Afternoon, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome Bill Winters, CEO of Standard Chartered, on stage with me today. I don't think he needs much introduction as this is the 10th year he's been doing the job. Bill, the bank has just passed halfway through the current three-year plan to taking the bank back towards 13% ROTE. When you reflect on this period, what have been the biggest changes that you've implemented as CEO, and what are the key challenges and opportunities that you see for the rest of the plan? Thank you for having me. It's very nice to be here. You're quite correct. I've been in the bank for 10 years. I think of it in a few buckets. We had some issues, for sure, when I arrived. That was part of the reason that I came out of banking and came out of non-banking back into banking. The first chapter was cleanup and repositioning. Thankfully, I had the view at the time that I had the hope and the view that there was a good franchise underneath a bit of trouble, some rubble. It turned out when we cleaned up the rubble and looked at the franchise, it was good. There were a couple of elements that were key. One was the really very good wealth business, but it was kind of buried inside quite a sprawling retail business. The second was a kind of a unique position as a cross-border corporate bank that was also a little bit buried underneath a lot of lending and then lending-associated problems. We went through the cleanup phase. I then tried to focus our efforts onto really those two businesses. We still had quite a large mass-market retail business, which we have also determined we really needed to focus either into a completely digital model or exit. We subsequently exited quite a few of the smaller subscale mass-market retail businesses. We've invested consistently in wealth, invested in this cross-border set of activities where, you know, you guys all know, there are very few global banks left. There's a reason. It's hard and it's expensive. We were determined to demonstrate that we could generate a good return and do that in a very cost-effective way. Things were really going very well. Through 2019, obviously, we had the COVID hiatus where we didn't stop progressing, but it was very hard to see with a dramatic drop in net interest income during that period. Obviously, that disrupted trade flows and then later disrupted supply chains. Thankfully, we came back out in 2022, 2023, 2024, now into 2025, kind of where we left off. If you drew a line through the whole thing, it's been 1% to 1.5% return on tangible equity improvement every year, like every single year from 0% to now approaching 13%. We've been very clear we think that continues. As I reflect over 10 years, what are the big changes? I'll say very simply nothing because the franchise was there before and the franchise is there now. We just focused on it. I could pick out any number of things along the way that reflect decisions that we took, most of which I'm happy with, some of which I'm not, of course. It's working out. Of course. I don't want to get ahead of myself because you're still within your current strategy cycle. Beyond 2026, where do you think the natural level of growth and royalty for the group should be? What are the biggest risks that you see to those ambitions? Is there anything that you're particularly excited by? I'm really very encouraged by our prospects for a long time. It breaks me down into pieces. Our wealth business, affluent client business, has been growing at 9% or 10% compound for over 10 years. That reflects the underlying accumulation of wealth and savings and the way that that wealth and savings is being deployed. We're the third largest wealth manager in Asia with a growing business as well in the Middle East, having set up a fully-fledged wealth hub in Dubai to complement Hong Kong, Singapore, and Jersey as a booking center. Our objective, and we're investing into that objective, is to grow at a supernormal rate. The underlying market should grow around 9%, 10%, 11%, I think, for the foreseeable future. We know that it will be volatile with market sentiment and world events. It's been extremely resilient through a lot of exogenous shocks over the last 10 years. I think that will continue for many, many years to come. We intend to grow at a rate faster than the market. We're investing into that. That one, I think, is a clear growth driver. There are clear economies of scale in that business. We have and are continuing to make the investments in technology, the AI investments, where I think we're well ahead of the pack, interestingly. It's not often I can say that in the context of AI, but I can in our wealth business is ahead of the pack. Right now, those are AI tools for sort of RM augmentation rather than models that we're putting in or apps that we're putting into our client's hands. This is that, I think, is a gift that keeps on giving. It does so with positive jaws in the parlance. The cross-border business is a little bit harder to put your finger on because you'll see the biggest pieces of that are cash management, very interest rate sensitive, and trade, which is really a facilitation business, tend to be the same buying point, and financial markets. We know that markets don't like to value financial markets business very highly. I ran financial markets businesses at my old investment bank employer for the better part of 20 years. It was always frustrating that we didn't get credit for how great that franchise was. I'll keep on trying. We did something a few years back and said, we're going to try to help the market understand our financial markets business a bit better. We split our reported income into flow and episodic. The flow is a 10% growth business. Our market share is good in our markets, but we're far from fully saturated in terms of what we can do. We've more or less doubled the size of that business in the past six years, and it's a much higher quality business. When you're asking about growth prospects from here, I see that financial markets business as one of secular growth, in part because trade is continuing to grow. You might not believe it if you read the daily press, and our position is very strong in that context. I feel very good about that. There's a second part of our financial markets business, which is the episodic. We said from the beginning that's going to be more volatile. Interestingly, it's been volatile above zero. Sometimes it's a meaningful chunk of our income, sometimes it's zero. The first half of the year, it was very strong episodically because of the market volatility and the way that clients engaged and because the deal flow was very substantial. Some of those deal flows we categorize as episodic. The third quarter is going to be a bit weaker in terms of the episodic, for sure. The fourth quarter may be strong again when I look at the market trends that play out. The episodic has tended to be about 30% of our income in FM. The flow tends to be 70% on average. Flow continues to be very good, and that's the recurring. I won't say annuity-driven because it's not annuity-driven, but it's coming directly off the transaction flows in our bank, the ordinary course hedging that our clients do. The episodic is volatile, but when I look at the progression over many years, they're both growing, and they're both growing very nicely. There's a bit of volatility in the episodic, not so much volatility in the flow. Both feel good to me, even though we had a bit of bifurcation so far in Q3. When I look at those two growth drivers, wealth and financial markets, it's looking very good, I would say, in terms of long-term growth. Sometimes neglected in looking at our results is banking, so capital markets and associated transactions. Banking is going very well. Despite the market volatility, the investment hesitancy in many of our markets in Asia in particular, we've had a good strong first half of the year in banking, and we've had a good third quarter year to date or quarter to date in banking. This is at the core of our client franchise. What's been interesting and very well forecast by us and some of you is that the banking business is also increasingly directly related to our cross-border capabilities, where we are somewhat unique. Of course, we're not the only global bank, but we're the only global bank with our footprint. That's a huge, huge competitive advantage in where we play. If we go to play in JP Morgan's piece, we don't have the same competitive advantage. We don't play in JP Morgan's piece, and they don't play in ours, for the most part. In our piece, we're kind of best in class, and that's continuing to grow. I look at the drivers of growth. They're all pretty good. We've made big investments in our underlying infrastructure so we can do this. The most recent kind of program that we call that is Fit for Growth, but this is part of a long-term program of foundation resetting and streamlining and automation digitization. As that is done, and we're substantially progressed in that evolution, that means expenses are going slower than income. Mathematically, you know what it means when you have income growing faster than expenses for a sustained period of time while staying within your risk boundaries. Loan impairments have been low. I think they'll continue to be low. That would be our expectation and hope, perhaps not as low as they have been, but low. That means we've got a long way to go. We say approaching 13 at some point. We'll update our guidance. We'll give some clues, no doubt, in February. We've got a capital markets day next year in May. We'll talk about these things then and give some more color. The headlines will certainly be we've got quite a bit to run having blown through, I hope, approaching 13. Fantastic. You've taken on many of my questions in one go. You can ask them again and see if you get the same answer. I just wanted to pick up on your comments on Q3 episodic income. I think I was just a little bit surprised when you said it was probably a little bit lower because southbound flows remain very strong. From what I can see, volatility is also strong. Was it just because Q2 was such a high comparator? No, no. I mean, our episodic income is really driven by two things. It tends to be driven by two things. The first is sharp moves in the market. Evidently, Q3 to date has been a lot less volatile than earlier periods. You see that in actual realized volatility, in VIX, and in other volatility indicators. We did not have the same big market movements that drove unusual flows from our clients. We're not a big prop shop, so it's not a matter of capturing the big prop trade. Our clients are definitely more active when they're going through a period of uncertainty. The second is, as we know, we're in the middle of Q3, where the uncertainty related to where tariffs come out and where the economic activity comes out is at a peak. I'd say we're coming off the peak now. There's more clarity how these things are likely to find their way to an end state. Our clients deferred investments during that period. In particular, they deferred some of the decisions. We're talking about one quarter in a year where the first half was outstanding. I think the outlook is very good. The Q3 episodic was relatively low. I'm really not concerned about it at all. It gives the opportunities in sessions like this to explain some of these things. I think our clients deferred a lot of their decisions. Interestingly, and we reflect on this quite a bit, we had a relatively low episodic or are having a relatively low episodic quarter with a very strong banking quarter. The banking decisions, financing decisions, and M&A and cross-border investments tend to have a three to six-month lead time. When we look at what drives our episodic income, it tends to have a much shorter lead time. Perhaps not surprising that we're seeing sort of real-time decreases in activity in areas where the lead time to decisions, where the uncertainty is high and lead time to decisions is short. I'm not worried about it at all. It is worth noting. OK. You've mentioned tariffs. I guess more broadly, are you seeing clients really starting to get ready for taking on those investment decisions that they have deferred in the past or still a bit of wait and see? There's a bit of wait and see. Money is moving. I think the outlines of where tariffs end up are clear at this point. As you know, it's largely a relative game, not an absolute. The fact that Malaysia may be zeroing in on 15% really only matters relative to the people that they're competing with. Are they much higher or lower? Vietnam's a little bit of an outlier on the high side. I think you're beginning to see an expectation that Vietnam will be relatively less attractive as an export destination with the U.S. market in mind. That's not entirely a bad thing because Vietnam is pretty close to capacity already in terms of their ability to absorb. The big shift in expectations at the moment, and still quite uncertain, is India. India had been a big beneficiary of China Plus One and was seen as a safe haven because India was expected to be at the low end of that infamous lead table. At the moment, they're at the high end of the infamous lead table. Does anybody think we're going to settle at 50% tariffs in India? No, we don't. There's enough uncertainty that people are taking a bit of a breath before they complete their investments there. India has some other big advantages. One is it's relatively underpenetrated with export-led investment. The track record that India is building up, first with some of the green tech and clean tech companies, second with EVs, all Chinese, and then third with electronics and semiconductors, so Chinese, Koreans, and of course, Foxconn and Apple, they've built a good foundation. Now there's a tariff question. Can you make the logistics work? Can you get the labor? Those issues are being resolved. I'm quite optimistic about India. I would say there is some hesitancy in terms of incremental investment given the tariffs at 50%. Makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Should we talk more about wealth? Clearly, it's one of the most exciting areas in your business. How much of the growth that you think you've seen in the last few quarters is sustainable? You've been growing at high teens, 20% for a few quarters now. What do you see as your key differentiator in that specific market? I think we have several key differentiators. First is that we've been in this business forever. I mean, we're not always associated outside of the markets where we operate as a wealth brand. In India, in Singapore, and Hong Kong, we've always been identified as a wealth brand. The fact that we're there and have been very consistent, we've been growing consistently in those high single, low double digits well before I joined Standard Chartered. Obviously, we've continued with that. The brand and the presence are good and is recognized. We're not pushing water or a pill on that. Second is we've invested heavily, although there's more that we can do, in technology, so customer service. We all look at Net Promoter Scores in our nine largest markets, which includes all of our wealth markets, of course. We're number one in eight of them, and we're number two or three in the ninth. That's not just one year. This has been going for five years. How do you get to be number one Net Promoter Score? You need to have a good, solid, reputable brand. You need to have really good customer service. Obviously, you have to have good products. Thankfully, we've got all those. Our clients are not only telling us, but they're telling the independent NPS compilers, which also means that they're telling their friends. The word-of-mouth referrals are very good. Customer service is our second differentiator. It sounds very cliché. I can tell you, it had nothing to do with me, of course. When I arrived in the bank, we were bottom decile in Net Promoter Score in seven of our top nine markets. We invested. We do our money to improve our customer service. It worked. Now we're really good at customer service. Number three, we're open architecture. That also sounds cliché because if we had our own asset management business and our own insurance business, I'd be telling you how valuable it is to have your own asset management business and insurance business. I'm not. We're open architecture. The game that we play and the reason that we can hire RMs from any place at any time at market wages is that they feel they have the best chance of delivering the best product to their clients at any point in time. We have hired a lot of RMs, and we've not paid up at all. We're paying fairly. Right? They want to come work at Standard Chartered because it is a good platform, good customer service, consistent, clear commitment, and they do not have to sell the in-house garbage. Sometimes that garbage is great. Oftentimes, it is not. There is no pressure, right? You sell, you do not sell. You advise your clients, you engage with them, and you deliver what the client wants and needs. We have got it on the shelves someplace. Fifth, and this is related to the open architecture, we are a highly desirable distributor for the world's best asset managers and, I will say, the world's best insurers. We have a very special partnership with Prudential, as you know, which is semi-exclusive across many of our markets, rarely entirely exclusive. It is just a great partnership that has been going for 25 years. I think you will hear the same from Prudential, that they think it is a highly effective partnership. In the new areas of private credit, the full range of alts or other new products as they come about, the originators, the manufacturers want to distribute through us, one, because we are pretty good, two, because we are good at partnerships, and three, because we are not competing with the in-house product. Those are the five advantages. They are all very enduring. That's really very many of them. Can you comment on the front-end flows? Southbound flows remain very strong. Is there anything you could comment on in terms of new-to-bank customers, but maybe also in terms of behavior? At the half-year, you mentioned that some customers were still a little bit wait and see, waiting for the uncertainty to dissipate. Have you seen a change in that behavior? We see very encouraging trends. The client numbers, the net new money, and net sales continue strong. We had a surge in net new money in the first half of the year. An unusually large share of that went into deposits. Very encouraged to see, as we progress through the third quarter, that exactly as we said, when Diego and I stood up and went through our half-year earnings, we expect this money to find its way into wealth products as they always have in the past. That's happening. It's just a very healthy business. In terms of client composition, clearly, we've had a good run with both clients and net new money. That is translating through to net sales, net new sales. I think that's an enduring trend. The bulk of the, but not all of the new clients are coming from our global Chinese population and global Indian population. Those are the two leaders. That's three of the world's 8 billion people. A large proportion of the world's wealth and growth in wealth is coming from those markets. That continues to be a big chunk of our business. Maybe even more important than the ethnic or national origin of the clients is the fact that they are international banking clients. We almost always, not always, almost always start with a local bank account, a local wealth management account. A Chinese client of ours will open an account in Shenzhen. After a period of time, say, we can't market into China for offshore business. They'll say, do you have a bank in Hong Kong? You think I might get a referral. Of course, we're well set up to accommodate that. Or Singapore or Dubai, increasingly, interestingly. The requirements of a multinational wealthy client are quite different than either a local wealth client or an offshore wealth client. They want both, and they want those things connected. We knew that. That's been the bulk of the growth. There have been two subsets, with Indian and Chinese, yes, but also multi-market. Those are the investments that we've made to channel that. We're still seeing good net new money flows from other ASEAN markets, other South Asian markets, and increasingly in the Middle East. As you know, a big chunk of the Middle East is people from South Asia, a lot of the wealth. There's also local wealth, which we're beginning to tap into more, Emiratis in the UAE, Qataris in Qatar, that we're beginning to tap into as well. Overall, it just feels very healthy. Are you in any way concerned by China macro looking a little bit weaker than expected in the second half so far? I think thematically, one of the themes that is certainly reading Chinese press is consumption downgrade, which is maybe a little bit not so in line with a rising middle-class picture that some might expect. Is that something that concerns you at all? At a level, up to a point. Our business has evidenced no correlation between GDP growth and levels of activity. In fact, it's probably been inverse so far. It's been inverse because as China is under economic pressure, they tend to accelerate the opening up of their capital markets faster. They have internationalized the R&D faster. Given that where we make money is certainly in offshore China, and when we say offshore China, we're disproportionately meaning Hong Kong. It's now beyond Hong Kong as well. We are the only bank that has, say, an onshore license for SIPS, the China Interbank Payment System, and an offshore license, so our Hong Kong bank and our Chinese bank respectively. We are, I think, by some measure, the leading interbank and client operator in all R&D-related transactions, whether it's payments or hedging, associated derivatives. We have a fully integrated Hong Kong and China team. A meaningful chunk of the outperformance that we've generated in financial markets has come from China or R&D dealing, rather. We have Mandarin speakers spread around the globe to serve the Chinese diaspora or Chinese expatriates who are operating in markets across South Asia, ASEAN, Africa, et cetera, none of which has anything to do with China GDP growth. If anything, it's been the other way around. Now, is a weak China economically a good thing for us? No. We do have an onshore business, which has grown closer to GDP than the 30% that we're growing offshore. GDP is still 5%. It's not driving our top line. We have little bits and pieces of local credit exposures and taking consumer loans and SME loans off of some of the online lending platforms, which are showing that consumer sentiment and consumer spending is reflecting in slightly higher delinquencies. Not noticeable, I don't think, in terms of bottom line return for Standard Chartered. It's obviously something, if you're a China watcher, you're seeing that stress. That stress is not a welcome. It's not a good thing. The property market continues to be very weak. Thankfully, we have no meaningful residual exposure there. It was small to begin with. That which we had, we've provided for very fully. Likewise, Hong Kong, just to be clear. We see it. We feel it. We would like the economy to be robust. I'll make the bet that the Chinese economy has some reasonably good underlying foundations. The financial system is still healthy. The problems have been in the smaller regional banks and the non-bank financial markets. The new economy sectors are extremely competitive, maybe too competitive because they're finding themselves shut out of export markets to some extent. I think China is going through a really big transition. I think they're pretty well positioned to do that in a way that doesn't disrupt the underlying business. In the meantime, tremendous wealth continues to be accumulated in China. When you look at the application of AI into industrial processes and into consumer processes in China, it's extremely impressive. It obviously feels somewhat threatening to the rest of the world as well. Along with that, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of unicorns being created every year. That is wealth that will eventually find its way into Standard Chartered. I've just got one more question on revenue. What do you see the natural balance of NII and fee income, which we've talked about a lot in the last 25 minutes? How do you expect lower rates to impact your income profile? If I look at Bloomberg screens, it seems to be suggesting quite a lot of U.S. rate cuts next year. We have been very transparent about our, as I'm sure everybody who comes in here has been, about our sensitivity to lower rates. I'm certainly happy that we've put on a substantial structural hedge over the past four or five years. That doesn't mean it's market timed perfectly, but directionally, it's addressing exactly your concern. A higher proportion of our position in U.S. dollars is hedged, a lower proportion in some of the emerging markets currencies that are harder to put hedges on that don't introduce accounting volatility. We're not 100% hedged, right, 75% or so. That obviously is a big buffer. We've gone from, I think when I joined the bank, we were probably 35% of our income was non-NIIs, 65% NII. We're now 50/50 or slightly over 50%. The non-NII part is growing faster by design. The NII part is growing slower, not by design. That's just the way it is. If we fast forward another five or so years, that trend will continue, and not just because of lower interest rates, but because of the nature of our business. Our non-NII fee income is growing faster than our balance sheet is growing, and that is somewhat by design. We're extremely return-focused as a bank. It showed up in the numbers, and this is approaching 13% and then progressing beyond that. It happened because we have shifted the nature of our business to not putting on assets that aren't generating a cost of capital plus return. We're certainly not going to move away from that, which in this market, where there are many, many non-bank alternatives to bank balance sheets for some things, I think the proportion of our income coming from non-NII will continue to increase. I think I've covered everything on revenues. Just quickly touching on cost, we've talked about it already a little bit. Your transformation program, Fit for Growth, ends in 2026. You've been very clear that that's not the end point. How do you think about managing the cost base of the bank beyond that? I think when I joined the bank, our expenses were $10.5 billion. Seven years later, they were $10.5 billion. We made huge investments in our business. We've since grown income quite a bit, and expenses have come up as well, consistently with positive jobs. We've done that because the hygiene, the cost-related hygiene in the bank, is very consistent. I think we got through the low-hanging fruit quickly. We invested heavily in the transformation layer. Fit for Growth is really an acceleration of a number of those transformation programs. Over the course of this year and next, we will have completed a migration of our entire HR and payroll infrastructure from Oracle to SAP, cloud-based, cloud-native. SAP gives us awards, if you can imagine, for being super creative and ahead of the curve. This year, we'll complete the migration of our whole general ledger and finance infrastructure also into cloud-native infrastructure. These are seven-year programs. The core banking system in Hong Kong will be the last of the big markets that we need to migrate. We've migrated 55 already without incident. We will complete Hong Kong without incident in the early part of next year. The point is that these are major foundational programs that put us in a position to be much more efficient down the road. We don't have to spend that money again. There will be new things that we have to spend on. We've completely reconfigured our data centers for 70% of the bank, the eastern two-thirds. We will do the same thing in the west over the next couple of years. We have ongoing investments in cybersecurity. We have ongoing investments in data and AI. It never goes to zero. We've had a headwind in terms of completing our foundational spend, which over the next year or two becomes a bit of a tailwind. The hygiene will never go away. Part of Fit for Growth is thinking about how we use some of the new tools, most specifically AI tools, to identify pockets of inefficiency in the infrastructure. I'll call it hygiene as opposed to fundamental transformation. The hygiene should allow us to consistently produce these positive jobs that we've done pretty consistently for the past decade. Fantastic. To bring it all together, let's talk about capital. You've already delivered $6.5 billion of your greater than $8 billion capital distribution guidance. How are you thinking about distributions going forward and the balance between capital for growth, dividends, and buybacks? We've had a pretty complete program of investments. Over my 10 years, we've gone from having sort of discretionary investment of $600 million or so to something that's closer to $2 billion of cash every year. I wouldn't say that we're at capacity. If we gave the team another $200 million, could they spend it usefully? Yes. You get diminishing returns when you push things too hard. We have never felt that we were compromising our investment in our business in order to maximize distributions. We've invested what we need to invest in the business. That's always the first priority. That continues to be the case. Obviously, the bulk of our capital returns have been through buybacks. We've had a dividend that's been increasing. As we approach and pass through book value, of course, we'll reconsider the balance of buybacks versus dividends. That's a decision that we'll take in February as we get to announcing the year-end results. That's on the table, of course. We're always looking on the margin at the organic opportunities for us to invest versus capital returns. That will also be a function of how we're feeling about the business at a point. We've never short on the in-business investment. We won't go any farther. What about the out-of-business investment? Touching on M&A, which is obviously a big thing. Yeah, I mean, we've done virtually nothing that was completely inorganic, although I would note that we've made very substantial investments frequently with partners into, in particular, ventures. It's not all in ventures. Some of it is inside the retail business or inside the WRB or inside CIB. To me, that's a form of M&A, but just investing a book rather than paying a premium. When Citibank was selling their Asian wealth businesses, we bid on a few of them. We bid in a way that we thought would generate superior returns to our buyback. Surprise, surprise, we didn't win because that hurdle was quite high when your stock was trading at 60% a book. If the Citibank pool came up again today, would we bid? Yeah. We would be as disciplined today as we were five years ago or so, or four years ago when that came up. The good thing is, when I look at our core strategy, which is cross-border and affluent, just to take those one hyphenated word and two words otherwise, we don't need to do anything inorganic to continue to grow at supernormal rates for a long time. If something came up that gave us a chance to turbocharge that, that was completely consistent with our financial discipline, yeah, we would look at that. It's not in our plan. You operate in so many markets with so many exciting opportunities. If you were to go for an M&A acquisition, where would you focus on? I mean, there are a few areas where scale is your friend and where we think we could leverage the scale that we've got. Security services is one. We're a or the leading sub-custodian in a number of the markets across Asia, Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Our clients are the global custodians. I've had frequently a GIC or an Allianz will direct their global custodian to use us for sub-custody in Botswana or in Korea. Frequently, the client is BNY or State Street or JP Morgan or usually those three. That's fine. If there's a way for us to scale up by books of business where we already have the infrastructure in place in a way that meets our financial returns, we would look at that. We would look at pools of wealth business. If there were pools of clients that we could acquire, we've done little deals. Some North American banks exited their small wealth businesses. It tends to have a bit of a white labeling feel to it. We agreed to take referrals from the home base back into our franchise. That's fine. These are small things. If one that would be noticeable to you came up, we would look at that, always with a very rigorous financial discipline. Makes sense. Before I open the floor for questions, I will just take the opportunity to ask you about digital assets. Standard Chartered has a number of investments and initiatives in this space. Can you talk about your strategy here and how big an opportunity you think it is? Do you see digital assets and stablecoins of the likes as a potential source of disintermediation? Yeah. Our approach to digital assets, which probably goes back seven years before they were called digital assets or stablecoins, at least not broadly, we were the partner for Facebook when they had its subsequently aborted attempt to set up what today might be called a stablecoin-based payment system. We really came to understand the power of blockchain technology in settlements. I and colleagues reached a very clear view at that time that eventually, everything that we do will be settled on blockchains. It will start with securities, move to FX and payments, and eventually, we'll get into real assets. We just started experimenting with things. The only place that blockchain technology was actually being used seven years ago was cryptocurrencies. That's still 99.9% of the transactions that get executed using blockchain technology, obviously led by Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, XRP. We took a stake in Ripple around that time, thinking that XRP, which is the Ripple cryptocurrency, would be an interesting medium of exchange. Ripple's had a great run in this crypto spring because they're seen as having payment-type technology using XRP or other things that could be very useful. We've developed a great partnership with a few of the other highly compliant digital asset companies, Circle, for example, who has actually invested in our digital asset payment platform called Zodia Markets. What's our strategy? It's offense and defense. The offense is to be at the cutting edge of banks, understanding how this technology can be used, incorporating that into our payment and settlement mechanisms so that we can offer our clients a differentiated and highly efficient form of settlement that they otherwise would have to go outside of the banking sector to get. These are already our clients. They already have all of their pipes connected to us. All of their pipes are connected to our portal. Our portal will connect them to all the pipes that might matter outside. We are way ahead of the pack in that because we've been investing four years. That's offense. We take market share in our core businesses, which off the back of that comes all the FX trading and everything else. We take market share by offering our clients a better solution earlier than our competition can. We're very well positioned for that. There's also defense. It's not just banks that are thinking about this. Circle has set up a Circle, our friend, who's invested in our payment platform, is also setting up. We're a partner in the Circle Payment Network. This is an alternative to Swift. It's a non-fiat currency payment platform. It doesn't exist yet, but it will soon enough. Circle, as you know, is the issuer of USDC, the second largest stablecoin and the largest compliant stablecoin, fully compliant. They're not alone. Many, many payment platforms will try to compete with the existing rails. If we're not there at the heart of that process, we could be disintermediated. There's offense, which is take market share, and there's defense, which is protect the existing position. We're very well positioned in both. As I say to my colleagues every day, being a thought and action leader at the early stage of an evolution where there's no money to be made, because nobody's making any money today, you're not seeing it on our bottom line. That's worth nothing if you don't turn that into a profitable business stream down the road. We're completely focused on monetizing the lead that we've got right now, and I'm quite confident we can do that. Fantastic. We've just got a few minutes left for a quick question from the audience. If anybody's got a question for Bill, that lady over there. Thank you. A quick question. Has your new Chief Risk Officer started, and if so, has he identified anything to change or improve? In terms of asset quality, we could see a bit of pressure on the grade 12 credit. Any specific concern on your side, please? Our new CFO, I think two years ago, he started. He's not so new. Sorry? Oh, CRO. Sorry, sorry, sorry. He's still pending approval. Jason, who is Sadia Rick, is our current Chief Risk Officer. She's leaving. She had a personal issue. She'll continue to work for those. She had to move to Boston. You can't do that job from Boston. She can be in our U.S. Risk Committee, which is our de facto U.S. management team. We're keeping our hooks in Sadia. She's fantastic. Jason has been in the bank for five years. He was the Deputy Chief Risk Officer. He's very familiar with the bank. I expect no change in terms of that transition and certainly no identification of problems. I'll say we're clean as a whistle, which is not to say we don't have issues that we face all the time. There's no issue at all on the risk side. The CG12, which did increase in the second quarter, had no particular consequence for the overall quality of our credit book. You notice that wasn't associated with a material increase in ECL or other provisions. That had to do with the reclassification of some certain and particular sovereign exposures relating to shifts in ratings. There are a lot of things to worry about with Standard Chartered at the moment. For the time being, risk and asset quality is not one of them. That's great. Thank you so much, Bill, for joining me this afternoon. I think I'll just draw the session to a close now. Thank you very much. I look forward to seeing you very soon. Thanks for having me. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us after lunch session. We had time to get lunch. Marguerite, I'm very pleased to welcome you to our conference. I think this is your first time meeting the investors' community as the new CEO of ABN AMRO. I mean, your attendance is highly appreciated. ABN is seen among the remaining few profitability turnaround stories, and your appointment is seen as a catalyst to drive this change. The shares performed well this year, up 70% year to date. Our portfolio sector, 30%. Clearly, the market is on board. They will be positioning ahead of your CMD on 25th of November. We keep that in mind in our interaction, of course. Before we start talking about your strategic vision and your stability, I want to start with the discussion about the budget day, which was, I think, this week, and then the Dutch elections to see what's happening, if there are any highlights in this budget and what you expect that will impact banks in terms of bank taxes or any policies. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for having me. I hope indeed that you had time to have lunch because I know these afternoons can be really long. To your question on the budget in the Netherlands and the political landscape, I was in The Hague yesterday because it was an important day. It's called Prinsesdag Day. It's a day when not only do you have the king's speech, but you also have the presentation of the budget. This year, of course, a lot of questions in the budget are left unanswered because, as you're well aware, we have elections on October 29. Many of the, I think, most important budget choices will be made after the elections. Once the coalition is formed, it will probably be a coalition. To your point, no, there was no change in the banking tax in the budget memorandum that was shared yesterday. I think more to be found after the election and the coalition is formed. Very good. You're French. I am. You worked at BNP. You came with fresh eyes into ABN AMRO a few months ago. Your first time you came in and you met the team, what really stood out most to you on ABN AMRO when you started? I was privileged in being able to meet many colleagues over the past few months, but also clients and, of course, investors as well. If I were to summarize what I think are the assets of ABN AMRO, I would say first that we have strong roots and very great brands. I put them as brands because we have ABN AMRO, but we have Neuflize OBC, we have Bethmann Bank in Germany, but now more recently HAL, Neuflize OBC in France, just to name them. Very good brands. That's number one. Number two, we have great market shares, of course, in the Netherlands, which is our home country, in retail, in wealth, and in corporate. In wealth and corporate, we also have, I think, a very interesting Northwestern European geographic footprint that works well for us. Very good market shares. I would also say that we have good market shares in attractive segments of the market. If I take retail, for instance, we have very good market shares in the mass affluent segment that is also a natural feeder to our wealth business. Good brands, good market shares, very committed teams. I also feel a good energy level in the bank over the past few months. I enjoy that a lot. I think there is also room for upside, room for improvement. That makes for a good mix. Very good. That’s a conclusion. How do you plan to leverage the bank’s strengths to drive that meaningful change you see? Going forward, we will be leveraging, as I said, on our strong assets. We envision to build our strategic plan on what are our strengths and on fixing, improving what needs to be fixed and improved. We can already name right-sizing our cost base as one of them. Our cost income is higher than our peers. I would say steering better on our capital is a second one. Of course, looking for what I call profitable growth. I do not envision growth without profitability. It doesn't happen in one day. It takes discipline. It takes focus and drive. These are clearly three, I would say, three key topics we will probably be building upon for Capital Market Day. Probably it's too much. We will build upon and elaborate on Capital Market Day in 10 weeks. Yes, we will come back to these few pillars you just mentioned. Conceptually, I mean, ABN AMRO has been delivering returns that are subpar versus the average industry. Where do you see the ROE, not in numbers, but basically positions for the versus the sector? I mean, with the works you'll be doing and announcing, is there an engine to be able to be up there with the profitability of the sector? I think in going back to these three pillars, and I'm going to give you some illustrations of what we've been doing already since April because, yes, we are working on a strategy plan, but we're not standing still. Just that, I think, gives you some insights on how we want to work going forward. First, on cost, we've been very clear that improving our profitability means working on our ROE. That means working on all the parts of the components of the ratio, not only the equity part, but also our revenues and our cost base. This being said, with respect to our cost base, we have been very clear on our cost guidance this year between $5.3 and $5.4 billion. We're steering on that, and we are confident we will reach this cost target. We started by implementing a few things. For instance, starting in April, a hiring freeze that we implemented in the bank. You've seen some of its impact at Q2, but that was, of course, moderate given the fact that it had only been recently implemented in April. You'll see more of that and more significant impact in Q3. Steering on cost is a big one. The way we look at our capital, if you look at the past quarters, we have already been steering on our capital. We have reached an inflection point on our RWAs, and we have been able to improve our risk-related assets by $4 to $5 billion in the past quarters, just actively steering on capital. For instance, doing basic stuff like improving the way we source our collateral or getting external rating for corporate clients when we didn't have sometimes some and some. These are just basic uplifts that we are getting. I strongly believe in this form of discipline to work on the capital and the cost. Also, what we're doing right now is having a thorough review of all of our activities just to make sure that we look at everything with, I would say, a neutral eye, making sure that we are in activities where we are relevant and where we can be profitable. That leads us to some choices. If I were to take an illustration of a choice we recently made in asset-based finance, we took the decision to stop this activity in Germany, stop this activity in the UK and France because we didn't think we were relevant there. Where we're not, we shut it down so that we can actually redeploy the capital more meaningfully, just to give you an illustration of how we think about things. That's a very good overview. If I may, we'll probably spend a bit more time on all of these components. On the cost side, which is a key focus, and I think it's high on your priority as well, where do you see the areas where, and maybe we can go by divisions if you want, where you can see some upside there? Talking about, and something we already discussed in the past in earnings calls, about FTEs, internalization of consultants, IT systems. Yeah. Of course, we will be going into details at the Capital Market Day and certainly dividend by division. I can give you another illustration on how we steer on that. I will take an example coming from our IT. For a variety of reasons, inherited from our history, when ABN AMRO was a more complex bank than it is today, we have still a fairly fragmented IT landscape. We had more than 3,000 applications running. This was also partly inherited from the merger between ABN AMRO and Fortis Netherlands at the time. We actively steer on that because it enables us not only to improve our cost, but also free up resources to invest. It also makes us more, I mean, we can go faster. We are more efficient when we do that. We have a program in our bank that we call our IT value case, where we decommission very systematically all the applications that are not strictly necessary to free up capacity from when we keep the lights on and allocate it to more, I would say, innovative venues. For instance, that's what we've done recently. Are you familiar with Tiki? Yes. Cool. Application. I'm not sure. I mean, for Dutch people, OK. Anybody who has ever been in the Netherlands should be familiar with Tiki. When you're not Dutch, it's less maybe well known. Tiki is a peer-to-peer application that was invented by ABN AMRO a few years ago. It is now a word in the dictionary, really. I mean, when everyone is using it, out of 18 million Dutch people, you have 10 million Tiki users. I'm going there because ABN AMRO is actually a very innovative bank. The Tiki team has recently, in less than a year, put together Boot, which is the new bank we've just launched a few weeks ago, dedicated to teenagers and their parents. The Tiki team has been able to develop that in less than a year. To my point on why do we steer so much on our IT as well, if you have a more simplified IT landscape, you are much faster, more cost-efficient, and more time to market. We've been able to create Boot in less than a year, thanks also to these efforts that are being done in improving our IT landscape. Just an illustration. I'm referring to things that are public because, of course, we will say much more about that at our Capital Market Day. It's just to give you a bit of a sense on how we think about this. I'm aware. Thank you very much for doing the exercise because it's so close, the CMD, and you want to keep not spoiling most of it. I appreciate you sharing as much as possible with us today. Hands ahead of our own. They'll just make sure that I don't spoil anything. It's just, you know. It's a very important event for you. We don't want to. I mean, staying on cost, clearly, the focus is on taking out costs, given your cost income level and so on. How do you see in your thinking on the investment side? If you look at, for example, the wealth management or others, are you allocating as well the investments in your thinking of the future of Standard Chartered? Yes, of course. Just to give you, you mentioned wealth. This is a business we like a lot. This is a business where we have a leadership position in the Netherlands, where we also operate, as I mentioned, in Germany, in France, and Belgium. The way we look at it, provided we find relevant opportunities, I'll give the example of the recent acquisition that the bank was able to complete with HAL. We closed the deal at Q2. This is a business where we can grow both organically and, if it happens, inorganically. What we did with HAL, with this acquisition, we actually were able to consolidate now a strong number three position in wealth in the German market, which we like a lot, and at a very good, I would say, return on invested capital. Our strategic thinking will be primarily focused on organic growth. If there are things that are relevant for our bank with a good strategic fit in geographies we know, in businesses we know, I don't believe in doing things we are not good at. Focusing on the things we do well, if there is a good strategic fit, if there are revenue synergies, if there are cost synergies, these are opportunities we may be looking at in due course, always with discipline. Thank you. Still on the cost, you've announced, I mean, or you haven't announced, actually, it was in the press, but I think you confirmed the restructuring plan on the risk functions. I understand it's not significant. No, but it's good you mentioned it because I think it's a good illustration of our mindset and the way we do things. Yes, we announced that we are reorganizing our risk function. We are simplifying our risk function. What are we actually doing? Several things. First, we reviewed our risk controls throughout the bank just to make sure that our controls were focused on the risks that mattered and were well designed. Sometimes it's a bit like in your house, when you don't pay attention, you keep piling things up. Sometimes your cupboards are full. It's always good to have a little review of is everything absolutely necessary. That was one. Something else we wanted to do is also make sure there were no duplications between what we have in the first line of defense in the business and the second line of defense. Sometimes we were doing a bit, you know, we were duplicating controls. With that in mind, you're able to simplify your risk organization. Not only do you bring, you know, do you have an impact on your cost, but you're also more efficient. You focus on what matters. At the same time, it's not only about less people, but it is also about bringing more seniority in the game. We are also recruiting people at a more senior level, including the management team of risk, Sehanaf Yorabanti. We do that because what we want with risk is for risk to be a strong countervailing power in the bank on the risks that matter and play that role. I take this example because this is really not just about our costs or everything, but this is about simplifying the bank and being more efficient. Yeah. Thank you, very clearly. The other area you mentioned is optimizing the capital position and the capital efficiency. This is a project you've engaged in already for a few years. As of Q1, Q2, you kind of completed that project. Maybe you can describe to us where you are in terms of this data quality and model updates and review where you are there. What does the future have in store in terms of, I think you already mentioned more use of SRT securitization to improve the profitability. I don't know how much you can say on that already. OK. Yes, as you mentioned, in Q1, we successfully transitioned to Basel floor. We also completed the simplification of our model landscape, i.e., moving our non-return portfolios to SA. That was successfully completed. It means now that we have, in that respect, something that's even more predictable and reliable. As I mentioned, and I think you've seen it also in our figures, we have indeed reached this inflection point, RWA. We do have this active steering in mind. You mentioned what we've done in terms of improving our data quality. I mentioned how we source our collateral, for instance. We are very focused on that. There will be more to come, also probably more widespread over time. For instance, that's the case for the SME support factor that is a positive as well yet to come. More of that, more of this steering on our RWA, and also this strong view on how we allocate our capital, especially in our corporate bank, which among our three divisions is the one that needs to be the most mindful about its profitability. OK. Thank you. On allocation capital, I wasn't going there, but you mentioned on the corporates. If you have tomorrow, I mean, to allocating capital, what's the area you think it's, it's this division that you would probably see decent returns in a decent time timeframe. Okay, so. I know we are going to. Of course. We will have more on that at our capital market day, because at the end of the day, this is what a capital market day is all about. This is about how you allocate your capital within your business, but also what is the return on capital, how you think about inorganic research, organic growth, and so on. This will be shared at the capital market day. This being said, and this is why I mentioned that I do believe we expect from each of our business lines profitable growth, i.e., when growth is not profitable, we don't think this is a priority for that business. This is a key metric of the way we allocate capital. In our corporate bank, we have a very profitable business with clearing where we have a top three position in the world, actually. We also have areas of improvement, and this is what we're going to be sharing. Okay. No, thank you. Talk about capital return. You've announced a $250 million share buyback in Q2. Market was expecting a bit more, although you beat on capital on CET1 ratio. Maybe you can shed a light on what was your, I mean, what's your thinking? Was it because you want to keep most of the announcements and more kind of over, I mean, holistic view on capital return with the CMD, or are there some other constraints we should be aware of? That came as a surprise, right? A few things that, because I do realize that, the $250 million share buyback we did at Q2 appeared, say, modest, in light of our strong balance sheet position with a CET1 ratio of 14.8%. Why did we do that and what to be kept in mind? First, keep in mind that this $250 million share buyback is a delayed share buyback related to 2024. If you remember correctly, at the time, in 2024, the bank had shared that it wanted to have fully transitioned to Basel IV in order to better assess its capital position and that the share buyback related to 2024 would be announced at Q2 2025. That's what we did at Q2 2025. This is a delayed share buyback. As we also shared at Q2, we will assess at Q4 2025 our capital position and potential share buybacks related to 2025. That's one. Yeah. Okay. If you can follow me between the, that's cool. So that's one. The second point to also bear in mind is that, you know, of course you're right, going into, you know, a capital market day, wanting to do, you know, a full review of our situation. We wanted to keep some optionality. Next, we also had, you know, a prudent view on, you know, the macroeconomic circumstances. We are going through volatile times. This was, I think, only fair. We wanted to, you know, take into account the full impact of the HAL acquisition that we had closed at Q2. That was another one. Last but not least, and we were very transparent on that, we also shared, actually, in the draft decision we got from the ECB, the fact that our Pillar II requirements would be increased by 35 bps, primarily on the back of interest-only mortgages, which is a very Dutch product. Basically, given this increase, we wanted also to make this one public. These were all the factors we took into consideration when we decided on this €250 million share buyback. Of course, we will be sharing our capital framework during our capital market day in November, on November 25th. We will carry on, based on our assessment of our position at Q4 2025, potential for share buyback in 2025. To understand better the sequencing, you have the CMD where you will set your dividend policy, whatever payout is, and then distribution on top. Currently, your policy is a 50% payout, and then every year you assess the capital position, and then you announce distribution and buyback and so on. Given that you'll announce a policy in November, and then you will have the Q4 results in February, we'll end up in the same situation. We'll have the payout, and then we'll have to wait for the Q4 in February to get the additional distribution. Is that understanding? You will have the capital framework on November 25th, basically. That will be for the duration of our strategic plan. That will give visibility on how we look at our capital allocation. We will assess, as we mentioned actually last quarter already, our situation for potential additional share buybacks at Q4. At Q4. On the capital level, we've seen that your target is, current one is 13.5% CET1. Clearly, there's been a race towards 13% targets in the industry. Now we see some other banks doing the long-term, short-term kind of targets, short-term 13%, long-term back to 12%. A bank like yours, which is actually quite derisked, and I'm sure you'll do a good job making it more efficient and profitable, 13.5% is a level that is actually very comfortable. You already know I'm not going to answer this question, right? I mean. Nice try. Yes, okay. I like it. Clearly you are in a comfortable position and there's upside eventually. Yeah. Okay. Poker face. Let's keep trying. Moving to another topic we didn't discuss yet is the net interest income, which is, for you, a big part of the revenue. We discussed a bit the wealth through the fees, through the wealth, sorry. On the net interest income, this is an area where, when you talk about, you know, margins, but then we have the lending growth component. Maybe you can give us a bit of an outlook of what you see in terms of on the ground of recovery in the mortgage growth and lending, corporate size as well, perhaps. You can have this, I don't know, shed some light on maybe your hedging or other components of the NII. Yeah, of course, NII is an essential component of our revenues. We have given guidance for NII in 2025 that we would land between $6.2 billion and $6.4 billion. This being said, I mentioned that I had interactions with investors in Standard Chartered even prior to starting my tenure. I did a reverse roadshow because I wanted to hear the feedback of my investors and so on. I do realize that on NII, I hear you, people want more transparency and guidance. If you look at the different buckets of our NII, first, for the part of our NII, and that's the bulk of our NII, that's related to our client activities, lending, and of course, deposits as well. There, we try to provide as much guidance as we can. I think we are fairly explicit with respect to our lending activities in terms of volumes and margins. If you look, those are fairly stable. On the deposit side, it's a bit more difficult to be more explicit because that would also give indications about our commercial policies, and that has implications on competition in the Dutch market if we were to be more explicit on what we are going to do with our client coupon and everything. This is why there is probably less information on that part. I recognize the questions, but it's a bit less easy to be more explicit. Also, then you have the other part of our NII, which is our treasury. There you do have a part that's quite visible and comprehensible, which is the one that's related to how we invest on our equity. There is a part that's a bit more volatile and where we can certainly also make progress in the way we run it. That's related to our hedging strategies because as you realize, our clients, for instance, you're mentioning mortgages where our clients have the ability to also lock their interest rates sometimes for 20 years, 30 years. Of course, our hedging policies are very important. You see that in the treasury results. This being said, given the current interest rate environment, we do expect tailwinds going into 2026. Long answer on the NII. Yes, we're trying. I'll try to be shorter for the next ones. The next question I would say is on the asset quality and the risk management. You've been running with the cost of risk almost zero for a while now. Clearly, I think this is not necessarily sustainable in building a plan. You don't extrapolate that. Are there any areas that now, with the tariffs, with the Netherlands being the center of Europe in terms of, do you see any pockets of lumpy, you know, in the corporate side, on the SMEs side, where it was kind of through the cycle level you would think is more sustainable? Okay. Several things on that point. Yes, we do have a very low cost of risk. Yes, cost of risk of the arrangement. At the same time, just for the sake of being precise, we also released some provisions in that quarter. The underlying cost of risk would be closer to four basis points, which I agree, given our business model, is still very low. It is just for the sake of being precise. We do have, I think, a very good asset quality position. Of course, we've been very mindful on assessing our clients, the impact of geopolitical tensions, what would be the direct impact and the indirect impact as well. We've done so through our models, but we've also done so through direct client outreach, and we are very comfortable with what we see. Direct exposures in the Netherlands to U.S. exports is 5%. It is very manageable in terms of direct exposures, and even, I would say, the indirect effects are manageable. This being said, we also see, it is of a different nature, but we also see on the part of our retail clients that they do save more, and that the geopolitical uncertainties also lead them to be more prudent. You have something in the Netherlands that's called the holiday allowance, and usually it's spent in the holidays. This year we saw clients saving more of it because I think you see some prudency, geopolitics, but also political uncertainties in the country. I think that certainly plays a role to a certain extent. Very good. Thank you. Maybe one last question from my side is on the government stake or the NLFI stake. Yeah. I did the IPO back in 2014, and the idea was at the time that the government would fully exit within two years. We are quite, one hour. I mean, the latest is that it will go below 20. Two questions here. How was the instrument and how fast would that go down? What's your interactions with the NLFI in terms of building the strategy, for example? Okay, so the current stake of NLFI, which is a foundation that owns the shares on behalf of the state, is at 30.5%. Yes, it was announced last week, if I'm not mistaken, because the time is, okay, last week, that this 30.5% would be brought to 20%. This 10% tranche would be basically sold through a driven out strategy the same way it has been done with the previous ones. That's one. What I think is also interesting in that decision is that this decision was taken in a moment when the Netherlands is under a caretaking government. It means that you don't take any, quote unquote, controversial decisions in these months ahead of the elections. The fact that this decision was actually taken shows clearly that this is not a controversial topic in the Netherlands, that this is not subject to a change of coalition, and that there is a clear mandate to, in due course, and I have no idea when, return ABN AMRO fully to the market. To your question on the relationship with the NLFI, I find it not only pleasant, but very professional. This is a relationship that's grounded on agreements. These agreements are public, so these are rights of information primarily, and also the right to advise on the selection of the CEO and supervisory board members. This is primarily what it's about, and this is a professional relationship fully grounded on an agreement and being linked accordingly. Actually, I find it a pleasant relationship. Very good. Marguerite, any final remarks before we finish the session? Thank you very much for your time, for your attention. I'm actually very much looking forward to share more about our story in Amsterdam on November 25th. It will also, of course, be a hybrid event that you can access from wherever you want. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Alma. Thank you for your time.