Welcome to Standard Chartered Plc's first quarter 2021 results. Today's presentation is being hosted by Bill Winters, Group Chief Executive, and Andy Halford, Group Chief Financial Officer. Once their opening remarks are finished, there'll be an opportunity for question and answers. To ask a question over the phone, please press star one on your telephone keypad at any point during the presentation, or alternatively, please use the question box available on your webcast page to submit your questions. At this point, I'd like to hand over to Bill to begin. Please go ahead. Thanks very much, and thanks, everybody, for joining us. Good morning. Good afternoon. I'll make a couple comments up front on page two of the slide deck that you probably have. Andy will take us through the package, and then we'll both be available for Q&A. Lots going on in the first quarter, clearly. The interest rate headwinds that were well flagged have been largely offset by growth in our other key strategic areas, which is encouraging, leading to a strong quarter overall. We had a record quarter in wealth management. I think as important as the income number is the new client number. 100,000 additional clients into our priority segment, coming about 2/3 from our mass segment and the others new to bank. As we've always pointed out, growing client numbers are the best leading indicator of future growth. Think that the outlook for the strong quarter in wealth, that outlook should continue to be pretty strong. Had a good strong quarter in financial markets, obviously consistent with the market, but continuing to advance on that front. Impairments were unusually low. We remain well reserved. In the face of some remaining uncertainties, not least in India and the rest of South Asia, we feel comfortable with our reserve positioning and with our capital strength. Apart from the financial numbers in the first quarter, there were a number of notables I think that are going in the right direction. Good solid growth in loans and advances. Our mass market efforts are gathering pace and I think progressing well. In particular, the digitization efforts, both in the main bank are going extremely well, and that of course, allows us to continue to rationalize expenses in that business, including the references that you see in the statements to continuing to reduce the number of branches. Our discrete digital ventures with Mox crossing the 100,000 client mark. Nexus actually in production now in Indonesia, which is all very encouraging. On the sustainability front, made very good progress both in the business of sustainable finance, as well as the early stages of preparing for a much more robust carbon market, but also in terms of forming our own policy views, which we'll be coming back on later in the year. Finally, I'd like to just extend my extraordinary sympathies and most heartfelt thoughts to the entire population of India, Bangladesh, and other parts of the world that are experiencing particularly bad pandemic outcomes right now. I'm very grateful to our own employees for holding the fort in these very difficult times. We've not had any challenges from a resiliency perspective as yet, but of course, we're watching it very closely. I think like so many people in the markets these days, our own colleagues have been heroic. I'd just like to call that out. With that, I'll hand over to Andy and come back later for Q&A. Thank you. Thank you, Bill, and thank you all for joining the call. Let me start on slide three with the usual financial snapshot, and I'll cover the component parts shortly. Just a few comments on this page. Starting at the top, income at constant currency and excluding the large DVA credit in the previous year was down just $130 million or 3%, with business momentum helping us to claw back nearly 2/3 of the $380 million of income lost due to lower interest rates. As Bill mentioned, the momentum that we saw building in some of our larger businesses last year continued, leading to a strong start to this year. Wealth management had a record quarter, up 20% year-on-year. In financial markets, income excluding DVA was up 7% year-on-year, which is an encouraging sign of the underlying improvements in that business given the massively elevated market volatility we saw this time last year. Finally, on income, the net interest margin has broadly stable as we anticipated, and the underlying momentum has continued in our fee-earning businesses, thereby supporting our view that the full-year income in 2021 should be similar to last year on a constant currency basis. Moving down the page to expenses, which were up 4% at constant currency due mainly to normalizing the level of accrual for performance-related pay. We've also created the capacity through our ongoing productivity initiatives to fund a 6% increase in the amounts expensed from our various digital and other investment projects. Credit impairment at $20 million was exceptionally low and was achieved whilst broadly maintaining the overall level of the management overlay. Although global economic prospects have improved and all our main risk indicators are broadly trending in the right direction, it's unlikely we'll see such a low quarterly charge as this again quite some time. I'll cover that in more detail shortly. Altogether, and notwithstanding the DVA benefit in the prior year, this led to an 18% improvement in reported underlying profit before tax of $1.4 billion. Indeed, this was our highest quarterly profit credit for several years and actually resulted in our RoTE nudging into double digits. Finally, on this slide, our capital and liquidity position is strong. Our CET1 is at the top of our target range, despite responding to strong client demand, with loans in advance to customers up 4% in the quarter. This gives us capacity to both grow the business further and fund shareholder returns. Let's start looking in more detail at our income performance on slide four. This is the usual view of income by product, excluding DVA, and with currency fluctuations stripped out to highlight the underlying momentum. The column third from the left shows the Q1 2020 income on a constant currency basis, and we've shown the impact of net interest margin headwinds that I mentioned from $380 million if you apply this year's NIM to last year's balance sheet. Moving to the right, wealth management income was very strong. As I mentioned already, a record performance that was underpinned by a continued improvement in sentiment in some of our larger markets in Asia, particularly Singapore, Korea, China, and Hong Kong. Put it into context, income at $640 million was $100 million higher than a year ago, and $200 million higher than our low point in Q2 last year. Financial markets is up again this year, and over what was a strong first quarter last year. When you recall the rates business in particular, and not surprisingly, did very well in the aftermath of the announcement of the global interest rate reduction. This year, there were better conditions for our commodities business, but much less volatility in rates and FX, meaning the macro trading overall was down year-on-year. On the other hand, credit trading, which posted a $25 million loss in Q1 2020, moved strongly back into profit this year, with credit markets excluding credit trading also growing up 6%. The columns in gray on the right-hand side represent the products that are taking the brunt of lower interest rates. In retail products, we see a familiar story when interest rates move lower. Positive income has fallen sharply, offset to some extent by growth in mortgage. It's a similar picture in transaction banking. As Bill said, we are seeing good signs of economic recovery in our markets, and trade income, as a result, is up 7% year-on-year, back to the levels we last saw at the start of 2019, with balance sheet growth at just under 8% during the same period. The cash business, though, is at a two-year low this quarter, with margin compression more than wiping out beneficial impact of 11% volume growth year-on-year. Treasury and other income was down $59 million. You may recall we generated unusually large realization gains in Q1 last year, given the market dislocation. We made some gains this year, not as much, given the less conducive conditions. All in all, as I said, income down 3%. I know it's a theoretical exercise all other things wouldn't be equal. If you were to simply rebase Q1 2020 income for the impacts of the NIM compression in the intervening period, then income would have been up 7%. Turning to slide five to spend a bit more time on net interest income and margin. Our first quarter net interest margin print of 122 basis points is in line with the guidance we gave in February. Q1 net interest income was slightly down on Q4 2020. After adjusting for day count and the one-off prior period Korea tax receipt, net interest income was actually up quarter on quarter by 3%, in line with the growth in average interest earning assets. The interest rate picture has not changed materially in the first quarter. HIBOR has continued to drift lower by about 12 basis points, which has continued to put pressure on NIM in Hong Kong. This has been partially offset by improvements in pricing and our continued focus on the mix of our liability base. Speaking of interest rates, although we don't expect upward hikes anytime soon, some investors have asked if we can't at least lengthen the tenor of our treasury book to take advantage of the steeper yield curve at the long end. The simple answer is yes, to some extent we can, and we will selectively do so over time. On volumes, we are seeing healthy client-led demand in some of our larger markets in Asia. As I mentioned, loans and advances to customers grew by $10 billion or 4% in the quarter, with lending volumes up on the back of short-term IPO growth in Hong Kong, transaction banking trade and wealth management growth driven by higher secured lending and retail mortgages, partially offset by a decline in the unsecured credit card and personal loans book. We expect to generate decent loan growth over the remainder of the year, albeit probably not at the rate we saw in the first quarter. Turning to slide six then. Our more capital efficient non-funded income, which comprises net fees and commissions and net trading and other income, has grown at 4% year-on-year. It now constitutes close to 60% of our total income. Wealth management, the largest engine of net fees and commissions, is up 23%, with our focus on driving client growth, adding new products, and investing to improve our front and back office capabilities continuing to pay off. We are adding affluent clients at a faster rate now than we were before the pandemic, 2/3 of which migrated from the mass retail segment, one of the many reasons why we are keen to grow that pipeline. Our product portfolio was expanded with new wealth management funds focused on retirement, China's new economy, and sustainability. Our other big fee-generating engine is financial markets. As I said, we believe the improvements made by our team in recent years will underpin healthy long-term growth that is much less correlated to volatility than in the past. Net fees and commissions from cash and trade both recorded the highest quarterly print since the start of the pandemic. Though still below pre-pandemic levels, this all evidences the signs of recovery that we are seeing in our markets. I already mentioned that the treasury income is lower year-on-year, primarily due to lower realization gains, treasury markets. With that, before I move to expenses, a few words on our income outlook. Our Q1 performance, supported by the broader macroeconomic outlook, reinforces our confidence in the previously stated income guidance. With the NIM having broadly stabilized, we expect income to start growing again in the second half of this year on a year-on-year basis, and for the year overall to be at a similar level to 2020 at constant currency. Beyond that, we see plenty of reasons to expect income growth to return to our medium-term range of 5%-7% growth starting next year. On to slide seven and costs. I mentioned earlier the reason for the small increase in cost in Q1. Clearly, the plan is to get back to generating significant positive jaws as soon as possible, and I expect we will do so in the second half of the year. I spoke earlier about the productivity initiatives that we are creating capacity to continue to invest. We have accelerated some of the opportunities, particularly as we implement new ways of working to speed up the rate of innovation and process improvements. Aligned with this, many colleagues across the bank have just moved onto new contracts which allow working from home from one to five days per week. We will monitor the success of this program and flex our office space accordingly. Suffice it to say, the benefits from our multiyear digitization program and other initiatives such as this should enable us to roughly halve the number of physical branches to around 400 and reduce our overall real estate footprint by about 1/3 over the next five years or so. As we said in February, expenses are likely to increase slightly in 2021 as we invest in digital capabilities and we continue to target full-year OpEx below $10 billion at constant currency and excluding the U.K. bank levy, but performance-related pay could nudge us slightly over. Two further points on cost before we move to the next slide. Firstly, as you may have seen, the UK bank levy confirmed our expectation that the UK bank levy will reduce to around $100 million this year, realizing an annual saving of $200 million. Secondly, you'll recall we said in February that we're likely to incur restructuring costs of about $500 m illion dollars as we continue to transform the business to drive productivity, most of which could land this year. There was a small charge booked in Q1, but those efforts will naturally build through the remainder of the year, so you should expect the quarterly run rate to pick up. Turning now to credit impairment and asset quality on slide 8. Credit impairment of $20 million was exceptionally low. A low first quarter is not unusual, but $20 million is. As I said earlier, all the main indicators are broadly moving in the right direction. We saw a small net release of stage 1 and 2 charges, and a small stage 3 charge, and retained a management overlay of $339 million. The stock of high-risk assets in our corporate, commercial, and institutional banking portfolio across the three indicators in the bottom middle graph continue to trend down. Clearly, the full-year impairment charge is going to be significantly lower this year. You're probably asking to give you very precise guidance, and as usual, I will refrain from doing so. However, the outlook is undoubtedly more positive, but the world is far from out of the woods when it comes to COVID. We have seen good progress in some of the markets, whilst others are facing challenges, as Bill has referred to. What I will say based on my Q1 experience is that we may get back to or even slightly below our normalized loan loss rate of around 35 basis points- 40 basis points possibly this year. To complete the financial overview on slide nine, risk-weighted assets and capital. Starting with the chart at the top, risk-weighted assets were up $8 billion or 3% in the quarter, driven mainly by strong client demand. As has often been the case before, the first quarter usually sees the financial markets business very active as clients return after the seasonal slowdown in Q4. As the financial markets business books assets and takes on trading positions, both credit and market risk weights tend to increase apace. However, this pace is typically not repeated later in the year. In Q1, customer demand led asset growth partially offset by an improvement in asset mix, added $8 billion to RWA. Increases due to credit deterioration of about $0.6 billion and $1 billion from market RWA were offset by similar reductions from FX movement. We have consistently guided that RWAs should grow below the rate of asset growth. That very much remains our expectation. Not in every quarter, obviously, but over time. I expect mid-single digit year-on-year RWA growth for this full financial year. As you know, our focus on returns in recent years has driven discipline around capital position. We are confident we can capture client opportunities without dialing up the RWA intensity during the remainder of the year. Turning to the chart on the bottom, we remain strongly capitalized with CET1 ratio at 14%, the top of our target range is 4 percentage points above our regulatory minimum. Profit accretion of 40 basis points allows us to reinvest into client-led asset growth. Roughly 10 basis points came off CET1 upon completion of the share buyback we announced in February, and the accrual of an interim dividend and AT1 coupons. FX and others includes nine basis points in higher regulatory deductions and 10 basis points for FVOCI reserve movements. Having weathered the worst of the pandemic, going forwards, we will be happily operating within rather than above our 13%-14% target CET1 range. We believe we will see significant profitable opportunities for capital to work supporting our clients in the current quarters, and we'll seek approval to use what surplus we have. After doing so, pay dividends and buybacks. Now on to the final slide before we open the line to questions. I won't repeat the outlook comments at the top of the slide. It summarizes how we think the rest of the year might pan out. The key point is that underlying momentum remains strong as the year-on-year interest rate drag now starts to reduce pretty quickly. The chart at the bottom shows some examples of trends we are seeing in the drivers of our underlying business momentum. Taken together, they reinforce our confidence in our outlook both for this year and for getting back to 5%- 7% top-line growth next year and beyond. With that, I'll hand back to the operator so Bill and I can take your questions. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you wish to ask your question via the audio press star one on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. To cancel your request press the hash key, alternatively, please use the question box available on your webcast page to submit your question. So that's star one to ask your question. Your first question comes from the line of Yafei Tian of Citi. Please ask your question. Hi. Thank you for taking the questions. I have a couple of questions, if I may. The first one is looking at the asset quality for this quarter. It's a very good quarter, compared to some of your peers, the amount of the reversal seems to be much more modest, particularly taking into account that the NPL stage 3 loans are actually falling. Does that mean there is a very long runway for Standard Chartered to deliver very low loan losses, not just for this year, but also for future years? That's the first one. Second one, you mentioned about half the number of branch network going forward and the restructuring costs related to that. Just wanted to have a bit of understanding, in what markets are you looking to optimize the branch network? Thank you. Okay. Let me take those, Yafei. On asset quality, I would point to a few things, and we've got this, I think, on slide eight. We saw a significant increase in early alerts, the ones that we're watching very carefully. That peaked at over $14 billion. That has been coming down progressively quarter by quarter. We're now about 1/3 less than that, and we're actually back below the levels that we had at March 2020 at the very start of the pandemic. That tends to be the best indicator as to what is happening over a forward period. We have got our stage 1 and 2 and stage 3 sort of credit items. Sorry. The stage 3 and the Credit Grade 12 are staying fairly constant at the $6 billion level. I think $6 billion needs to be seen in the context of an overall portfolio of nearly $300 billion. It is a relatively small part of the overall portfolio. It is stable. We are monitoring it. Quite a lot of the activity there is actually better collateralized now than we have had in the past. We are not worried about that from the perspective of the overall of the business. Clearly, there could yet be unforeseen events, but we think that the portfolio is behaving well. Finally, I'd observe that last year with the $2 billion charge, it was, what? About $1 billion higher than might otherwise have been the case. So far this year, we seem to be now normalizing back to the long-term averages. I think if we take about $1 billion of excess charge on a $300 billion book through the whole of the course of COVID, I do not think that will be a bad outcome. On the branches, we have been investing in digitalization and mobile applications regularly for the last several years. We have been regularly reducing the number of branches over that period of time as customer behavior moves from attending the physical branch to actually doing more and more things on mobile devices. I think four or five years ago, we had about 1,200 branches. We're about 800 today. What we're saying today is that we continue to expect that trend to occur, and that over a period of time, we think we'll settle at somewhere around the 400 branch level. The combination of digital, the combination of mobile access for customers is what is concluding. We think that that will be a sensible target to go for. I just had one short comment on the branch side. Within the 800 branches, we've been steadily reconfiguring a number of those branches from main transaction branches into wealth and advisory branches. Typically upgrading the facilities and making them more suitable for affluent customers who are looking for advice and transaction processing rather than day-to-day banking. The branch isn't going away by any means, but will be substantially reconfigured as we already have in a number of cases. Thank you. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Aman Rakkar of Barclays. Please ask your question. Good morning, gents. Just wanted a quick question on wealth management. Obviously good print in Q1. Interested in what kind of reach do we take for the full year in regards to wealth management? I guess I note you're kind of calling out again the difference in performance between the bancassurance component of wealth management. Can you help us understand the kind of moving parts behind that bancassurance component versus the non-bancassurance component? To what extent is activity subdued, and can we expect some kind of rebound potentially as the Hong Kong China border reopens later this year? We've been very focused upon wealth management for a number of years now. While it is really good to see such a strong start to this year, it is sort of a build on what has been progressively happening over a period of time. As we all know, a lot of wealth has moved into the Asia region, and I think we have availed ourselves of that over a period of time well. We've invested in new systems. We've got better insights. We're supporting clients better. The team is stronger. It's just really good to see that having come through. As we observed today, we have got a smaller increase in the banker assurance and a bigger increase in the rest of the product sets. That will vary from period to period. Remember that a lot of the bancassurance product is sold face-to-face. In a period when it's been slightly more difficult to get so much face-to-face contact, it's not entirely a surprise that has slightly been hampered. We come into this year feeling pretty good about wealth management. Obviously, how it plays out over the remainder of this year will depend a lot upon sentiment and how various markets around the world move. It's clearly a bedrock to the business and something that we are proud of. Thanks very much for that. If I could just follow up quickly then. You're demonstrating some really strong growth in that product line as things are, but you've got a decent chunk of that business not firing on all cylinders. Is there any reason to think that next year wealth management total doesn't kind of take off? Is that something we should be thinking about, in terms of either you've overearned in Q1 or some other thing? Well, 20% overall I think is reasonable takeoff as far as I'd be concerned. Listen, within any product range, you're always going to have some that are slightly stronger and some that are slightly lighter in any period. We're not at all worried about bancassurance performance. Not at all. We see a lot of potential there. We are doing a lot now that we have got our CPBB business area to look more cohesively at our service for affluent customers, including the wealth management product. We hope that actually, as we start to get a more consistent approach there across markets, that that also will provide upward opportunity. We've also been very encouraged by the growth in the affluent customer segment, 100,000 more customers. A lot of those, 2/3 of them, actually are coming from our mass market segment, hence reinforcing our belief that actually having a bigger presence in the mass market as a feeder to affluents fueled by wealth management products is a very potent combination for us as we move forward. Maybe, Aman, I could just add. I think we see a tremendous amount of runway in this product line. When we look at Q1, but also over the past two quarters, we've seen some of the markets that are smaller contributors to our overall wealth business, but nevertheless, large businesses, China, Korea, in addition to the businesses that have been the bulk of our wealth business, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, et cetera. The new markets are really firing. When we look prospectively at the Chinese market opening up, we look at specific things like Wealth Management Connect, bigger area in China than perhaps expanding to the rest of the country over time. Building on some really good strength in our wealth business in China over the past quarter and over the past couple of years. We're very encouraged by the ability to sustain these relatively high growth rates. Perhaps not at 20% every quarter, but as you know, that business line has been growing at high single digits, low double digits for many years for us. We think that the runway goes for quite a long time. We're investing in that. I'd call out specifically Korea, China, India, and other markets that will move up and down from quarter to quarter, but that are establishing a very nice trend for long-term growth in this key strategic area of focus for us. Thank you very much. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Joseph Dickerson of Jefferies. Please ask your question. Hi. Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I just had a quick one, really. One of your competitors, I don't know if it's a competitor, but a large global bank is looking to sell off some of its consumer businesses in your footprint. Just wondering if you think any of those portfolios would be a good use of excess capital, or a comment on portfolio acquisitions more generally would also be helpful. Thank you. I think we're always looking for opportunities to fill out in our network. Obviously only looking for things that play to our core strengths, where we think we have some value to add. There could easily be parts of the Citibank portfolio that fit nicely with our business. We'll look at them. I think we know the businesses reasonably well. None of it is without complication. Early stages of the process, but we'll look, and we'll determine whether it's the best use of the shareholder capital that we've got relative to the other uses. Always recognizing that we have the opportunity, or hope to have the opportunity before too long to buy back shares at a discount to book value. We'll look at those acquisitions in the context of our whole portfolio. Thanks much. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Tom Rayner of Numis. Please ask the question. Yes, good morning, both. Wanted to stick firstly just on the sort of revenue sustainability question. You've spoken about wealth management. I just realized that the first quarter was very strong in Hong Kong, particularly in terms of stock market turnover, which I think drives mutual fund sales and retail sort of equities trading. Wonder how much of your Q1 performance was driven by that rather than some of the other things you mentioned, because I think in April that has dropped off quite notably. Just a question there about the sustainability of that aspect of the wealth management performance. Also just on revenue, can I just sort of check that the expected currency impact this year is still around $400 million? Because obviously the currency impact was quite small in Q1 relative to that full-year guidance. That's the first question. I have a second one on costs, please. Tom, as you know, that wealth management business line is quite volatile and is very driven by market sentiment exactly as you call out. The outperformance in Q1 was clearly driven in part by the extremely favorable conditions in the equity markets, not unfavorable in fixed income markets as well, and in addition to the resumption of activity in the banca line. We'll see that bump around from quarter to quarter for sure, as we have, I think, for every year in the past decade. Our business is relatively less market sensitive than some other businesses, because we've got a relatively higher proportion in banca and other savings products that are a bit less market sensitive. It doesn't render us harmless to market volatility. Maybe the thing you called specifically in terms of sustainability is the consistent growth in client numbers. It's not an accident that we have a growth in client numbers. We focus on this quite a bit. We've been focusing on reorienting our mass market to identify those clients that can elevate themselves in terms of their status inside Standard Chartered to premium and then priority. The premium segment that we've added in most of our markets over the past couple of years is going very well. We made big investments in customer service, which has led to, as I called out at the full year results, led to a number one net promoter score in six of our top nine markets, and top tier in the other three. Again, none of that's an accident. These have been very deliberate investments that we've made in improving customer service, including digital marketing, improving our digital offering, improving the quality of branches that are ever more suitable for that priority client segment. Those are translating through to growth in customer numbers, consistent growth in customer numbers, which we think bodes very well for the sustainability of earnings down the road. None of that is to take away from that observation that in a 20% YoY growth quarter, we're not going to sustain that every quarter in every market environment. Tom, on your second question, currency impact. In February with the rates as we saw them then, we put about the GBP 400 million uplift. Remember, this is both to income and to cost net neutral on profit. If you took today's rates, it might be nearer GBP 300 than GBP 400, it obviously does move around over time. Rather than give you a sort of blow-by-blow account on that GBP 300-GBP 400, somewhere in that range is where we would see it as of today. Okay. Thank you. Just moving on to costs. Can you add a bit of color around this sort of normalizing of the performance-related pay? Because we heard the same thing from HSBC a couple of days ago that there's sort of I don't know if there's been a directive that sort of determines how you have to accrue now your performance-related pay. Just like to get a sort of better understanding. You are signaling as well that it might have an impact on the full year. Again, I suspect if that's going to be higher, does that mean that revenue will also be higher than current sort of expectations? Just to sort of try and get my head around this PRP issue a little bit better. Also on the restructuring charge, most of that will be taken in 2021. What's the likelihood that we get another restructuring charge top up, say, for 2022? We don't want to move into a situation where we have rolling restructuring charges sort of going on and on. I just wondered again, your thoughts around the restructuring charge as well, please. Yeah, sure. This time last year when we were doing the Q1 numbers, which clearly was at the very start of COVID, we said quite explicitly that the business performance was likely to be adversely impacted, that we would be looking at what levers we could pull to flex the cost base accordingly. As we did at the end of the year, and as most banks did at the end of the year, clearly we had a lower level of payout for performance-related pay as a consequence of what happened last year. What we're saying this year is with having had a good start to the year, that we would see that situation being unlikely to prevail through this year as well, and that if we continue the momentum we have got. Remember that performance-related pay is a mixture of factors, some of which are income related, some are profit related, some are digitization related. It is possible that we may see a little bit of an extra cost in the current year. Not big in the overall scheme of things, but we just want to put the marker down at this point in the year that could be a possible outcome. On the restructuring, we've said about $500 m illion dollars mainly this year. In February, sort of repeating today, I think the majority of that will be current year. I don't think we will have a significant element of that sort of flowing through to years subsequent to this. I think about that being majority this year, minority thereafter. Yes. Sorry, Andy, it was more about whether there's likely to be another one of similar size when we get to end of this year, looking into next year. Just how specific the restructuring is to specific things you're doing rather than becoming a sort of general restructuring of banks going on and on. That was the focus of the question. Yeah. If- Yeah. Listen, we are going to continue to evolve the bank. We're going to continue to refashion it, reshape it as you would expect. As we see it at the moment, I think the bigger charge will be this year. Certainly not excluding next year totally as being a sign of behind next year. I think with everything that we can see going on at the moment, it is most likely that the big charge will be this year. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Nick Lord, Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question. Thanks very much. Thanks for taking the question. Two questions actually for me. First is just to push you a little bit more on this revenue point. If I look at what you've just delivered in terms of revenue relative to consensus, you're just about 25% over consensus expectation. It doesn't sound that you're changing your full year target, but then you're saying second half will be higher than first half. I'm just trying to marry that. Are you actually saying, look, actually the outcome is we're probably going to beat the target and we're just going to hold back because obviously there's some market and wealth revenues in there. I'm just trying to get a feel for what you're actually trying to say there, and what some of the drivers or what some of the uncertainties might be in that revenue line. The second is just on tax. It seems to be quite low in the first quarter. I just wonder if you could tell us what happened there? Yeah. The revenue print for the first quarter, I think is just slightly ahead of consensus. I don't know whether you said $25 billion, 25%, we are just slightly ahead. Clearly, as we move forward over the balance of the year, two or three things to take into account. The Q1 had some treasury realization gains, not necessarily that we'll have those in every single quarter. Secondly, the normalization of the NIM. It starts to normalize much more in the second quarter, it still has got some way to travel. We are much closer to like comp for the latter two quarters of the year. Hence why we're saying that in the second half, the volume side of this plus the fee income should be essentially what is driving the growth. It should not be held back by the NIM effect, and the NIM effect will work up over that period of time. You put all those together and you get on a constant currency basis, notwithstanding the $340 million comment of earlier, something that is similar to where we're at. Now, have we probably, at the margin, had a slightly better start to where we had hoped to be? Yes, I think at the margin we have been. Does it change the word similar for the full year? Not materially so. We clearly have still got three quarters to go. The growth in some markets is good. The India situation, obviously less good. I think we're just being thoughtful about where we are in terms of balance of year. Overall, I'd say we are comfortable with where we have started the year, and we look forward to continuing as much as we can the underlying momentum through the balance of the year. On the tax, yes, it is a lower print. The underlying rate, about 8 percentage points lower than in the equivalent period last year. There are a number of moving parts there, but the single biggest is, well, probably two single biggest. One, with increased profitability, the proportion of our non-allowable tax expenses is a lesser drag than is the case when we are in a low profitability period. Secondly, it is a question of mix of profits between different countries, and we have got a slightly higher proportion of the first year result that is in lower tax rate countries than was the case a year ago. Those two together. I think the full year, we've said over a medium term period, we'd expect to see the tax rate full year basis to be progressively moving to slightly below the 30% level. I think we'll probably be somewhere around the 30% level on a full year basis this year. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Manus Costello of Autonomous. Please ask your question. Morning. I just wanted to question on NII, please. Andy, you made some comments about increasing the tenor of hedges. I wonder if you could give us some more color on that. In addition, you've got a new slide 15, which gives some more information about why you think you're actually more rate sensitive than you told us last quarter. Can you just elaborate a bit on that as well, please? Thank you. Yeah. Net interest income, we have said that we see the overall margin sort of continuing to stabilize broadly where we're at. A little bit of downward pressure because of the HIBOR, we think we can work through that through sort of mix and other effects. One of the things we have obviously been focused on, and there's been a number of questions on, is whether we can benefit more from the long end of the interest rate curve. Clearly, the majority of our activity is on the shorter end of the curve. The time duration of a lot of our lending is more in the 18-month period than in the five-year period. We do believe that there are some things we can do with hedging, which will be appropriate in terms of balancing the sort of reward risk side of things. I think that there will be some upside over a period of time as we avail ourselves of that. Secondly, slide 15, to which you have referred, Manus. We have shown in there that the mathematical calculation of the interest rate sensitivity comes to about a $480 million uplift per 100 basis points of increase. What we've also observed there, and I think we sort of put this in words, but we didn't put it in charts in February, is actually that there are other things which on an upward movement would actually benefit them. Some of those relate to management actions that we can take. Some of it relates to the risk sensitivity of trading book assets that are funded by the banking book. If you put those two together, you sort of get numbers that are roughly double that $480, so not far off $1 billion. I think that makes sense in the context of what we actually saw last year with the reduction in rates, and this is essentially saying that we think actually on the upside it would broadly marry what happened on the downside. Therefore, obviously, if we can keep the cost in the business low, the increase in the cost low, then this should give us good operational leverage as and when we do see those rate increases starting to happen. Thank you. Just on the change in hedging policy, when was that started? How quickly will it flow through to NII? How much of a benefit are we talking about if you're putting stuff further down the curve? We've been looking at it in recent weeks. We will be starting it pretty imminently. I think it will be on a full year basis. It'll be high tens of millions GBP rather than something significantly bigger than that. We will obviously phase it in over a period of time. Super. Thank you very much. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Martin Leitgeb of Goldman Sachs. Please ask your question. Yes, good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to follow up on revenue guidance and not trying to revise your guidance here or comment on consensus, but I was just wondering how conservative it is, just given what we have seen in the first quarter. Loan balance is up 4%, and I think the notion that margins might be close to have stabilized. 4% absolute growth in a single quarter rather than annualized and consensus foreseeing revenues going up by roughly 4% in 2022. In a scenario where we have a fairly strong recovery in Asia globally after the pandemic and snapback in activity, is there meaningful upside risk to that number so that loan growth could be over and above the 5%-7% kind of goalpost you said earlier? Is that a fair assumption or are there other elements which would make us more cautious? The second question related to the Citi announcement in terms of retrenchment on its Asian footprint. I was just wondering, is there a similar exercise of thinking being undertaken by Standard Chartered just to evaluate some of the smaller retail footprints where the group might lack scale? Is your way to addressing this essentially to reduce and thin out the branch footprint and with that essentially address some of the issues of the lack of scale? Thank you. Yeah. Martin, on the revenue guidance, two or three things. One, the NIM and the adjusted NIM sort of numbers. Clearly, I know we've got this on, I think slide five. We've got a 128 quarter as a comp for Q2. There is obviously some drag relative to what we've indicated where we think the balancing year will be, and then Q3, Q4, it's lesser, but a 122, 124 gap, 2% or whatever. There is still some drag to come through on the NIM, but it's mainly in the second quarter. The volume growth we have seen so far has been strong. Now, I did observe that it's often stronger in the first quarter, I don't think one can just sort of take that number and times by four going forwards. Nonetheless, it is a good start. We have got, as we all know, an increased sort of nervousness about what is happening in India and one or two of the adjacent markets. I guess particularly India at this point in time, which is slightly difficult to call on a full year basis. You put that all together, I would say, as I said earlier, to sort of come out similar to last year overall. At the margin, I would say we've come out the quarter probably a little bit stronger than two months ago we might have liked. I wouldn't say it's not so significant that we changed the wording. Let's just sort of see where we go as we get into the second quarter and beyond. Your second question, I think, was on retail and sort of market shares, low market shares in some countries. Listen, I think that the way we are approaching that is to say many of those countries we can through digital reach. Through mobile payments, we can reach more customers than we have hitherto availed ourselves of. We believe that we don't need such a large number of branches and hence we can moderate the cost base accordingly. Through a focus upon digital marketing, potentially using platforms like the Mox platform in Hong Kong, if we wanted to take that into other markets, we have now got that as a proven capability. We have actually had already in Africa for the last two years, a very, very significant drive to digital. All new customers are now signed up digitally only, and we will continue to push on that front. If there are opportunities to bulk up on scale in some of those markets, as per one of the previous questions, obviously we will look at that and look at the economics of doing that. Our sense is that actually with the ability to look at these markets more digitally, with a good brand reputation in many of these markets, that there is still an interesting future in them. We are very minded to returns, and every one of our markets obviously needs to hit and achieve our returns criteria. We're working that hard. The creation of the CPBB business unit globally is very much aligned with this and making sure we have a consistent approach across the world. Perfect. Thank you very much. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Omar Keenan of Credit Suisse. Please ask your question. Good morning. Thank you very much for taking the questions. I wanted to ask how you felt activity was so far following the first quarter. Do you think that there has been some carry through in momentum in the good activity levels in the first quarter? Thank you. Your question, sorry, was on momentum from the first quarter and how we think that will carry forwards? Yes, that's right. Especially in financial markets and wealth management. Financial markets and wealth management. Okay. Let me start on that. I think that the financial markets activity, clearly we have seen a slightly different set of products be strong this year to last year. Overall, as I said in the script, what we have done over the last period of time is to rebalance our activity, make it a little less volatility dependent. Our view is that the sort of momentum that we have seen in recent quarters, we do see continuing. The exact shape of it will vary from quarter to quarter. We are feeling good about the performance of that business unit, and I think you only need to look back now over a number of quarters to actually see that this has now been progressively building up. The first quarter of this year is just further evidence of it. Wealth management, obviously, we've had a very strong quarter, so I don't think you're going to see necessarily those percentage growth rates through the whole of this year. Nonetheless, it is good to have that start. There's no reason to believe that we won't continue to have that momentum. Sentiment will play a part in this. If the India situation were to expand to other countries and sentiment changed a lot, then obviously that could change things. With the India situation, hopefully, sort of self-balances without a major ripple effect, then I think that should be conducive to continuing progress in the wealth management space. That's great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Your final question comes from the line of Guy Stebbings of Exane BNP Paribas. Please ask your question. Hi. Morning, afternoon, Bill and Andy. I joined the call a little bit late, so hopefully I'm not repeating a question that's already been asked. Firstly, can you give a bit more color on what you're seeing in India and perhaps sort of beyond asset quality, if it's having any impact on operationally there and any sort of associated cost implications? Also, can I just check on slide 14, the macro assumptions. Am I interpreting correctly that you've improved the assumptions for India and therefore some sort of reassurance there? Is that just a timing and we need to wait for H1 for any sort of updates on macro assumptions? Then the second question was just on RWAs, sort of came in a little bit higher than consensus in Q1, but I note the guidance for the full year is broadly consistent with consensus. You obviously having good volume indicators, in Q1 and beyond. I just want to check you are happy with market expectations both this year and beyond for risk-rated assets. Then just a final point of clarification. On the new rate sensitivity disclosure you've given, are you able to give any sense on which currency that would be in the additional uplift that you think you might be able to benefit from? Thank you. Let me take a stab at the India question. I did comment that from a resilience perspective, we are seeing no signs of stress as yet. We have material case counts amongst our population, both in our service center and in the bank itself. I think consistent with what we're seeing across the country. We've kept most of our branches open. Banks are considered essential services, so we've had a disproportionate share of the cases in the branch staff, very unfortunately. We've had everybody working at home in Chennai and Bangalore for most of the last year. That has continued apace. We've not seen any signs of stress on the back of the increased case count, but we're watching it extremely carefully. We're looking also carefully at how we can rebalance loads. We have rebalanced loads between our service centers in Chennai and Bangalore, through to Kuala Lumpur, Tianjin, and Warsaw, where there are, in particular in Kuala Lumpur, there are also problems, nothing like the scale of India. Overall, looks good. The economic activity will certainly be subdued as state-by-state restrictions are reimposed, have been or are reimposed. We don't see it taking the underlying wind out of the sails of economic recovery in India. While we expect that there will be an impact, we are quite hopeful that the Indian economy will recover quickly once they're through this very difficult phase. In any case, we think we're very well provided for and reserved against the possibility of extended moratoria or consumer and small business defaults. Again, that's something that we're watching quite carefully given the very dynamic situation on the ground. On your second question, risk-weighted assets. Yes, we had good growth in the first quarter. That is quite normal. We've guided to keeping the rate of RWA growth down below the rate of asset growth. We've said that we sort of see about mid-single digit growth on the RWAs. I think consensus is there or thereabouts on that. To your question on consensus, I hope that our comments have been interpreted in that spirit. In terms of rate sensitivity, those numbers are based upon parallel shifts in the curve across all currencies. We've tried to, as best we can, do balances across all of our markets and then to express that in dollars being what we obviously report out in. Okay. Thank you very much. Good. Thanks. I think that's it for the questions, and we are out of time. Thank you all for the attention and look forward to seeing you at the half year. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes the presentation for today. Thank you all for participating. You may all disconnect.