Morning. Happy to see you all, and thank you for being here. Thank you to Peter's speech. I think he's politely trying to explain to you that this floor is where you graduate HSBC leadership to, and we're all down at the steam room. I joined 25 years ago, a few floors below at the dealing room. I then spent 15 years in China from 2005 to 2020. I've seen some of you there. You know, five of those years I was looking after China as the CEO, and then took up took up this year, just short of two years ago. Thanks, David. I started a few years before David, in 1991. Spent 24 of my 32 years in the markets business on the trading floor across India, Hong Kong and Indonesia. My last role was as India CEO before I joined up with David back in Hong Kong to run the region in 2021. Well, these few days I know the hard work is on you 'cause we're just speaking for 10 minutes and I've just looked at your pack and it's quite a lot to digest and I took 25 years to do that. We're gonna keep it reasonably light and interactive. We've taken your feedback and that's why the feedback form is important. We'll be more focusing on Q&A, demos, and my better colleagues will really drill down into business. Let me just run you through on how today will be spent. Roshan and I will just frame the Asia business overall. We will then have Ming going through the results. We had a strong 2022 and a stronger Q1 2023. Dave Grimsey will then speak about the driving of the discipline, the transformation program that we've in progress, into saving $1 billion of savings, as well as releasing the $6 billion investments that Peter spoke about that embarked a couple of years ago. Martin will then cover the risks of the region. Actually, prior to that, we'll have the Q&A between Roshan and myself, David and Ming. Luanne and Mark, the Hong Kong CEO and China CEO, will then go into a deep dive into our core leadership in Hong Kong, as well as our growing strength in China. Frank will then talk about CMB for both Hong Kong and China. Maggie, leading into the leadership of Hong Kong's WPB business. Before ending, we'll have Diana and the CFO, Say Pin, to speak to you about Hang Seng, which is also a substantial part of our Hong Kong business. I think we will then have Noel opening up to Q&A before we end there. I think as Peter mentioned, you know, the easy job for us is to talk about the Asia opportunities. You know, I think the macro speaks of itself and the outlook is as it should. We know that the growth engine of global GDP will be in Asia-Pacific. IMF, I was just speaking to the IMF Asia head, 70% of global growth will be sitting in Asia this year. This is how we crafted the pivoting and the focus on Asia. Peter spoke about this $6 billion program two years ago, continue to drive our leadership in Hong Kong and China. As well, the appointment of both Roshan and I, myself is to drive also a deeper expression into Southeast Asia and India. We're also going to invest very heavily into wealth because we think the great businesses here will create better wealth. We do think so great business will end up with great wealth and the catchment, whether it's in WPB and institutional, will be substantial. It's been a difficult three years. Hong Kong has just opened up end of last year. Ran through many challenges. I have to say, the opportunities on Asia as well as our strategy has been strongly aligned and the timing has been extremely eerily aligned, as it were. You will know of our leadership here, and I hope you feel the depth and more of it here, and also our strength in China. In the past two years, our renewed focus into investing in Singapore and India has really almost moved intact with as China closed up with policy stress in the past two, three years. The China Plus One, T wo and Three consumed a lot of the business. As we invested in the catchment, in South Asia, Southeast Asia and India, it really was quite fruitful as as I think the results will show. Our identity is in the cross-border space, and we know intra-Asia regional trade, FDI and GDP will overtake its relationship to the West. Again, that is also taking part within the bank. I think the strategy is aligned. We have a distinctly unique advantage of our international connectivity intra-Asia as well as in the group. Actually the renewed travels that Rosha and I had since the beginning of the year, I've been to China four times already, three of those that Peter mentioned about. Spoke of the energy of the reopening up of Hong Kong and China, but also in terms of all the activities that Roshan has encountered in India and Southeast Asia has proven that it's all on track. This is just really the IMF projection in terms of the bankable GDP. We, as well as many other banks are more bullish in China. We expect almost 6.4% this year. We need to see further in terms of the sustainability of the growth in 2024, 2025. Certainly, we expect the rebound will be intact. We were with Ministry of Finance in China. They expect almost Q2, into a hefty 8% growth, albeit from a low to negative pace, from last year. The banking revenue pool is higher than that. You can see from China and India, as well as the respective functions of wholesale and wealth, which we believe are where our opportunities are and aligns to our strategy. I'm pausing here. I'll pass to Rosha to look at where we are with our businesses. Thanks, David. We capture these micro opportunities through our distinct footprint in the region and our multiple engines of growth. When we set out a strategy in late 2020, one of the key areas of focus was diversification, and we are halfway through that transformation at the moment. In Hong Kong and China, we make $7 billion of PBT, and including BoCom, that's $9.4 billion. Even in these markets, we are diversifying. One of the proof points is the growth in our market share in insurance in Hong Kong, where we are now number one in 2022. In the rest of the region, we've doubled our profits from 2020 to 2022, from $2 billion to $4 billion. This includes the 12 other international markets that we operate in outside of the large markets. We'll talk a bit about this more on Thursday when we speak to you in Singapore. Our strong client franchise and leading capabilities is underpinning this growth. We continue to invest in this franchise. In our Wealth and Personal Banking division, we've expanded private banking in China and Thailand this year, and we will be opening in India later in Q3. We also are investing in Pinnacle in China. In Commercial Banking, we've deployed digitized onboarding capabilities to acquire customers at scale across many of our markets. This feeds into our transaction banking capabilities that are market-leading in Asia. In Global Banking and Markets, we have enhanced our presence across investment banking and markets in Singapore as a hub over the last few years and service a larger part of the business opportunity that exists there. We also have invested in the Chinese joint venture for investment banking, HSBC Qianhai Securities, which Peter referenced as well. When we come to our international network, we generally believe, David and I, that our global connectivity is our superpower. We have the privilege of operating in a region where the governments, the regulators that we speak with are extremely supportive of growing trade and cross-border capital flows. Our wholesale client business in Asia generates $9 billion in client revenues. Sixty percent of that wholesale revenue is cross-border, and 60% of that comes from outside of Asia. We serve more than 5,000 non-Asian corporate clients in Asia. Just as an example of our the strength of the East and West linkages that HSBC has, the North America to Asia corridor and the EU to Asia corridor are more than twice the size of the Hong Kong-China corridor that we bank, and they have been growing at over 25% over the last year. We see further opportunities in this space. We think that we have more market share to gain as some of our competitors, global competitors from the U.S. and Europe face challenges. There are further tailwinds for growth as more and more economies activate the regional trade agreements that have come into place. Peter talked about RCEP, but even with the CPTPP, where six of our six of the members are markets where we are present, two more have applied and two more are likely to apply. Frank and Amanda will talk more about the Commercial Banking opportunity through today and Thursday. This network also makes us the leading bank in Asia for corporates and institutions that want to bank with an international institution. We cover 95% of Asia's GDP. Seventy percent of the largest corporates active in ASEAN already bank with us at HSBC. We are the leading transaction bank in the region across cash, trade, security services, and FX. As we bank clients in more markets and with more products, we see our revenues continue to increase dramatically. Stuart and Monish will talk more about our global banking and markets opportunities later in the week. Lastly, I'll just cover off wealth very quickly because that does get a lot of airtime. I think I want to just bring out a couple of data points from this slide. We are seeing faster growth in Asia wealth than any other part of the world. We expect Asia wealth to reach $79 trillion by 2026. Our Asia wealth revenues have grown from $5 billion-$5.8 billion in the last couple of years. More importantly, just last year, our net new invested assets grew by $59 billion. This to me is the proof that our strategy is working, particularly in the hubs of Singapore and Hong Kong. As we open up more banking, private banking markets across the region, it'll feed further into these hubs. I'm gonna now hand back to David for the rest of the presentation. I'm just gonna dwell quickly into the key markets of Hong Kong and China, before closing and passing it to Ming. Hong Kong is really our key market of the group. It is our home market. We used to be called the Hong Kong Bank. Occasionally we have been called the bank. Essentially, it is really where our heart and is where our spiritual home is. It's where the heritage, the brand, and the trust is. I have been in the bank for 25 years, born in Hong Kong, but as I came back to Hong Kong into this role, I cannot fail to notice that intricate weave of this bank into all parts of the society. I was in my Asia Board a couple of weeks ago, one of the board members asked whether I had enough time to see clients. My first instinct and reaction in Hong Kong was, I actually cannot not see clients in Hong Kong. Whether I go into the MTR, whether I go into dinners, whether I go into any facades of society, this city is banked by us. That's a huge obligation as well as a huge opportunity. We are the notes biggest by far, the notes issuing bank here. We are the key reference bank for the Hong Kong dollar interest rate. As Luanne decides the rates against the U.S. dollar movements, we are basically strongly referenced by other competing banks. We are the final dollar clearer on behalf of HKMA here. There is significant importance in terms of how we hold this responsibility. It cannot be shifted as you understand it. It's unlikely to be shifted into China sets of banks, nor is it big enough for any foreign banks to take up that role. These are the sort of responsibility and the weight that we hold in this bank, and the opportunity it's bound. The fact is, I think, Peter spoke about a lot of the challenges in China as well as COVID, I think in terms of the involvement of China is almost consolidated Hong Kong as the single and sole funnel of China's internationalism to the world and the international community into China. You're not getting the optionality of, less of the optionality of, the likes of Shanghai or Beijing or Shenzhen. It's, it's very clear with President Xi here last summer speaking into the one country, two systems, speaking into common law and speaking into the expression of internationalism in Hong Kong, which I think will be where we capture. Why? is because we know despite the FT narratives or the Bloomberg narratives, you know trade and intra-trade with China is still growing. Substantially, most of the significant economies still have China as the largest trading partner. Even U.S. is growing in terms of trade, and that needs to be facilitated through Hong Kong. The expression of the capital markets in China is very underweight by yourselves in terms of the market into Asia, into the China bond market, and that's a conduit through Hong Kong and the CIBM and the stock and bond connects. The savings concentration of opportunities in China is very concentrated in China, and they ultimately need to go out to invest. Again, QDII schemes and many of the southbound connects allows that to happen. Many, many more. Just on GBA, this is a city that does that with, Luanne will tell you how deeply saturated we are with the 7.5 million people. There's 86 million people just across the border that's looking at new policies on interconnectivity as well as infrastructure, with the Greater Bay and Hong Kong that would come through. The release of that is significant. I think the biggest testimony is, we have extremely capable Singaporean that's chosen to be the Hong Kong CEO of HSBC, and it tells you a lot about where the depth and the opportunity of this city is. Not to say Singapore is not thriving, and then we're not successful there. That's really for Hong Kong. China, we just know that any and every conversation that we've been to, whether it's the Middle East, and my 3rd time in the next month, there, as well as around the region, the even the China Plus One, even the recipient of Plus One has to be a China conversation. In the past four months, going into there and looking at the resumption of the GDP, it's encouraging. What's more encouraging is just really to see, and I don't know how many of you have moved into China, but for me, just going into the Greater Bay and Shanghai and Beijing, there is still the energy and the youth of the economy. You know, the biggest thing when I went back to Shanghai to see my colleagues is that sense of I'm gonna build back my last three years. I know that regardless of politics and policies, I'm gonna come through with good business ideas, creativity and technology that we can bank. We are small in there. The aggregated foreign bank market share is probably at around 1%. You have voted that a pure China play isn't what you want. You've marked all the Chinese banks at 0.3 book, and you know that sort of risk and that sort of balance sheet isn't what you want. It is the alpha of connectivity that is where we want to drive our strength in retail through wealth, through Pinnacle, through institutions built. Which I think, again, we have a strong handle. We're the strongest bank by far in China and complements very well into Hong Kong. Peter spoke about the infrastructure that we have apart from the bank. Our joint ventures of asset management, insurance and securities, we're already upping the ownership to the point that that is profitable to us. Lots of noise on the geopolitics, U.S., China, that will continue. I'm speaking in all these conclusions despite all those. We can again, Mark will go deeply into those opportunities. Just to conclude, as I said, the Asia macro story stands. Our strategy is aligned to it. We also have an infrastructural connectivity that nobody has that banks it very well. I take up the challenge of whether it's a international banking model or regional or local model. You may have momentary bright spots of rushes of capital and opportunities in specific local markets, we have the best Asia catchment, but a lot of work to do, my colleagues will speak into those. Right. Who wants to go first? Martin. Yes. Good afternoon. Hi, Martin. I just wanted to ask on the broader competitive... It's on. On the broader competitive landscape across HSBC's Asian footprint, I was just wondering if you could comment if you see either opportunities or threats in particular pockets of your Asian footprint. Are there a number of, you know, competitors retrenching or could there be opportunity for market share gains, or do you see areas of increased competition? I think there's opportunity, particularly in the wealth space, because I do think some of our global competitors are pulling back, either voluntarily or involuntarily. I do think there's opportunity there. We're picking up business, and clients and people in that space. I think on the middle market corporate space, I think many of our global peers realize the strong growth opportunities and profitability of banking middle market corporates in Asia. You know, we've done that globally for since the day we were started, 158 years. Many of our global peers tend to stop at the very large corporates and only take them globally. You know, if I think of Citi, JPMorgan, and others, they see the merit in middle market corporate banking in Asia. They're trying to probably enter that space. That's been cyclical. They've been in and they've been out, and they've been in, and they've been out. I know some of you are from those competitors here today, so I think, you know, we're conscious of that being a very competitive marketplace at the moment. It's hard to build. It's hard, you know, if you're in and out, it's hard to reenter. Then always here in Hong Kong, you get waves of strong competition from the Chinese banks. We've not been afraid in the past, and I've not been afraid in the past to say it's a street fight every now and again. You keep the customers, you take on some of the competition, and you defend your position. Then they go away a little bit because they've done a lot of low margin business, and then they pull back their balance sheet. There's a little bit of that happening at the moment. I think some of the capital that came in from the Chinese banks into Hong Kong, chasing volume, doing business at what we thought was low rate, low margin. Some of that capital has gone back to Mainland China to restore the capital back into the Chinese banking system. I think we're seeing some pull back on that competition. At least the simple answer is, when you operate in 60+ markets, I work on the philosophy there's a strong competitor in every one of those markets, at least one or two. They're domestic, typically. Our biggest USP is mid-market international corporate banking. You know, our peers, the global banking peers, we compete for global banking type clients around the world. JPMorgan, Citi, Deutsche, we're all there. BNP. They're all very good at it. A few compete with us, nobody competes with us on international mid-market corporate banking globally. Nobody. A few of them come in and come out every now and again. Then we have regional competitors in mid-market international corporate banking. I'll honestly say there isn't a global peer who does mid-market corporate banking the way we do. Raul, and then Nick. If I can just follow up on the $6 billion investment. Yeah. I think that target was set in 2021 at a time when perhaps rates weren't supposed to go up as high or as quickly as they have gone. I guess the one difference HSBC has over all the other names you mentioned is a very attractive deposit franchise that throws off a lot of revenue— Yeah. W hen rates go up, and you have a very big tailwind in terms of profitability. You probably have a lot more room to invest than you thought. Yeah I n 2021. I guess the question really is it a matter of capacity and pace at which you can invest? Or is it that you feel pressurized? You know, you already admit to high RoTE. Listen, you're standing right next to me. Raoul, I feel the pressure all the time. We've got to buy you a drink after this. This whole day you've been doing it. Yeah. You know, if I, if I listen to what other banks are talking about, they are all really aggressively talking about investing. You know. Yeah I think Deutsche just bought a bank in another country, right? Everybody's thinking about how to capitalize in this market. You've done SVB UK and w hen we think about Asia, organic is probably the way, the best way to grow here— Yeah. A nd to invest. Are you thinking about that at the board level? Are you thinking about— Yeah A ccelerating investment? Where would you invest if you had— Listen, it came as a theme from a number of people, should you be investing more than you are? Are you constraining cost growth too much? Are you missing an opportunity for growth? There's that generic theme, I think, on a number of your minds and clearly it's on our minds as well. Let me give you a bit of backdrop to it. Firstly, I'm pleased that in the middle of COVID, we're still committed to spending $16 billion on investment in Asia, $3 billion here in Hong Kong, Mainland China, $3 billion elsewhere. All credit to the board and frankly, the management team to say, even in the middle of COVID, when the P&L was depressed and revenue was hurting because of COVID, that we decided to take on an investment program of $6 billion, and we're broadly on track with it. I think take that as a positive. The next thing, if I think about the context of this, for too long, we haven't earned the right to invest because our returns have been too low. There haven't been enough years when we've been above cost of capital on ROTI. We as a management team, not just me, we as a management team, turn around and said, in this three-year transformation program, we've got to get our returns back above cost of capital to earn the right to continue to invest in the business. That can't be a one-off, and it can't be purely rates-based. It's got to be sustainable and be able to sustain through a rate cycle. Now, I don't mean a rate cycle that gets you down to zero again because nobody thinks that's the normal rate cycle. We needed to regain credibility as a group, being blunt. We've kept costs tight over the last three years whilst investing, so saving money through digitization, organizational change, debureaucratization, reinvest, and start to grow revenue back up through fee income and NII. We've done that. Last year, it was $11.6 before significant items, Q1, $19.3. I think we've got to continue to deliver performance. We as a management team know we've got to prove to you quarter-to-quarter and to our investors that actually we're a dependable, high-returning business with growth potential. Growth, not just potential, growth, with growth. Then I can take on a much more positive stance to investment. Now, your question is, well, you've got really positive revenue this year, you've got positive momentum. Can you feed more investment in this year? That is the debate we're having. Listen, we've had one really stellar quarter. We've had a good year last year. I don't want to rush like HSBC has done in the past. Get the first sniff of high rates, you go blow the cost base to smithereens, and then rates come off and you've got a cost problem, and you've got to go back into restructuring. I don't want that. I want a sustainable long-term strategy. The final comment is, this year, we'll spend around about $4 billion of IT spend on changing systems, processes. We have a total IT spend out of $30 billion of around about, John, $7.5 billion, our total IT spend. About $3.5 billion, keeping the lights on, running the boxes, running the network, resilience and everything else, and about $4 billion of change in the bank. These guys, collectively, every year, last year, when they asked about the IT spend for this year, the ask was about $6 billion. It was about $5.5 billion-$6 billion. On a $4 billion change program, the demand was about $5.5 billion-$6 billion. I haven't been in this cycle any year when it hasn't been less than $1 billion over. You always get asked for at least $1 billion more than the envelope to spend. We are thinking about how we feed in continued digitization and IT investment and growth over the subsequent years as the business model sustains. I think the answer is, I'm not against investment. I just wanna prove to you that we've got sustainability in returns, we've got sustainability in growth, and we'll feed in more investment. You'd rather spend more money in a sense. We know there's opportunity. Yes. From my perspective, I think customer acquisition in Southeast Asia and India would be key and digitizing our processes. Some of this will flow through from the investments that are already being made. One other aspect that perhaps we haven't touched on enough today, I think it's important, $3 billion has been invested already. We do need to monetize the investments that have been made. I think that is quite critical, and that'll feed into the performance that Noel's been talking about. We've got to subscribe to this cost rigor because, I mean, we've ran through cycles that you've all experienced, where we just had Hang Seng presenting. I mean, you know, as an entity, you would have wanted more. You know, the point about the red/g reen brand needs the investments. If that tempo comes with how technology comes through. You're asking about HKD and e-CNY. We have to be front-footed in our key market to drive relevance to client behavior. So it's not exactly in, you know, always immediately a model, but we have to be in place. So those are. China multiple fold from wealth, Pinnacle, custody, institution, CFIBC, sector leadership in the recovering capital markets here. So that's where we would put sort of investments in if we have space. Again, on the basis of that rigor, and I think we're running a reasonable tempo. We just need a few more quarters of hopefully strong. We're doing a lot, e-CNY, there was a question on that. I spoke to the regulators in China about e-CNY, they said, "Look, we're working with the technology, we're working with the business models. We haven't quite worked out what we wanna do with e-CNY yet." They were quite honest about it. They said, "If you can help us with some business models. That'd be really great. They're looking at e-CNY as a domestic digitization strategy rather than an international digitization strategy. I said, "Well, domestic, most of the CBDCs are looking at international remittances for people and remittances for small businesses. Take out the inefficiency of the international payment system for migrant workers and for small businesses." China, on the other hand, is looking at e-CNY more as a domestic digitization strategy. I said, "Well, if you're looking at that, you've got to look at programmable money." 'Cause digitizing CNY in itself doesn't add a lot of value, you know. 'Cause we can move CNY digitally like that domestically through faster payments. We can do it here in Hong Kong. You can do it in most markets. Programmable money where you can direct money towards social causes or social initiatives, a very different proposition. I think that's where you look at some of the architecture that's being built in India. It has that capacity to create programmable money where you can, as a government, distribute money and stimulus into the economy in a very targeted manner, and you can get that stimulus hitting the population you want it to hit. If you're gonna go e-CNY, it's programmable money. Now, the question for China is, do they wanna put that in the hands of the FinTechs or the techs, or do they wanna put it in the hand of the central payments architecture? They've chosen they wanna put it in the hands of the central payments architecture. Clearly, they should. That's what India's done. They haven't allowed the techies to build it as an architecture. They built it and then allowed the techies to build business models on top. What else? Nick? Yeah, a couple of structural questions. One, hopefully quite short. Just spoke on where that fits into— Yeah. Sort of thinking. Then the second one is just on insurance. I mean, you've obviously got a big insurance business, which is part of a bank. A lot of insurers in this part of the world or a lot of banks in this part of the world have decided not to own insurers. Yeah. Distribute. You're sort of going the opposite direction. I'd just love to sort of understand some of the thinking behind that. Let me, let me deal with BoCom. Listen, BoCom for a long time has been very accretive to the bank. Our investment in BoCom, because the bank return was so low, BoCom was accretive. We've now got a situation where BoCom throws off good profit for us. It's a good access to a domestic profit pool in China. It's, it's hard to get access to a domestic profit pool in China through a managed business, you know, to get access of that size. It's good. Ironically, now, because the group return is going up, BoCom is probably slightly, as a return, is dilutive to the return of the bank. Listen, you go through the cycle, it's been accretive for a long time. It's a, it's a decent return. It's above cost of capital. You know, we still see it as access to a profit stream. We're trying to monetize the relationship as much as we can, so it isn't just a passive investment, that there is actually some synergies coming out of it. I think David and/or Mark covered that earlier. We're in a status quo position with BoCom. On insurance manufacturing, look, your point's a great one because we're in this situation where we own the best insurance business in Hong Kong. It's both a distributor and a manufacturer. The profitability out of both on an economic basis is very, very good, but nobody values it because it's a one market captive insurance business. Even though it's very profitable, you don't— I think the market doesn't really look through and give that business the value it would have if it was a standalone listed business, particularly the manufacturing bit. The problem is, you can't list a captive single market business. Even if you wanted to list it and give it its own identity, technically you can't. It's not listable as its current business. It's a good business economically. I don't wake up in the morning thinking we're keeping a business that isn't earning good returns. I do wake up in the morning thinking, I wish I could get a better valuation on it than I currently do. We're trying to make it less than one market. We're trying to make our insurance business in Asia more than just a captive. With the work we're doing in Pinnacle, we've got both a manufacturer and a distribution capability. We're building up a good business there. Our business in Singapore, we've got both a manufacturer and a distributor. China is definitely not a captive. It's more of a director market than it is a captive. Hong Kong, we're really a captive because we have such a big market share on banking. No matter what you call it's a captive. In Singapore, we're building up both director market and more of a director market business than a captive. In India, we own 36% of a joint venture— 26%, 26% of a joint venture. I'd be happy to go up, there's three partners in it, and if we could, we'd be happy to become a two-partner joint venture if we can get to that position. Roll that forward, it becomes a much more interesting strategic proposition at the end of that journey as you get through the maturity of that journey. I think what I'm doing is building strategic optionality. I don't think that strategic optionality is here today because I don't think you'd get enough value for that single market captive business. I think we've got to work on in the interim period, is how do we explain that strategy much more fully so that you can at least attribute some credit and value to that business activity. I'm not saying we will list, we won't list, we will sell, we won't, we'll hold. I'm not making any of those decisions. I just know that the strategic optionality down the path would be better on value creation opportunities than trying to just run for that value creation today. That's the call. Other questions? Oh, Andrew. Yeah, Andrew Kim from Citi. Just actually a couple of follow-ups, I guess. You talked about BoCom, I think the words you used were it's been a good investment. If you rewind back, say, 2009, there's a joint venture on cards. If you were talking up the synergy prospects, has that ship sailed now? Yeah. Is there anything else you could do? No, I think to be honest, we've changed radically our strategy in China on WPB. Listen, I'm not a WPB person, as I said, I'm not a wealth person. I think we were rolling out a strategy in the Greater Bay Area that was principally around retail banking, mortgages, credit cards, branches. With the benefit of hindsight, I'm not sure that was the right strategy to pursue. What we're doing now is a wealth-based strategy. Less capital intensive, faster payback. I mean, a cards business has very slow payback on it as you're building it. It's just a long payback curve because you've got a provision on day one for what could be revenue in five years from there, or three to five years. I think we've retrenched on that and said we shouldn't lead with retail banking per se, we should lead with wealth. International wealth management is our strategy to enter the Greater Bay Area, not retail banking. My simplification of the strategy that was and the strategy that is. A broad-based question in part relating to your answer on insurance, but you have talked a lot about organic expansion plans today. Are there any areas where you look at and think, you know, a bolt-on acquisition here would accelerate our expansion plans? Yeah. M eaningfully, and how do you weigh that up against dividends and buybacks in this market? Listen, we can do bolt-ons probably. It depends on your definition of bolt-on, but the bolt-ons we've done so far, John, have probably added up to just under $2 billion, is it? About $1.7 billion, if I remember correctly. $1.6 billion, $1.7 billion. Yeah. It's about that number. We can do that within our dividend strategy of 50% plus some buybacks, plus some growth. I think the bolt-ons have been manageable so far within our existing capital plans. If you go for a bigger definition of bolt-ons, you know, we keep looking for additional capabilities. The capabilities I'd be happy to really look at are anything that can enhance our management, our products and distribution capability in wealth. I'm also keen to look at opportunities that could enhance our ability to, in particular in Commercial Banking, platform sort of plays, where you can take our trade capability and our payments and FX capability to a group of clients that aren't our banking clients. You're sort of taking our product. If there's one constraint that we've had as a bank in wholesale banking, we acquire customers and then we cross-sell products. One of your constraints on growth is you could have the best products in the world, but our current model is sell that product to a bank customer who wants a relationship. What I think we're looking at more and Barry's looking at, is there a way to take our product capability to customers who bank with other banks, and essentially enter that transaction via a platform play and ecosystem rather than just winning the client. It's not instead of our current model, it's a new avenue for growth. If we can see platform or ecosystems that could give us that capability, be either to partner with them or to buy them, then we'd be interested in looking at things like that. Look, longer term, you know, we really wanna. We're very fortunate, and I'm gonna digress a little bit. If you think about what HSBC is, two very strong pillars of foundation. Universal bank Hong Kong, universal bank U.K. Across the top is a bridge. The bridge is international wholesale banking. I'm gonna dissect that into two components. One, international wholesale coverage with a USP in mid-market global wholesale banking. The other part of the bridge is international transaction banking, trade FX payments. You imagine it, two pillars, very deep liquidity pools, Hong Kong, U.K., and inherently high returns, mid-single- digit returns. Across the top, two planks across the top. International wholesale coverage with a USP in mid-market, international transaction banking comprising three principal product lines, all of which we're in the top three in the world. That's the essence of HSBC. You used to say to us, we thought that was profitable, but it always got masked by things underneath the bridge, where you were going deeper into retail banking and SME banking in markets you could never get scale. We pulled that back up. We pulled some of those tentacles that we're trying to create universal banks in that many markets, we pull those tentacles back up to be the de minimis necessary to support the bridge. Now you're seeing the true returns come through from the domestic markets and the two planks. For me, we've got a two plus two strategy. Two domestic pools of liquidity supporting two global capabilities. I'm going to modify it and say, we've actually got two and a half. The third plank of the bridge, and it's a half, is wealth management Asia. I'd love wealth management Asia to be wealth management international, global, broader. A broader spread of wealth management. I'd like to widen that part of the bridge or deepen it, whatever you wanna call it, build more product capability and distribution. I'd like that bridge to span more than just Asia. That doesn't mean I'm gonna become a domestic wealth manager in America, so don't worry about that. I'd like my Asian clients to access some of the wealth management capabilities and products of Europe and America. I'm not gonna build a retail bank, I'm not gonna buy a wealth manager there, you know, I'm not gonna try and re-enter the U.S., so don't worry about that. I'd like my Asia, Middle East clients to have access to Western products, and I'd like some of the Western clients to have access to Asia wealth opportunities. I think we haven't got a fully developed wealth business yet, and that's what Nuno's working on, is to take wealth management into a deeper and more international component of our bridge. You didn't ask that question, but I thought I'd get the answer in any way. Mid, mid-teens RoTE. James. Hi, it's James Invine here from Société Générale. Thank you very much for a great day today. We heard from divisional heads, regional heads, country heads, divisional country heads, I think, and of course, you, the CEO. Within those different layers of management, who is it who's really driving the strategy in terms of how much investment is enough? Given that you've got quite a few different players, how do you avoid turf wars? You know, people not wanting investment on their P&L? You don't avoid them, they're part of being a large organization. That's part of the skill and discipline of running a global bank for all of us, not just me. That's part and parcel of it. Structurally, I have three global businesses, and then we have the geographies, and then the functions. On the geographies, Asia, Middle East, the Americas, Continental Europe, U.K. I haven't missed anyone, have I? No. No. Principally, the three global businesses should be setting the global strategy for WPB, CMB, GBNM. They've got to negotiate and have dialogue with the five regions. The honest answer is, I've looked at this for 36 years, it's a fact of life. If you wanna be an international bank, you've got a matrix. You don't want the matrix to be overcomplicated, you don't want it to go too deep. I pick people on the ExCo, and I put people into major geography roles who I think can not only run their businesses, but they can have an ability to manage a matrix. If you put people in there that wanna run their own fiefdom and their own isolated business, you're doomed to failure because they're protectionists. They don't see the bigger picture. Picking the people to run those senior roles, the CEO of Hong Kong, the CEO of Singapore, they have to be able to have the personal behavior and attributes and culture that is capable of having sensible grownup discussions about trade-offs, because there are always trade-offs to be made. You know, people have said to me, "Flip the organization around. Don't have a matrix, just have it geography-based." Then you don't get the global collaboration, the global systems, the global product. Nuno is unwinding years of legacy of that. We had 15, 20 internet banking platforms around the world for personal banking. He's built it once here in Hong Kong, and he's now rolling it around the world. Every CEO wants their version of it now. The U.K. wants it before Hong Kong, and Singapore wants it before the U.K. That's why you need people who are capable of having that dialogue in a grownup matrix management. There is no simple answer to that. That's part and part. If you don't want that as a leader in this organization, then you should go and work for a domestic bank. And your— I'll let these two now give their version. Well, I mean, speaking on as a, as a geography, having been in functions, I mean, that has to be the most efficient way. I think in Noel's GEC, you drive the business primacy on controlling costs, controlling controls. We have our say in the planning stage, and we do that to go with the countries. Many people have asked about, earlier in the day about, "Well, what if China wants to move faster or Hang Seng wants to do that?" In a snapshot moment, by our experience, you might get a sort of a quicker local result, but you don't get the center of excellence, you don't get the economies of scale, you don't get the evolvement of the matrix working together. It's very hard. I mean, I would even argue on matrix, you actually do need primacy on functions rather than geography. You can't even flip the primacy because it's much harder to then drive a co-common denominator. Yes, there are tensions because, apart from having the CEOs, the CEOs are also key to call out. Australia and China and Singapore needs to be able to kind of through us make that voice and saying, "Hey, that's too shallow a common denominator. You're not hitting China deep enough or India deep enough." That's really how we play into it. Interest, Russia. No, I'll just add two points. I think one is that, when we look at our market CEOs, they're playing a significant role in the execution of that strategy. As Barry, Nuno, and Greg set the strategy and you get into the market, it's really these CEOs who are working with the regulators, Mark talked about getting the licenses, et cetera, for example, to set that strategy into execution. The second piece is the corridors connect with more of the CEOs traveling, meeting, taking clients across. Again, Mark talked about going to Dubai, going to Saudi. That's a great example of what. It's not that everyone's just debating cost or investment. There's an execution element that we need to get on with and do as well. Let's take an example. Nuno has the ultimate say on if a country is allowed to write their own internet banking platform. The answer now is, "No, you can't." You've got to take the internet banking platform we're writing globally, write it once, deploy many times. Barry has a saying, "You can't write your own trade platform in Malaysia separate from the one in Singapore. It's a global product line. It's a global capability. You write the system once, you deploy it many times, 'cause you need that consistency of customer experience because we're a global bank." They have decision rights on that. These guys, the geography heads, would never turn around to me and say, "That's bloody stupid. Allow me to write my own trade platform." You know, that's a trade-off analysis you'd never have in this group. There are other things where you've got to do some localization. The local wealth proposition and product capability here in Hong Kong will be different to the U.K. 'cause the market is different. Wherever possible, you try and standardize the IT architecture, and that's the trade-off. As I said, we had demand of about $5.5 billion-$6 billion for $4 billion of IT spend, development spend. I didn't actually prioritize that. The guys spent about a month to six weeks, maybe eight weeks, the ExCo prioritizing that spend. They were having their trade-offs amongst themselves between different business lines and different geographies. What I had to do was set the envelope, and there was a debate about the size of the envelope to spend. Is it $4 billion? Is it $4.5 billion? Is it $5 billion? The actual prioritization comes from a series of dialogues that take place in the summer of the year, so that everyone enters their FRP process with a clarity on investment direction and investment spend. That's just the reality of being a global business. Just to share some stress points. I mean, I guess one of the points that's hardest to balance is regulatory and compliance and having, you know, 60 countries— Yeah. And 19 markets in Asia where you are clearly having diverting data, privacy issues, data integrity issues. You have core systems drive in China, where you have a much more uniformity amongst the Chinese banks or the regulators giving pressure there. We have to work out those, and they're not as easily and clearly planned right from day one too. You know. Okay. Next question. You'll hear more from Nuno on WPB and wealth on Wednesday. More questions. Perlie. It's Perlie from KBW. Can I just ask you about the AGM? I guess the resolution very much passed, you know, in recommendation with board. I guess I just wondered, in your conversations with your shareholders before their event, is there anything that, you know, may have been said that sort of was useful to you? Like, you know, did you learn something? Because in those conversations, I guess people would have come up with different recommendations or, you know, different thoughts. Just wondered if you felt like you learned something from that process. Well, let me compartmentalize it. The conversation we had with Ping An versus the conversations we had with other shareholders. I mean, let me deal with the other shareholders first. The one thing that I kept getting asked by other shareholders is, look, more and more as the time went on, they used to say, "Look, you don't have to explain the business case to us. We understand this doesn't make sense, splitting Asia from the rest of the bank. We understand the diseconomies." Because if you think about it, what Ping An were proposing, I have these two pillars that are domestic banks, and I have the bridge across the top with the international wholesale banking, and they were saying, "Split the bridge." You saw stats today that evidence how interconnected that bridge is. The reinforcing bars of that bridge are quite strong because you heard 60% of revenue, 45% of revenue, internationally connected, whatever. Most shareholders that I spoke to said, "You don't need to explain that to us." The two questions they asked was governance and political considerations. What level of governance have you gone through in reaching your analysis and conclusion? Have you done good governance? That answer we gave them was our management produced financial models of what we thought the breakage costs would be, the opportunity for upside, the execution issues. We produced a detailed analysis of each of the separation proposals that Ping An put forward. We then got Goldmans in, and they did a fantastic job. Simon Robey from Robey Warshaw, they did a great job. They weren't hired as defense advisors. We hired them to challenge our model. The one learning is after their challenge, our model was more negative than our own model. The assumptions that they came up with and the modeling that they came up with, the quantity of value destruction was more penal than our own internal model. We got a Big Four audit firm in to do an assurance review on their models. We said, "Is the model that we've run comprehensive? It includes all the attributes, upside, downside, everything." The second question we put to the audit firm was: where we've made assumptions on future break costs, is that founded upon an information base that seems reasonable? You know, they're assumptions, so you can't audit them, but you assess, is the information base reasonable? i.e., is it more than just Noel's opinion or Barry's opinion? Is there a database underpinning it of record? Their conclusion was yes, it was a reasonable model. When I explained that to the investors, they said, "Okay, so you've done good governance, you've involved the Board, you've reached your conclusion." When we came out last summer with the definitive recommendation not to proceed with the separation, we did it after six months of detailed due diligence. The next question was, what's the rationale here? Is there a political hand behind Ping An? Is this politics rather than economics? 'Cause clearly the economics don't work, and you've done governance on that. For that reason, as you would expect, myself and Mark, over the period of last year and the early part of this year, have used and with David and Peter and Mark Wang and others, have stayed in regular dialogue with Beijing and with Hong Kong. Listen, I can't say this as a PLC director and know something different to what I'm about to say. There is absolutely no evidence in any of those dialogues with any stakeholder we've had conversations, that there is a political hand. Quite the contrary, when I was in Beijing recently, the conversation was, you've been an international bank for 158 years. You've helped Hong Kong become an international financial center as an international bank. You've helped China open up its economy to the international community. We need your, we need you to continue, as an international bank, to continue to do that. Help Hong Kong reboot as an IFC after COVID. Help China stay connected to the international market. I have absolutely no evidence from all of the conversations we have that there is any way, shape, or form a political hand behind this. Quite the contrary, it's the opposite. That's why I can feel comfortable, and I've said that publicly. I'm not saying anything today I haven't said in previous courses. Absolutely. I couldn't say that if I had contrary evidence, 'cause I'd be breaching the law. I couldn't say that. That's why I think it's as simple as we have a difference of an opinion, either commercially or philosophically. We're an international bank, two pillars and a bridge. Ping An originally thought they'd prefer just one pillar and a regional bank, and just become a regional bank. They then modified that proposal in the first quarter of this year and said, "Okay, we understand the breakage cost of the bridge. Just do a partial listing. Keep majority control." We assessed that in detail and modeled it, the answer is still hugely negative because nobody in this room would believe that was the end game. Your customers wouldn't believe it, I'm guaranteed my global peers wouldn't believe it either. They'd be ringing every one of my customers the minute we announce that strategy, trying to pinch the clients and the people from that global model. The breakage costs even come into play on a partial listing. At no point did Ping An ever share with us a detailed financial model of their proposal. I agree, very much so. It was just a broader question because obviously some of the developments like, you know, it's allocating more equity to Asia or, you know, the cost discipline. A lot of it was, you know, you were sort of in line with. We were doing that anyway. I just wondered if there's. No. Any sort of suggestion that came out that you found useful. No. No, I don't think so. That's not being arrogant. It's not being arrogant. It's not being defensive. It's I don't think. If anything, it's reinforced the global strategy. That's one of the things I've said all along here. If you look at what Stuart Gulliver did, he pulled a lot of those tentacles that were going down to, you know, become small universal banks in many markets. He pulled them back up. I've continued to do the same. We exited $128 billion of RWAs that were largely domestic low return RWAs. We're pulling those tentacles back up. We're even more an international bank today than we were five years ago. Therefore, the breakage cost is even a higher percentage of your business model than it would've been five years ago or 20 years ago, or 10. It, you know, intellectually, it didn't make sense. Next. Katherine. Catherine. Okay, I will take a different angle. On the banking events, we all know that a banking crisis is never linear, right? Following the risk event in the U.S. regional bank, markets, like when you are doing your own counterparty risk review, for your major markets, particularly in Asia, have you learned anything or do you think that there will be some potential hidden SVBs in Asia or in your other markets that you need to pay attention to? Also that will, that type of thoughts, have impact on your capital management, i.e., you may be a bit more prudent, when announcing type of like a buyback or return to shareholders. Also that when there is banking crisis, there is a challenge and opportunities. The opportunities that there may be M&A activities, right? Potential targets coming up. How do all these events impact your overall view in terms of risk management and capital management? Thank you. Do you wanna talk about— Yeah. Do you see any replicas here in Asia? Yeah. Sure, sure. Yeah, we've spent a lot of time with Martin and others in the team reviewing the exposures we have to banks in Asia, particularly the larger banks in each of the domestic markets who we trade with, where we have a global relationship with many of them. What we really found is that by and large, in Asia, the banks are well capitalized, highly liquid. There continues to be a significant amount of support from the central banks into the banking system. I think importantly, Asia is not dealing with an inflationary situation of the nature that some of the Western markets are. The only other point I'd make is there are a couple of markets where there are stress points. I mean, Sri Lanka is the most obvious one, and we've taken over the last three years, actually, the team has taken a significant amount of action to re-reduce our exposures there. It's an ongoing process as far as bank exposures are concerned. Where do we see stress points? I think you'll have to continue to watch how the FX flows and order flows from the West come into the East. As you see a decline in certain retail sales, in ready-made garments, for example, as a sector, electronics, what does that mean in second order in Asia? I think that's really what we're looking at, and liquidity in certain markets, again, getting impacted by effects. Multiple factors that we're looking at, but banking as a sector, less of a concern. David, I don't know if you want to add on? No, I think that's it. Even with the U.S. banks, the top segments there seems to be resilient to our point. We've looked at the exposure, and it's appropriate. The point is, to your question, was surprised by the opacity of the lower level regional banks in the U.S. and how they managed that, you know, the Treasury and balance sheet. Should there be more in how that trickles into the broader U.S. financial system? That's unknown, but I think the rhetoric seems like at the moment it's relatively contained. I think we'll all have to see what happens with regulation and deposit protection insurance and if it increases. I mean, I got asked the question a few times recently by journalists and by actually a regulator. I said, look, the first responsibility is on the management to make sure you run your balance sheet wisely. Second responsibility on the regulator, not for deposit protection, but to actually regulate wisely. I think generally, the global financial system gets both of those right. Then the third backstop is deposit protection insurance when things break down. I think the recall should be first to management to actually improve their liquidity management. I think there are some banks, particularly in the U.S. regional banks, that some action be taken there. Then second on the regulation. Then fine, if you've then got to do something to enhance deposit protection, then you might need to do that as well. Equally that I, I had a very blunt conversation with a regulator recently where I said, look. It wasn't in the U.S., so I said, we've done number 1 and you've done number 2. You know, we've, we've incurred an insurance cost, an insurance premium by running a very liquid balance sheet. That insurance premium is foregone earnings because of not chasing yields. If you now turn around to me and say, "But I'm gonna, I'm gonna get you to pay for the failures of other management teams that didn't run a safe balance sheet," then I won't be very happy, because I've already incurred the insurance premium on behalf of my shareholders. Don't double-dip on the safe balance sheets. We'll see what happens. Just a closing comment. I was the reason I was sitting on the back most of the day actually was not because I wanted to constrain what people were saying on cost and investment. It was actually to listen to what your questions were and also to listen to the presentations. Richard, there's one observation I got out of it today. I think we've given you a lot of information. We've given you possibly a lot of positive sentiment. We've given you positive sentiment on potential for growth. The question I had when sitting at the back was, I don't know how you're gonna model it all. I think what we need to do is think some of the information we gave you today, how do you factor that some of that information into your future models? How do you, how do you get a sense of what the GBA revenue opportunity is and how much of that should appear in Hong Kong and how much of that should appear in mainland China? What is the revenue growth potential for us in a— you know, 'cause I do think there's muted loan demand at the moment, particularly term loan in corporate banking, because I don't see a lot of companies wanting to do a lot of capital investment at the moment because they're waiting for the economy to become more predictable. I do see short-term working capital possibly coming back if the economy performs better. I think that will be a reemerging part of the balance sheet first, with term lending later. There's also inherent growth opportunity in that cross-sell of corporate clients to another country or that cross-sell of corporate clients into another product, and how much of that should be there relative to economic-led growth. I think we need to probably debrief after this and think, and you could give us some feedback on the areas that, without us writing your models for you, what else we could provide or should provide to decipher some of what we said today to help you factor that into your future thinking. Maybe there's an action on us on that. I think the way I there's one message I think, I think it was Maggie summed it up well, that I had on my list I wanted to say as a close. If there's one thing I was particularly proud of was our team here in Hong Kong. When Hong Kong went through its worst close down, its real bad lockdown, the team here performed heroics for our clients, and they strengthened that red hexagon even more because of what they did, in my view. There's one thing they did as well. They were investing in digital account opening, particularly for wealth and insurance sales, particularly insurance, prior to that lockdown. They launched a new onboarding and online completion capability for insurance about four months before the lockdown in the red brand. They continued to sell insurance from home through that four-month lockdown period. We ended up regaining number one market position. We were the only bank in Hong Kong that sold insurance all the way through the COVID lockdown. I was here at that time, towards the end of it. It was devastated. That, for me, was the power of digitization, because it allowed you to meet market needs, even if you couldn't see people. What Nuno and the team are now doing is trying to bring that level of digitization into our international Premier and our international wealth proposition in more than just the Hong Kong. The contrast was Hang Seng didn't actually have that digital capability at that time, therefore, their insurance sales suffered. Hang Seng will get that now. I suppose what I'm trying to say, the message is, even during the transformation phase, which was all about reengineering cost, we have been getting ready for an economic pickup post-COVID. We're digitizing as much as we possibly can so that when the economy picks back up and the real economy starts to rebound and grow, we can ride that growth curve. None of us can predict exactly when that's gonna be, but my plan is to change the nature of the revenue stream to be less dependent on NII, more driven, but to pick up on the growth in the economy and to shift more of the revenue into fee-based type revenue and wealth management. That's why when I talk about two plus two or two and a half, or two plus two and a half, I really want to grow the wealth opportunities because that counterbalances the dependency on NII. It gives us less dependency on balance sheet, more fee income-based. That's why we still want to invest in transaction banking, 'cause it's fee income-based. We've been putting the building blocks in place to change the nature of the revenue and to be ready for economic pickup. That's what we're trying to do and have been doing over the last three years. That we're not as sensitive on rates. We'll always be sensitive, but not as sensitive on rates. That's it. My final comment is thank you for coming. It's a big investment of your time. I hope you enjoy tomorrow, but not as much as you've enjoyed today. Thank you very much.