, which was tough, but we've done it. When you just look at that cost development, hopefully you just, like, see in my eyes the willingness to apply even more cost discipline if it became necessary. Thank you very much. Next question comes from Pierre at CIC, also online, please. Hi, Pierre. Hi. Good morning. Can you hear me? Yes, very well. Thank you. Okay. Good morning. Thank you for the presentation. I would like to know if you could give us a little bit more color regarding Europe, ex-Germany, regarding your favorite markets and particularly for instance, France or Italy, which are important markets regarding asset management industry. Could you tell us in a few words where you stand and what... where are your ambitions there? My second point is a follow-up on cost. When we talk with one of your main competitor in Europe, they are focused on the fact that they want to increase the part of variable cost in their cost base. I was wondering here, what are your targets, if you have any, of variable cost versus fixed cost, sorry. How do you see things in this industry that is volatile per se? Thank you very much. I'll take the second one first on the cost variability. Obviously we've been very focused in the past on cost income ratio, and we'll continue to have that as a metric that we measure to in the future. We also pointed out today what the cost has been, as a ratio to AUM, where we've been reasonably stable over the last period of time, and, you know, of course, we want to continue to improving on that with greater scale. So there's certainly elements of the cost base that are fixed. I think we're about 50/50 between compensation and benefits and general and admin costs. Within our general and admin costs, we see about 20% of that being variable with volumes, variable with AUM. I think as you, as you get scale, it can, you know, support you in improving that ratio of cost to assets under management. We, we always have levers that we can pull and I think as Stefan has said, you know, we will ensure that we deliver against the cost income ratio target that we've outlined today. Coming to the question on Europe, and if I take Europe ex-Germany, which I think we've given some detail on today. In Europe ex-Germany, including if I look at U.K. and EMEA, we've got around EUR 200 billion of assets under management across that jurisdiction, and that spans a number of locations. The U.K. is where we have our passive manufacturing. We, of course, we have a capability in Luxembourg, Portugal, Nordics, Switzerland, and several others where we have sales distribution locations. Quite well distributed, but very much, of course, Germany is the core of our AUM. If I may just add 1 observation. In the kind of middle part of my presentation, when I talked about the soul-searching portfolio analysis we've done over the last two months, we actually had country-specific discussions. We discussed what should DWS do in Italy, in the U.K. and so on. Obviously, to the point you've made, those are also, like all of them, really attractive markets, but all of them have very specific setup, right? I think that our ability to persuade Crédit Agricole to distribute our products is probably going to be challenging, right? Therefore, in France, the focus will be less on retail or wholesale partnerships, but stating the obvious, more on institutional. We could go through all of the markets, but Dirk Goergen and his EMEA coverage team, and obviously, our leadership in the various countries, they will oversee country-specific growth plans that we feel are realistic given our capabilities, but also the market environment in the respective country. Yeah. Thank you very much. We're getting closer to the end of the session, but I wanted to see if there are remaining questions here. I think Michael had a question. Yes. Good morning. Michael Sanderson, Barclays. I have two questions as we're allowed. The 1st one, please. You've obviously given some more information on Harvest and the developments there. Obviously, a number of your other global peers are more active in China. They own subsidiaries out there and developing there. Be interested to know how you think about that opportunity, given Asia-Pacific is relatively small in your broader piece. The 2nd one is, when you sort of set out your underperformance, I guess, versus your mix of business since 2000, clearly, one of the things that's changing now is that you are getting your own operating platform, a proper fund management one. How much of a difference do you think that makes to your ability to keep pace or exceed? Sort of how much would you say it probably held you back over that 20-year period, please? Let me start. In China, which is a very important attractive market for us and many of our competitors, we do have capabilities on the ground as a standalone DWS brand, but we've just not built sufficient scale, right? Don't view it as us not liking the colleagues we have. We like them, we just don't have enough of them. The question that you obviously have to ask is then, if it's a market in which some of your competitors have already built up greater scale and arguably a better known brand, to what extent should you then deploy more resources into going alone versus either going with a partner or then deploying resources in other markets, right? Same discussion we had for China, same discussion we had for ASEAN and so on. In China, our view is that that decision, which by the way, Mark, who's in the audience, took, what? Like 20 years ago, to partner with Harvest and buy a stake was a genius decision. We have obviously benefited from the nice growth with Harvest. What we haven't really been able to do is distribute more Harvest products into countries outside of China or partner with Harvest to distribute DWS products that are not Chinese market knowledge to their client base. Even with our existing partners, we feel we have more upside, and that's our China-specific strategy. Let's see if we have final question here. Okay, that's three final questions here in the first row, please. Thank you very much. Jerome Doyle from Jefferies. Final question, which will be really an aspirational one. Well, we saw that services has become quite an important revenue stream for some of the large asset managers. I've been interested by your comments made on the focus on investment to new technologies, and I know that Stefan is passionate about technologies. I was wondering if those comments made today is maybe the first step of, well, DWS looking to expand into services and as maybe a future revenue stream for the organization. We work together. He's, you know, if there's any accusation of me having planted question, it would be with my former colleague. Good to see you again. Look, if the takeaway from anybody is that we're building an additional revenue engine, then I definitely wouldn't dispute that. However, this will take some time, right? I just wanna reemphasize the point I made before. We will be very, very specific in what we're building. It's those three things. I don't wanna, you know, repeat all of it, not because I don't like it. I really like it. Those are just three specific things which we'll be boldly with conviction implement on, or execute on and then implement. That will take some time, but once you have it, yes, for sure it could be a setup similar to what the corporate bank had, right? Where you're essentially in a fee-generating service providing business model. Obviously, one of our large competitor, you know, has a very nice tech platform, which we are using and paying fees for. Could you imagine a situation where there is or there probably will be a couple of tokenizers, which would be a fee in generating business? For sure. Right? For sure. It will take some time. I think we cut short the second question that was asked previously on the platform. Maybe I start and then happy for you to do it. For sure, the singular focus on being an asset management company has massively helped, right? I think kudos to the management team. What they have pulled off over the last couple of years will hopefully give us like credibility. I think when you talk about platform, it's really not just the tech piece, but also the set of rules, the governance. Obviously, what is right for global universal bank doesn't necessarily make a asset management company be fast and quick and speed to market. For sure will we benefit from being independent, not just from a tech, but also from a set of rules perspective. I think that is something which I think gives us confidence in addition to the other things we've said that we can now properly punch our weight over the next few years. I think that's a perfect end to the Q&A session. Thank you very much for all your great questions and your participation. Let me hand back to Stefan for concluding remarks. That was unscripted, I'm happy to just thank all of you for coming to Frankfurt. Those of you on the screen, thank you very much for spending the last couple of hours with us. Hopefully, you saw the passion that all of us have. Hopefully, you saw the work that went into designing the strategy. As I said before, I really like my team, I like our franchise, and I'm confident that we can pull it off. Right. For now, thank you very much and happy holidays. Get some rest.