Good day, and welcome to today's Novo Banco first half 2024 results presentation. Throughout today's call, all lines will be in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. You may register for questions by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. And now I'd like to hand the call over to Mark Bourke, CFO. Please go ahead, sir. Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to our first half 2024 results. In the room with me, Benjamin Dickgiesser, CFO, and Maria Fontes, Head of Investor Relations. So, as I said before, we'll give a short presentation and then go reasonably quickly to Q&A. We'd say that should happen in 20 or 25 minutes. But the high-level messages from these results are that, first of all, the bank continues to deliver. So on literally every line of our profit and loss, we are either at or better than we have expected or mapped or budgeted. On our balance sheet, we are strong both in terms of capital and in liquidity, and we are starting to see expansion of our credit books. We are completely focused now on just continuing and improving the of experience and efficiency for our clients, and therefore being able to deliver this a similar level of financial and sustainable profitability. So I'll turn quickly to a couple of slides before I hand it to Ben, who will do all of the details on the financials. On page five we just have a set of highlights. So, you know, first of all, our level of profitability at EUR 370 million for the first half, that represents 17.4 return on tangible equity, but it has to be remembered that that is a return on a fully loaded CET1 ratio of 19.9, which is part of a total capital ratio of 22.7, I think makes us probably the best capitalized bank in this economy at the moment. Our tangible shareholders' equity has increased in the year by EUR 698 billion. Moving to the second highlight there, we have a strong NII number, EUR 594 million, that represents a net interest margin of 283. That's ahead of, you know, our average for last year, but down slightly on second- half NIM. Down not as much, as we would have expected, given the curve, so a very strong NII performance. At the same time, we have started to see fulfillment of our plans to expand our fee income by approximately 20% over a three-year period, so we're 11% up at EUR 161 million, and our cost-income ratio is 32%. The third point, asset quality, our NPL ratio, you know, at 0.5% at a net level, then we'll talk about this more. You know, this is essentially our NPL story is one of the past. Our cost of risk at 38 basis points is very well- padded. We are seeing very little in the way of NPL creation in the first half. Then to the balance sheet, deposits have increased, increased by EUR 1 billion to EUR 29.1 billion, but significantly, the ratio of demand to term is 60/40 in that increase, which is, which is both significant and contributory to balance sheet performance. And as we've said, our credit book expanding, so we've seen 1.1%, largely driven by our corporate book, where we are seeing a better backdrop. And the last point is liquidity. So liquidity with metrics like LCR of 198 and NSFR of 121, extremely comfortable, leaving us in a position to continue to support customers. The next two slides are a little bit of macro. So in terms of Portugal and the economy we are working in, this is, you know, as a retail and corporate bank with no other areas of operation, this is a very positive backdrop. So GDP growth, consistently a multiple of average for E.U. and expected to continue to be so. So if the average for the E.U. was 1.7, and it will be in the last 3 years, I think it was about 2% in 2022. It was half of Portugal in 2023, and it'll be between 0.8 and 0.9, whereas Portugal will be closer to 2%, I believe. Inflation is running at 2.3%. It's higher than some other European countries, but still well within sight of the 2% target. Both the employment and unemployment figures continue to be impressive in terms of stability and effectively almost a full employment level at 6.4% unemployment and 73% employment. Our labor costs compare very favorably across Europe, and that is, you know, a particular driver of our ability to deliver a sustainable cost-income ratio. The next page seven is just a continuation on the macro, but relating it more to how we see the economy being set up for recovery, investment, and continued performance. On the left, we see the deleveraging story, which represents political stability and strong fiscal discipline on a government point of view, regardless of who's in power. We've seen continuous debt to GDP reduction, now below 100%, but corporates also over that period, since 2015, down 21%, and households as well, down 24% to now 55%. So the economy largely deleveraged, and this consistent with all of the other economies that fared very badly in the financial crisis. They have all learned the lesson of fiscal discipline at a corporate, at a household, and at a political level. On the right-hand side, we see more about the opportunity. So we see on the upper chart, essentially that gap between investment need, disposable income, net capital transfers being this is the area where traditionally the banks, rather than financial markets, supply the credit and supply the leverage, which allows people to make those investment decisions that have been generally long fingered, and those we believe are starting. And lastly, that EUR 22.2 billion of NextGen E.U. and the Portugal 2030, long-term financial grant aid from the E.U., you know, that represents 17% of GDP. So that being the macro, turning the page briefly to, you know, a quick look at us. On the retail side, we have over the past three years, three and a half, four years, been building an omni-channel retail offering, and that is around having a digital contact center and a refurbished branch network, which is now reduced by almost 100 branches. But we now are starting to see the benefits of that flowing through in terms of our ability, one, to hold, and now to expand our credit books, to get, our banking income up and our profit before tax. So you see that on the left-hand side. Also, we have driven our client numbers up, largely on the retail side. So there's 101.6 million clients, and say between 100,000 and 150,000 of those are in the SME and corporate side. On the corporate, we are then a pure play corporate and SME bank, sectoral support, with a focus on the six sectors that Ben will talk about later. Again, in the foothills of getting the benefit for our investment in recovery, but you're starting to see our net customer credit has actually expanded in that, in that diagram. It says it's the same as the first half of 2023, but it's increased by EUR 300 million since, the end of 2023. Our NIM also, and our profitability, considerably better than in the past, at 2.342 and EUR 212 million. So all of these really being, about positioning in terms of that macro backdrop. And then on the final page, I have a number of examples, but we have four pillars to our strategy: the customer centricity, the ability to deliver that, experience in a simple and efficient manner, investing in the, or attracting, training, and retaining the right people. So we have developed on the customer side much more streamlined approach on our corporate customers into we have actually introduced a new trading platform, which is Saxo, for wealth management, which backs up both our open architecture and asset allocation. And we have now improved both the experience and the ability to deliver to our clients through the digital channel. Simple and efficient delivery of a new point of sale offering, delivery of new insurance offering, and the one which you see there, Inbound Orchestrator, is all about having our clients have access to the appropriate channel to execute the transactions they wish. And then under people and culture and sustainability, we mention a number of things, but it's largely about, you know, attracting, training, and retaining people, and also working together in multidisciplinary teams, all of these on a journey basis. So these are simply examples of how we continue to build the ability to deliver and build the ability to sustain the performance that Ben is about to talk about as he takes you through the financials. So I'll hand, I'll hand over at this stage to Ben. Thank you, Mark. So I'm very happy to present our first half of 2024 results, where we've been able to deliver EUR 370.3 million net profit for the period. This consists primarily from a top-line contribution made up of net interest income of EUR 595 million in the first half of this year, driven by an expansion of net interest margin from 2.5% in the first half of 2023 to now 2.83% in the first half of 2024. Fees and commissions are growing at very healthy levels, 11% year-on-year growth, despite some headwinds which we had in terms of legislative changes, which were implemented in the second half of last year, delivering in aggregate commercial banking income of EUR 756.1 million. Operating costs are reflecting a cost income ratio of 32.1% at EUR 243 million, and operating costs are up by 1.3% compared to the average of 2023, driven by the investments which we are undertaking in our business, but also the inflationary pressures which are still prevalent in the economy. Moving on to the impairment side, here we've been able to reduce cost of risk marginally to 38 basis points from 41 basis points in the same period of last year, despite continuing to build management overlays also in the second quarter of this year. And we've been booking a EUR 30 million provision charge as part of the process to further simplify our business, tech transformation and process reengineering. On the corporate income tax side, we are increasing on a year-on-year basis, and this will slowly normalize towards our effective tax rate of 17%-18%, which the business can operate at or is expected to operate at for the foreseeable future. Then we can flick over to page 12, which gives you further detail in terms of our, the breakdown of our net interest margin, the composition of average balances, and also the average yields on the asset and liability side. As you can see here, asset yields are largely linked with EURIBOR. So on the chart on the top right hand side, you can see that average EURIBOR has increased from the first half year of 2023, from 3.38% to now 3.84% in the first half year of 2024. And therefore, asset yields have expanded, from 3.7% to 4.75%, whereas, us being a deposit-funded bank with EUR 28 billion of customer credit, funded by approximately EUR 29 billion of customer deposits, net interest margin expanding. As we are now leveling out at paying approximately 40% of EURIBOR for our customer deposit book. As Mark already mentioned, and you can see this now in more detail on the bottom right of this page 12, we had a very important second quarter on the deposit side of our business, where we saw, on the one hand, a stabilization of the mix of the deposit book between demand and term. So demand deposits have stabilized at the 54%-55% mark, meaning that those are now largely made up of transactional accounts, and the savings portion of the deposit book has, we expect, largely migrated into the term deposit book. Therefore, stabilization of the two books, and in addition, we've been able to decrease the cost of deposits in the month of June to 1.48%, compared to 1.56% in the month of March. Meaning we are past peak cost of deposits, and we're now very focused in terms of driving down cost of deposits going forward, as in tandem with EURIBOR. Which gets us to page 13, which is our sensitivity in terms of net interest margin and net interest income to EURIBOR. On the left-hand side of this page, you can see that our balance sheet structure, which, to simplify it, had a loan book, which is largely linked to EURIBOR, funded by deposit book, where we're now paying 40% of EURIBOR, therefore, being very rate sensitive. The loan book... Oh, sorry, the bank had a very rate-sensitive balance sheet, meaning that for 1% increase in EURIBOR in December 2021, our net interest income would have increased by approximately 20%. Over the last 30 months, we've worked hard in terms of reducing the sensitivity. Therefore, by now, and as of June 2024, a 1% decrease in EURIBOR decreases our net interest income by only six percentage points. Two assumptions here are important to note in those sensitivities. On the one hand, it's based on a constant balance sheet, but secondly, also, this is based on the deposit pass-through of 40%, meaning that we can outperform and offset this sensitivity by delivering pass-through rates, which are ahead of the 40%, which are embedded in our model. On the right-hand side, I will walk you through the measures which we have implemented over the last 30 months in order to drive down this interest-rate sensitivity. Step number one was that we've swapped our mortgage book, the variable-rate mortgage book, into fixed rate. So for EUR 6.4 billion out of our EUR 10 billion mortgage book, we've entered into such hedges at an average fixed rate of 2.8%, so that's the base rate we locked in for a duration of 5 years. Secondly, we've done the same on the liability side for EUR 2.5 billion of our non-maturing deposits, where we were able to lock in a 3.1% interest rate, also with a duration of 5 years. Lastly, the open position we had on the balance sheet in terms of very long duration, fixed-rate liabilities, related to our zero bonds in 2043, 3.5, we have closed that position by putting approximately EUR 800 million very long duration core European sovereign bonds against those fixed-rate liabilities, therefore locking in our net interest margin on those liabilities. So in aggregate, across those three measures, we've added approximately €10 billion of fixed-rate exposure to our balance sheet, meaning that our interest income has been decoupled to a certain extent from EURIBOR for those €10 billion, and we've done this with a good amount of duration of 5 years. We are now expected to maintain that duration on the swap book, in terms of rolling those hedges on a continuous basis to maintain that residual duration. Lastly, also from a structural perspective going forward, where we are originating more fixed-rate exposures and we are swapping less the the corporate fixed rate exposures as we have done in the past. So also on, as the balance sheet churns, the balance sheet is less rate sensitive going forward than it used to be. Moving to page 14, in terms of our fees, the left chart shows you that we've been able to increase fees in every of the last four quarters, compared to the same quarter in the prior year. As you can notice here, on the one hand, we have seasonality in our fee structure, so second quarter and fourth quarters are always our strongest quarters in terms of delivering fees. But more importantly, we've actually been able to increase the pace of the fee growth. Whereas in the first quarter, we've grown fees by 8.8% compared to the first quarter in the prior year, we've done this by 12.7% in the second quarter of this year. Middle of the page shows you that this has been primarily driven by the accounts and payments segment of our fee pool, which has increased by 28% year-on-year. Also important to note that on loans and guarantees, here, it's very clear that you see that we are down by approximately EUR 3.5 million year-on-year. This is exactly reflective of the legislative changes, which were introduced in Portugal in the second half of last year, which doesn't allow us to charge certain fees to our clients on loans and guarantees. That had a run rate impact of between EUR 6 million and EUR 7 million. So this has been more than overcome by us by now. On the right-hand side, you can see that the good performance and trajectory we have on accounts and payments are primarily driven by three elements. On the one hand, the strong growth on the customer base by 7.4%, reflective of the strength of our franchise. Secondly, good number of transaction volumes in the Portuguese economy. So we see overall transactionality growing in the Portuguese market by approximately 10% year-on-year. And lastly, we implemented a new pricing grid early this year on our retail side, in particular. Then moving to page 14, to our OpEx base. Here we outline, on the one hand, what I've mentioned earlier, that we've increased costs by 1.3% compared to the average OpEx base, which we had in the course of 2023. Despite that increase of 1.3%, we've been able to drive down the Cost-to-Income Ratio by 1.5%, now to 32.1% in the first half of this year. I think as you can see in the middle of the page, this puts us among best in class in Europe in terms of efficiency of our business. Then I would move on to the balance sheet on page 17. As you know, we have a very simple business, purely focused on the Portuguese economy. And that's really reflected, reflective of the simplicity of our balance sheet. We have a customer credit book with a net exposure of EUR 27.3 billion, which has grown by EUR 345 million in the first half of this year, so 1.3% growth year to date. That's on the asset side. On the liability side, we've been able to grow our customer deposit book by EUR 988 million, and the debt securities we've grown by EUR 1.3 billion, which is reflected, reflective of three issuances which have taken place in the first half of this year. Two issuances, which have taken place in the first quarter, was a EUR 500 million senior preferred bond, which we issued, and a EUR 500 million covered bond. The last part, which we have done now in the second quarter, is a EUR 300 million funding line granted by the EIB. This, these EUR 1.3 billion debt security funds raised and the EUR 988 million customer deposits funds, which we, which we've raised, we've partially invested in the ALM portfolio. So this is our sovereign portfolio and HQLA book, where we store our excess liquidity, and as a consequence, that ALM portfolio has grown by EUR 1.44 billion in the first half of this year. Lastly, on this page, you can see shareholder's equity growing to EUR 4.62 billion, or on a tangible book value of EUR 4.376 billion, which is up 19% year-on-year. Then moving to page 18, you can see here in more detail, our EUR 27.3 billion book of customer credit, which has grown on a net basis by 1.3%, on a growth basis by 1.1% year to date. Reflective of the EUR 2.3 billion of new origination to the Portuguese economy, which splits between 64% corporate, 25% mortgage, and 11% personal loans, which we've granted to our clients in the first half of this year. Page 19 shows you, zooming in now on the corporate side of our business, where we exhibited very strong growth in the first half of this year at 2.1%, increasing the book from 15.5 billion on a net basis to 15.8 billion. And we've done this primarily by originating in our strategic sectors. So 60% of the EUR 1.48 billion new origination has been in our strategic sectors, which are broken down in the middle of the page. These six strategic sectors are sectors which, we are expecting to grow faster than the rest of the Portuguese economy, and where we also see larger, revenue potential for us as a bank, and therefore, we have invested in those sectors in terms of having the right coverage approach, the right industry bankers, and a proactive approach to client coverage.... We're clearly covering the entire economy, but we are investing in terms of having a very proactive and client-intensive coverage approach for those 6, 6 sectors, and we can see this now reflecting also in terms of the mix of our new origination. Page 20 is our mortgage portfolio, which has marginally declined in the first half of this year by 1.1%, standing at EUR 9.9 billion as of the third of June. And as you can see in the middle of the page, this book has a very conservative risk profile. So the average loan-to-value of this portfolio stands at 50%. The loan-to-values which we show here are not indexed LTVs, so they're not rolled forward in house price index, but those are actually the valuations which have been done with physical appraisals, which we usually do on a three-year cycle. So therefore, not benefiting from the strong momentum which the Portuguese house price sector has seen over the last few years. So what holds true on the stock, as the 50% LTV is also true on the new origination side, where the average LTV has been 60%, and that is also reflected in terms of the average ticket sizes, where we're originating mortgages with an average ticket for EUR 120,000 right now, whereas the stock has amortized down to EUR 55,000 per ticket. Therefore, clearly the strategy has been to focus on the area in the book, which exhibits lower LTVs, which is also as an advanced IRB bank, favorable for us from a capital treatment standpoint. The last part of our book is the smallest one, page 21. It's our personal loans business, a EUR 1.7 billion portfolio, which includes not only our credit cards, our current accounts and overdrafts, but also mortgage-related lending for kitchen renovations and so forth, for example, and also individual credit. This book, we've been able to grow at the fastest pace. We've been able to grow it by 7.6% year-to-date, also on the back of launching a new digital origination channel for this product, and therefore, we've been able to grow market share to 5.8%. Clearly, this is one of our highest return on equity products in our balance sheet, and therefore, we have, we are, we are... It has gotten a lot of attention from our side to use the fixed rate environment to grow the loan book now to EUR 1.733 billion as of June 30th. Moving to page 22 and our NPL exposure on our asset quality, you can see on the left-hand side that we've been able to decrease non-performing loans by 8.7% year-to-date, to EUR 1.034 billion, which is equivalent to a 4.1% NPL ratio. NPL re-creation is very muted. As you can see, we had in the first half year, EUR 111 million new entries, which is equivalent to, on an annualized basis, to 80 basis points of our EUR 27 billion customer credit book. So very benign levels of new NPL creation, and we've been more than offsetting those new NPL creations with recoveries, cures, sales, and write-offs, driving down the NPL ratio to 4.1%. We have best-in-class NPL coverage at 88%. This is only cash coverage, doesn't include any collateral. With this 88% cash coverage, we have a net NPL ratio of 0.5%, which is in line with E.U. averages. Our strong coverage can be further seen on page 23, on the right-hand side, 'cause if you add to those 88% cash coverage, also the real estate collaterals, we have on the NPL book, 158% coverage, as you can see on the bottom right-hand side of this page, which has increased by 20% year-to-date, given the additional overlays which we have built in the year, and also the strong collaterals which we have in that portfolio. Page 24 outlines our liquidity position, which has further been strengthened compared to December of last year. Now, with an LCR ratio of 198% and an NSFR ratio of 121%, also reflective of the growth of deposits and emissions, which has taken place, therefore, getting our liquidity buffer up to EUR 14.9 billion, growth of EUR 1.3 billion year-to-date. We would expect this now to normalize in the second half of this year on the back of repaying the remaining EUR 1 billion TLTRO tranche, which we still have outstanding, but also letting some repos roll off to improve P&L and, normalize our liquidity ratios. Page 25 walks you through our capital position, where we continue to exhibit best-in-class organic capital generation levels. We're currently running in this first half year at 90 basis points per quarter organic capital generation, therefore getting us to a 19.9% fully loaded CET1 ratio or 22.7% fully loaded total capital ratio. This is equivalent to an 8.6% MDA buffer based on forward-looking capital requirements as of December 2024. We're showing you forward-looking capital requirements as there are certain capital requirements being phased in in the second half of this year. We're already taking those additional burdens which are being put on our business into consideration when we show you the 8.6% MDA buffer here.... Lastly, page 26 walks you through our MREL position, where we stand now at a 28.4% MREL funding level, compared to the latest MREL binding requirement, which the bank has been imposed in April this year of 27%, which we need to comply with in January 2025. So we are already fully compliant with our final binding MREL requirements. That being said, clearly, we are expecting to reduce CET1 in the future, as we move through the dividend ban, which is still in place in our business. And as we normalize our CET1 ratio, we would pre-fund any reduction in capital with future issuance. We are currently monitoring the market to consider whether in the second half of this year, we take further steps to pre-fund further capital reductions and come with additional issuances in the second half of this year on the senior side. Okay, so that finishes the financial. Thanks, Ben. It remains simply to revisit the targets we set at the beginning of the year and to make a couple of final remarks. But as Ben has said, we have been throwing off, you know, between 80 and 100 basis points of capital. It's not a consumptive business, so we're building capital very rapidly. Our focus now, and from what you've seen and what he has spoken about in terms of growing at the same level as our real GDP, is focusing on our fee income and managing our balance sheet. All of that, combined with our cost level being maintained at the same level, are all about a focus on sustainability. So with that, one last thing is to say we set out targets at the beginning of the year. Our targets were as follows, and this is on page 28: EUR 1.3 billion or more than EUR 1.3 billion in terms of commercial banking income, a cost to income ratio of approximately 35%, the cost of risk which we maintain at a 50 basis points, but that's through the cycle, number and an expectation of net income resulting from all of that, at 650, million or greater than. So our outlook for the year-end is now to increase the expectation on commercial banking income to greater than EUR 1.4 billion, to then, you know, have an adjustment to that cost income ratio, so it'd be less than 35%, and ultimately delivering more than EUR 700 million in terms of profits after tax. All of that, you know, really reflecting the fact that you see robust performance on all lines of P&L and the ability to expand balance sheet and essentially on both sides, both deposits and the credit books. So with that, I would say we can turn over to Q&A. Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question at this time, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you find that your question has already been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two. Please make sure the mute function on your line is switched off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, please press star one to ask a question. We will pause for just a moment to assemble the queue. We will now take our first question from Lee Street from Citigroup. Please go ahead. Hello, good afternoon, thanks for taking my questions, and well done on the results. Three questions, please. Firstly, on interest rate sensitivity, obviously you've done a lot of hedging there. Just in terms of the process, are there any, like, regulatory guardrails on how much you can hedge and, you know, what you're actually allowed to do, or is it entirely up to management's discretion? Secondly, I think you said that you'd hedged the, the zero coupon bonds. Am I correct in understanding you've basically hedged that back to a spread? And if yes, any sort of detail or color on what that's, you know, what, what the level of spread, which you've hedged it back to? And then finally, a broader one, obviously you referenced, you know, building up capital and the dividend, you know, restriction. Any progress, talk, comment, color on if that could potentially be reduced or removed a little bit earlier than is currently expected? That'd be my three questions. Thank you. I will take a bit of the first one and the third one, and then I will hand to Ben for the difficult question in the middle. But on interest rates and the regulator, I mean, the regulator takes a very keen interest in how the bank sets up and manages risk. But in terms of specific guidelines on how much or how little, that is all really about an appropriate model and an appropriate approach, and having a sustainable performance. So the regulator's view essentially would line up with the way the management would look at managing the business and producing sustainable profitability going forward. So that one, and after that, the on the zero coupon bonds and the hedging back to the spread, I will leave that to Ben. The second point was on progress on, you know, capital and readiness in terms for transaction, et cetera. The messages are simply the same as before in the- You know, the bank business wise is ready. The balance sheet, we, as Ben has said, we will see ourselves taking a certain amount of CET1 out, replacing that with MREL, and that would leave us in position to effectively transact at any stage. So the short end, if that were to go as quickly as it possibly could, we could be ready by as early as early 2025. If not, the CCA expires at the end of that year. So within a 12-month period, it could be accelerated. We believe it is in everybody's interest that it would be accelerated, but we can say no more than that. I'll hand to Ben just on the specifics of both of the other questions. Yeah. Going to, if you flip to page 40, this is a summary of our outstanding bonds, and this covers, in particular, also the 2043, and it's zero coupon bonds. And actually, your question is answered on exactly this page, on page 40, in the last bullet point of this page, where you can see that the growth yield on those bonds would be 6.6%. But if you look at the package of the assets which we have put against those bonds, the net interest expense is approximately 2.5%, for those bonds. So we find for the duration which those bonds offer us, it's a fairly reasonable net expense. All right. Thank you both for very clear answers. Thank you. Thank you. We will now move to our next question from Hugo Cruz from KBW. Please go ahead. Hi. Thank you. I have a few questions, if I may, mainly on NII. So first question: What was the main driver of the increase in the net interest guidance? And can you tell us a bit about the latest trend you're seeing in the Portuguese market for rates and volumes? Then second, if deposits continue to grow ahead of loans, you know, what, what's the plan to deal with that accumulation of, of liquidity? You know, could, could, for instance, start lending internationally through syndications. And third, the, the hedging measures in slide 13, is there anything left to do to, to hedge further? Or it's just a matter now of just rolling over the hedges? So those are my questions on, on NII. And then, a quick question on, there was this, arbitral tribunal decision in June, that I, I think you guys haven't, given guidance yet on, on the implications. So if you have any comments there, I would appreciate it. Thanks. Okay, I think we'll do this as a tag team. So first of all, on the drivers of NII rates and volumes. So if you break our books on rates, you know, it still continues to be a well competitive or a competitive corporate market. But we have and are maintaining our spreads at the moment. The mortgage market equally continues to be competitive, but, you know, with a spread of 90 basis points or more in an international context, continues to stack up well in terms of the bank performance. And the final book, the consumer book, is one where we have seen effectively the rates, it's almost a fixed rate book, which is capped by a usury rate. This has gradually ticked up through time. So, you know, it's a competitive environment, but it is still profitable. And Ben might comment a bit more in a sec when I hand to him, but on the volume side, we are starting to see more activity in corporates. This is, you know, it is early days, but it is consistent with what we-- what I was pointing at at the beginning, which is an economy which is deleveraged, a position where there are now companies and individuals are well positioned to releverage or to make investment decisions. We think we're seeing a bit of that come through on the corporate side. We think we may see it come through on mortgages, and you've already seen the national kind of consumer book tick up 3%-4%. I think all of the banks are seeing kind of expansion in that area. The use of excess liquidity, I think, you know, our strategy is, while we do have a corporate book, and we do have some investment outside of Europe, we are really focused on the Portuguese market and being a pure play in that. Our excess liquidity at the moment, as Ben has said, is generally deployed in the ALM book, but he can comment more. And on hedging, I will hand that to Ben, other than to say, I think we are where we kind of should be right now. Ben, you might give all three, and we'll come back to the arbitration afterwards. Yeah. So I would say upgrading guidance is driven, on the one hand, by clearly rates moving up, right? We have. Despite rates coming down now in the month of July, we have clearly seen in the first half of the year that our business plan was based on the curve at end of December, beginning of January of this year, and therefore, rates have outperformed the expected curve. There was one element. Second element was that we've seen now the clear stabilization in terms of the mix between term and sight, where we've also had more conservative assumption in terms of demand leading to to a certain deposit beta. So we've seen on the one hand, higher rates, stabilization of the mix of deposits, and actually volumes performing well, while us now driving down cost of deposits on the term deposit side. All of those are, I would say, elements, especially on the liability side, where we landed better than what we had inscribed in our projections. Lastly, the fee growth, even though we had obviously ambitions, I would say we are very happy to see that all of those ambitions are actually coming through in our P&L, and we see them play out through our P&L. And therefore, those are elements which we didn't have that clarity or visibility on at the beginning of the year. And with this clarity now, flowing into our P&L, we are more comfortable raising the guidance to the EUR 1.4 billion mark, or higher than EUR 1.4 billion, for full year this year. Then in terms of the liquidity, as Mark said, we would primarily seek to park this in our ALM book. ALM book means it's, it's a combination of, sovereigns, meaning European sovereigns, primarily, unless we have US dollars, where we'll also buy some US Treasuries or government-guaranteed bonds, and, HQLA corporate bonds, or covered bonds in that space. So, very conservative risk profile. That's what we would... Or we also park it to a certain extent, obviously, with ECB. So it's, it actually links into with our hedging strategy, maintaining a certain duration profile on that securities book. On the hedging side, I would say we are right now at the level which we think is appropriate for our business. As you know, the more fixed rate exposure you take on the balance sheet, to a certain extent, also the more risk you're taking on your balance sheet. Right now, we think the balance sheet is well-balanced with the 6%, sensitivity, and we think the 6% sensitivity, we have room to potentially offset this actually with performing better on the deposit side, with right now running at the 40% side. So we feel balance sheet is pretty well-balanced. If we can see, better performance on or different behavior on our deposits over the next 12 months, which we're not expecting, we might fine-tune this a bit left or bit right. But right now we would say, we are happy, and we would just continue to roll the hedges to maintain this five-year duration on the book. Okay. And just, on the arbitral, on the arbitration award, you know, it was, first of all, we would say we do not have any provision, in other words, anything in the balance sheet, in terms of expectation on that, in terms of our capital. So we had a partial win, partial loss. Now there will be a process of, you know, questions and then, considerations on both sides as to whether they wish to take it another step in appealing for annulment. But basically, it was a sort of 60/40, result between, the two parties. But also important to note that none of those amounts which have been awarded in the arbitration decision are reflected in our CET1 ratio on our CET1. So this would all be upside to our capital position. Perfect. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one. Our next question comes from Daniel Davies from Autonomous. Please go ahead. Yes, absolutely. Congratulations on the results. I've got a few questions. The first one, just on the PMAs, I think you mentioned you continue to build PMAs. Can you just comment on the size of the PMAs you hold, and whether you'll continue to build, what the optimal level is? And then kind of related, I guess, just looking at your Stage 2 balance, it's relatively high compared to some European peers. Do you see that fourteen percent Stage 2 coming down over time? Is there anything you can say there? And then I think you just covered my legal claims question. But the final one was just on your comments with regard to MREL. I guess pre-funding a December 25 potential exit from a CCA in the second half of this year seems a bit early. So does that imply that it could happen earlier? And also, do you have any guidance on how much MREL you might be looking to print over this year and next? Thanks. Thank you, Daniel. All very good questions. I would say on the management overlays which we have in place, as you know, we've built in the first half year, 34.5 million of credit impairments. Over half of that would be management overlays. So the cost of risk, excluding management overlays, would be running below 20 basis points in the first half of this year. So stock of management overlays is just shy of EUR 100 million right now. Stage 2, high ratio, as you correctly say, I would say, from our... And we've done recently more work around this, from our experience, let's say the Stage 2 trigger points are not harmonized across Europe. We feel we have actually quite conservative trigger points for Stage 2 classification. This was part of the history of the bank. The bank had an imposition as part of European Commission commitments to book a certain amount of minimum provisions on its performing book until December 2020, EUR 1.5 billion of aggregate provisions, which the bank was imposed to build in the three-year period. That was only possible by building a very conservative Stage 2 trigger model. Now, looking at the benchmarks and doing more work around it, we are considering whether we should dial this back a bit to normalize trigger points to align this with other European banks. We haven't taken the decision in that respect, so, but yes, as a consequence of that trigger model, it's not a reflection of the bad quality of our portfolio from our perspective, it's really how the model is calibrated. And lastly, in terms of printing MREL, I mean, clearly we see our debt trading very well. We also receive good level of inbounds in terms of demand for our paper. And lastly, and I think it might be a good segue actually, to jump to the page, which we have in the appendix here of page 45, which is our Moody's scorecard. The one point to highlight here is that our next senior issuance will more or less automatically lead to an LGF upgrade for Moody's. You see that, in the chart on the, top right-hand side, that approximately EUR 400-500 million issuance would move us, one notch to the right, therefore, automatically meaning that our senior paper would be also fully investment-grade rated from Moody's. Right now, obviously, investment grade from Fitch, with another issuance of EUR 500 million, we would be also fully investment grade, automatically, more or less automatically, but by Moody's. Therefore, we're considering, this pre-funding step on the one hand to get to the LGF notch, but also really, reacting to the market being open to us, requesting paper from us and, and offering decent spreads. Thank you. And as a final reminder to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one. We'll pause for just a moment to allow you to signal. And if there are no further questions at this time, I'd like to hand the call back. Oh, pardon. We have a pop-up question from Alfredo Alonso from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Hi, congrats for the results, and thanks for taking my questions. I have two, if I may. First, it will be on, regarding the booking of the EUR 30 million reserves, for the transformation process. Could you provide some more color about, what measures you are targeting, and what could be the payback for, for those measures, and what you're expecting from them? My other question would be on, on the other side, on the quality. Given the benign environment that, we've seen current levels of coverage as you reach, do you think there is more value by continuing writing them, or selling, or even could be better keeping them, trying to recover future value? Thank you. I'll take the first question, Ben will take the second question. So we have a EUR 30 million restructuring provision. The way we see this is that we would expect our cost profile to increase by approximately somewhere between EUR 28 million and EUR 32 million over a three-year period, unless we have a number of measures. And those measures include technology estate update, some reorganization, and simplification processes on some of our, you know, major internal journeys. So they are the three elements of it, and I think you could probably say, you know, a third, a third, a third between them. And the EUR 30 million investment essentially gives us the ability to deliver that over a three-year period. And that's essentially the genesis of where the provision comes from. In terms of your question on, on NPLs, and we have an annex slide on those as, as well. On page, sorry, let's find it. Page 34. There are a couple of points to make. On the one hand, and you see this on the left-hand side, that still, a third of our NPL portfolio is covered by the CCA. What does this mean, is that we, don't freely control those, those NPLs. Those NPLs, have servicing rights granted to the Resolution Fund, meaning that any significant decision, like for instance, a disposal in the market, would need to be approved by the Resolution Fund. And we've had difficulties in the last years in obtaining those approvals to deleverage that portion of our book quickly. We are completely free to provision for this book, and we have done so therefore, and have built this high coverage. Therefore, we are confident there's nothing but upside in this portfolio, given the high, the high collateral coverage, but also high cash, provisions which we have built against it. But in terms of pace of deleveraging, it's a bit linked to the timeline for termination of the CCA. Once CCA is terminated or has matured, we are completely back in control and can drive, timeline and pace of deleveraging this one-third of the portfolio. And this one-third is also the portion of the portfolio which you would like to deleverage, first, given that it's the oldest part of the portfolio. The remainder of the portfolio is actually either not overdue or largely, with very fresh vintages, so only in default, for a short period of time. Those are clients we rather work with to have them cure, have them recover, than to sell them in the market. Thank you. Very clear. We'll clearly work on this and optimize. Thanks. Thank you. And as it appears, there are currently no further questions at this time. At this, I'd like to hand the call back over to Mark Bourke, CEO, for any additional closing remarks. Over to you, sir. Just by way of closing remarks, just to say thank you for attending. To reiterate that we have, I think had a very good six months. And that has allowed us to update our targets. Our, our focus now is purely on execution and maintaining, and driving the sustainability of these results. So with that, I would say good afternoon to everybody, from myself, Ben, and Maria in Novo Banco. Thank you. Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. Ladies and gentlemen, you may now disconnect