Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am Zubair Chaiwalla, Head Capital Market and Industrial Relations, I welcome you all on The Commercial Bank Q1 2021 results call. You will be put on mute for the duration of the speakers' presentation, and I will come back to you for the Q&As. I now hand you over to Joseph Abraham, The Commercial Bank's Group Chief Executive Officer. Joseph, over to you. Thank you, Zubair. Welcome again to our quarterly, analyst call. Well, this year's first quarter results have been a strong quarter. As you can see, a 50% increase in our net profit. This has reflected underlying strong growth in our loan book, which has grown at 12% on a consolidated basis and 15% in domestic. We've also seen good progress on our net interest income, helped by an improvement in our net interest margin to 2.6%. Also, our fees and other income have also grown by 12%, reflecting good Forex, particularly in Forex income, arising from our strong remittances business. We have kept our costs reasonably well controlled. Overall, I would say that the outlook remains positive for the Qatar economy, given the continued removal of uncertainty from the blockade and the lead up to the World Cup, and also the expenditure on infrastructure and the North Field expansion. We remain positive on the Qatar outlook, and the IMF has put Qatar at 2.7% as the projected growth for 2021, though we actually expect it to be slightly higher, around 3%. The other, I would say positive, is from our overall return from our subsidiaries and associates. We've seen NBO continue to be the main contributor and we have also had UAB finally turning the corner and giving a positive result, albeit small. On the other side, we had Turkey. The volatility in policy and interest rates meant that our Turkish business had a loss for this quarter, which was due to the mismatch in pricing on their deposit and asset book. We expect that to flow through and be coming into positive in the second quarter onwards. We also have our CEO here, from Alternatif Bank, who will be available for questions later. We continue to show good asset quality in our Turkish loan book, which I think is the most important part, at about 4.6% NIM, which is one of the best in the sector. Overall, I would say a very positive quarter, and a positive outlook for the rest of the year. Therefore, we see this continuing to build and benefit our ROE, which we have said would be in double digits and which has already crossed 10% this year. We continue progress in our ROE. Our CET1 remains at 12%, and our total CAR is also strong after our AT1 issuance. The other positive is the upgrade in Commercial Bank's outlook by S&P to positive, from what was previously stable. This, I think, is an indicator of, again, the rating agencies who have access to a good degree of our information, also signaling the positive outlook on Commercial Bank. I will hand over to Rehan, who will speak in more detail about the financials, and then after that we can move to questions. Rehan. Thank you, Joseph, and good afternoon, everyone. I will focus primarily on slide seven, which shows the quarter-on-quarter results. As in previous quarters, I have separated normalized results with the reported results. This is just to strip out the impact of the staff share performance scheme, which is a fully hedged scheme. It does on the operating profit, therefore you can see that the numbers are the same, QAR 795, QAR 795 and QAR 730 last year versus QAR 730. It does gross up both on the income and the cost side. By stripping that out, you can see what the underlying trends are in both the income and in costs. It has actually been a busy start to the year. We successfully completed our first international AT1 issuance of $500 million. We have participated in NBO's AT1 issuance in March. As you can see from the balance sheet, we have got a very strong growth in loans of 12% year-on-year, and just under 3% quarter-on-quarter. We have grown our share of consumption and government public sectors, which is a prime focus for us in our five-year strategy, and at the same time reduced our percentage in the real estate sector, which is now below 20% at 19%. Alternatif represents under 10% of the balance sheet size now, around 9.5%. On the deposit side also, you have seen that we have grown our deposits by 5.8% year-on-year and 8% quarter-on-quarter. Within that, low-cost deposits have grown by 26% year-on-year and 9.5% quarter-on-quarter. This has been very much a focus area for us, basically ensuring that areas such as payments, cash management, and remittance products come to the fore. We have invested in those products, that is beginning to help us in terms of lowering our cost of funding, our cost of deposits, and therefore improving our NIM. As you can see now, that stands at 2.6% versus 2.4% for Q4 of last year. Our net interest income has grown by 8% year-on-year. This is being driven by the overall reduction in our cost of funding and the overall loan growth. I can see the momentum in the business. Some of that loan growth was very much at the end of the quarter, therefore, there is momentum in the business, which should mean that our net interest income continues to grow further from this area. In addition, on our non-funded income, we grew by 12% year-on-year. Having said that, we did see some impact of the volatility in the Turkish lira, which did impact our fee income, our FX income, and increased our swap costs, slightly compressing the NIM in Turkey as well. Kaan Gür will speak to that in a bit more detail later on. Costs are up quarter-on-quarter, within the range that we expected. We continue to invest in the business, this is likely to be the kind of area of cost that we see quarter-on-quarter going forward. Our cost-income ratio reduced from 27.1%-26.8%. What we can see going forward is that the main driver for reduction in cost-income ratio will be an increase in income, both in our net interest income and also in our non-interest income. Overall operating profit at QAR 795 million. Net provisions lower than the previous couple of quarters. We continue to be conservative. We've not changed our ECL model in the first quarter versus last year. The QCB scheme has also been extended, we will continue to err on the conservative side. You can see our cost of risk is lower, though, than Q4, both on a gross basis and on a net basis. We've seen strong recoveries again in the first quarter, which has brought down the cost of risk on a net basis. NPL ratio, given those settlements, we've seen a small reduction in our NPL ratio from 4.3%-4.2%. Importantly, our coverage ratio continues to go up, it's just under 106% now, at the end of Q1. Given the AT1 issuance, our capital ratios have improved. At Tier 1, it's now at 16.3% and 18.3% on a total basis. Joseph mentioned, our associates have both recorded a profit in Q1, it's good to see that UAB has returned to profitability in the first quarter of this year. I mentioned in the last call that we will look at impairment again, at the back end of this year, Q3, Q4. Given that both have recorded a profit in the first quarter, that should give a strong signal of where we expect that to be. Having said that, we have set aside QAR 400 million in our budget for impairments, we will, as I said, assess that in the second half of this year. Alternatives' profit, as I said, has been impacted by the volatility in interest rates and exchange rates. Turkish lira did depreciate, that did have an impact in the operating income, primarily. They have worked very hard on the NPL ratio and the coverage ratio, which have both improved year-on-year. I'll hand over to Kaan Bey now to talk a little bit more on Alternatives' results and the Turkish economic environment. Kaan Bey, over to you. Thank you very much. Rehan Bey, thank you. Good morning to you all. Today I will give you a brief update on the Turkish macroeconomic indicators, as well as the latest data on the banking sector, of course, followed by Alternatif Bank's first quarter financial results. Here in first slide, let me start with the macroeconomic side. As you can see, we have seen growth momentum. This has been maintained in first quarter. We have seen solid 6% growth. However, we also see that the continuing volatility have the potential to limit the positive outlook for Turkey 2021, as a full year, our growth expectation is going to be around 3.5%-4% levels. As you know, the sudden replacement of CBRT governor generated some volatility in the financial market. We are believing that maintaining a tight monetary policy, of course, will contain further volatilities. Thanks to normalization efforts, we expect, which is very important for Turkey, the current account deficits to GDP ratio. We're going to see a decline around 3% this year. It was around 5% last year. Of course, the most crucial thing here is higher tourism income and lower gold imports. Those are expected to help the pace of this recovery. On the CPI side, we're going to see a rise, 17.5% in May, but it's going to be decline. I think the fourth quarter is going to finish around 13.5% levels. Ultimately, we believe in that. The continuation of tight credit policy and demand control becomes even more important to maintain both financial and price stability for Turkish economy. Second slide, we're going to look at the Turkish banking overall trends. As you can see here, in contrast to much of last year, in first quarter, we have seen limited growth in loans and overall decrease in lending appetites by Turkish banks. Just a reminder, in 2020, growth was around 35%. As Rehan Bey and Mr. Joseph underlined this, the high interest rate environment also means general lower demand for borrowing, especially on the business side and individuals. Again, we look at main banking products, we see 45% growth, loans and deposits. This is meaningful. The most important signal comes from non-cash loans, which is a reflection of increasing Turkey's foreign trade volume. In the same time, lower cost of Exim Bank financing facilities. This is, again, important issue. Asset quality. This is a very crucial thing we are focusing on as Alternatif Bank. We continue to outperform sector here. Our NPL and cost of risk metrics, this is as a result of our last several years', the efforts, we are doing very good at, compared to especially private sectors in Turkey. In an overall profitability aspects, Turkish banking sector net interest margin under very huge pressure as funding costs increased sharply. 30% year-on-year decrease in sector net interest income. We are going to cope with that in a very, let's say, systematic way as Alternatif Bank. At the same time, we have seen 6% decrease in fee and commissions, sector-wide year-on-year. The NIM squeeze has continued into second quarter, we believe, but we expect that it's going to be loosen up, especially towards the end of year. This is the overall picture of Turkish banking sector. Last slide, I would like to mention about our performances under this background. Our total asset size, as you can see here, grew by 9% in nominal basis. The thing is here, we really maintained our existing loan book. We continued our selective lending. Of course, the risk management approach was very solid. We also focused on hedging our balance sheets in order to minimize any impact for future depreciation. On the deposit side, again, we were very selective, but in the same time, our focus was on rationalizing our deposit base to optimize funding costs. Especially, this is very important performance, key performance area here. Despite the challenging environment, I can say that we still managed to decrease our NPL volume, and we finishing the quarter at 4.7%. I must underline that we have also increased our NPL coverage, 87% to 80%. Thanks to our existing capitalization plan, our parent The Commercial Bank, we have received $25 million capital injection, and we completed the transaction in March. Also it was important AT1 issuance, which is $200 million, also completed again, the last week of March. When you look into profitability sides, as we all know that under the huge net interest margin pressure, we are completely changing, converting our existing NII facilities in order to cope with that, the margin squeezes. We are diversifying our deposit base. We are much more focusing on, especially deposit costs. Of course, having a selective lending to the appetite also gives us good news to, again, creating the positive net interest margin. Maybe the most important thing is here, especially for the first quarter, our high asset quality, thanks to our very limited NPL flows, very strong collections, we succeeded decrease 42% in our provision expenses. Of course, we allocate TRY 27 million free provision. This is again going to be a kind of shield against possible volatility in the markets. I should really like to emphasize that this point, also while the bottom line for Q1 is negative, we're believing that we are going to come back, actually, we have taken quick and very comprehensive action in order to manage extremely well our duration gaps, especially on the TRY balance sheet, focusing on lowering funding costs, of course, successfully set a positive profitability trend as March 2021 on solid basis. We expect to finish the year in line with the profitability targets set in our 2021 budgets. Thank you. I am ready to answer your questions during the Q&A session. Stay safe and healthy in these extraordinary times. Thank you. Thank you, Kaan. We will now start with the Q&As. If you wish to ask a question, please use the raise hand feature. If you're using a laptop, you can click the participants icon, and you will see the raise hand feature there. If you are using handheld devices, you will see the three dots on the right below, which is written More. If you click on that, you will see the raise hand feature. If your name is announced, please unmute your device and state your name and organization, and then ask your question. Once your question is answered, please mute yourself to allow others to ask their question. Let me pause for a moment to enable you to raise hands. We now have our first question from Rahul Bajaj. Rahul, please unmute and ask your question. Hi. This is Rahul Bajaj from Citi. Thank you gentlemen, for the call. Very useful and a splendid set of results, definitely. I have three quick questions, if I may, please. The first is around margins. I see a decent kind of pickup in first quarter margins Q on Q. Just wanted to understand, is the first quarter sort of run rate the rate we should kind of bake in going forward for margins for the remainder of this year? You would expect improvements coming from Turkey and maybe some funding cost benefits to kind of push margins higher as we move into second quarter and the second half of the year. Any guidance around where margins will go from the pickup in first quarter? The second question is on loans. Again, very good performance on the loan side, +3% Q on Q. If I recall, please correct me if I'm wrong, there was a substantial repayment or the kind of repayment that was supposed to happen in first quarter. If the 3% growth is actually including that repayment which happened, the loan drawdown happened in the end of last year, then it's even better performance, I would assume. With that background, how should I look at the full year sort of lending growth projection? Your earlier guidance was around 5%-6% excluding that one-off loan repayment. I'm sure you should be looking to exceed that guidance now. Where should we be looking for the loan growth for the full year? My third question is around Turkey, ABank specifically. Again, I understand the revenue pressure coming in from ABank, leading to the revenue decline both on the interest income and interest expense line. Surprised to see that the costs are still pretty rigid or still pretty high. I mean, year-over-year revenues were down like 40%, costs were up 13%. CIRs for the first quarter was at 84%, 85%, if I'm not mistaken. Any way to get the cost down? Any plans to get the cost down in the ABank business, or you're waiting for the revenue to return and that will kind of normalize the CIR? Slightly linked to ABank, the capital injection point. Just wanted to get some more color around what was the requirement for the capital injection coming from CBQ to ABank, and should we expect more of these? Thank you. Yeah. Hi, Rahul. Let me take those questions one at a time. First one was on net interest margins. As you first asked, what is the driver of that? I think there is a few there. Firstly, as I mentioned, the low-cost deposits continue to rise. They are not only rising, but they are of a more stable nature as well, given the products we are focusing on. That has been a very strong driver for increasing the net interest margin, plus the lending, the investment book, et cetera, that we have been working on has ensured that our net interest margins improve. That has given even that Alternatives was lower year-on-year as well, as Kaan Gür had explained. Our guidance would be that net interest margin will continue to improve. It will be a modest improvement from here. This is 2.6% already at consolidated level. Our target is to continue increasing our net interest margin from this point onwards. Second question was around loan guidance. As you quite rightly said, our guidance was 5%-6%. For this year, we did have a large temporary overdraft at the end of last year. That was paid back, but built up a little bit again during the first quarter. Apart from that, there was a strong pipeline that we have been working on. The business converted that into loans within the first quarter, and that is something that we really emphasize to do as much of the business in the first part of the year as possible. The business has been successful in doing that. Probably 5%-6%, therefore, is at the lower end, given what we have achieved already in the first quarter. We will watch that as we go. There is some de-risking to be done as well. We are certainly very pleased with the loan growth in the first quarter. I think your third and fourth questions were around Alternatif Bank. Let me just answer firstly on the capital injection. We have done QAR 25 million in the first quarter. There is another QAR 25 million to be done later this year. We had budgeted for QAR 50 million capital injection during the course of this year. Half of that has been done so far. On the Alternatives performance and the cost-income ratio, obviously there is inflation-related cost increase in Alternative. Having said that, the cost-income ratio looks very high because of the decrease in income primarily, and that is what we will be looking to address. Of course, there are cost efficiencies to be achieved as well, and the management team is looking at how to reduce costs from the base that we have here. I will ask Kaan Bey to add to that, if you will, Kaan. Rehan Shaikh, thank you. You completely answered the questions, actually. Again, I would like to assure that starting from quarter two, actually, we have seen the April results that we are coming back in terms of profitability. At the same time, I would like to stress a little bit that, especially when you look into our performance year-on-year basis, I would like to remind that especially with the COVID impacts, started from April 2020. The first quarter of last year in terms of the new business generations, et cetera, were very successful. Then, of course, the transaction numbers and the new business, when you look into the first quarter, there was a lack of demand in the market due to very higher borrowing rates, as I mentioned early. The second thing is, yes, especially managing the expenses are our main focuses. At the same time, we are eager to grow our net interest income, the basis. Of course, we are, once again, converting our existing loan book in a very aggressive way, but very selective way in order to get a higher margin there. At the same time, of course, the lowering the deposit cost. As you can see, I mentioned that especially the demand deposit growth for the first quarter is better than the banking sector. Those are our main focuses. Of course, keeping our loan book intact, keep it healthy, and one of the best performing loan books in the banking system. Those are the important areas. Thank you, Rehan Shaikh. Thanks for the questions. Thank you. Rahul, I'll just add on the capital question that you had. As I mentioned, QAR 50 million for this year, of which QAR 25 million has been done. Then there's a further QAR 50 million that we have in plan for next year- Yeah which takes it up to that QAR 300 million that we'd indicated a few years ago, is the overall plan for Alternatif Bank. Yeah, definitely. Sure. Thanks, Rehan and Kaan. Just quick one on capital injection. Please correct me if I'm wrong. What is the capital impact on your capital ratios from these injections? Is there any impact? Ultimately this gets kind of consolidated ABank gets consolidated with CBQ. Is there an impact at your capital level? No, it cancels out completely at consolidation, given it's 100% subsidiary. Got it. Thanks so much. Okay. If you have any questions, please use the raise hand feature. I will pause for a moment. Vikram, please go ahead and ask your question. Hello. Can you hear me? Yes, Vikram, go ahead. Yes. Thank you for the call. Congratulations for the wonderful set of results. My question was on the associate income. The aggregate share of income from associates has now turned positive in this quarter. How should we look at this, as far as the full year is concerned? Should we be annualizing the Q1 number, or should we expect increasing momentum in earnings from the associates in 2021? Thank you. Yeah, Vikram, I think Q1 is a good indication of where the business is going, both in UAB and NBO. Both are obviously working to improve their financials in Q2 onwards as well. We expect that this will be a base case for both of those associates. Obviously, they're independent banks and independent entities, but I think that's the indication I would give on their numbers going forward. All right. Thank you. Our next question is from Aybek Islamov. Aybek, please go ahead and ask your question. Yes, thank you. Thank you for the conference call. Just a couple of questions from me. The first one is that you do have some other comprehensive losses, which basically means your comprehensive income is lower in the first quarter of this year. What's the chance you think that these other comprehensive losses may go into the P&L, into the income statement during 2021? Secondly, I had a question about the Board of Directors. The term looks like in 2022, the term of nine Board members will expire. What usually happens around that period? How many members are going to be reelected? Do you envisage big changes to the Board of Directors in 2022 when the terms expire? If you can answer this question, yes. Sure, Aybek. Thanks for that. Firstly, in terms of OCI, other comprehensive income, no, they would stay in OCI. They would not translate into the P&L. In terms of the board of directors, it's been a pretty stable board of directors for a very long time. I don't have any indication that it would change from what it is today. Joseph, anything you would add to that? No, I don't think, Aybek, we have any indication that the board of directors would be any different from what it is today. Okay. Thank you. I think I would just say that the board of directors has been very supportive of the strategy and the actions that have been taken. We would expect that to continue. Thank you. We have no further questions. Joseph, any closing remarks, please? Thank you very much for joining us today. We're always happy to take any further questions or any clarification that you require. Rehan and Zubair from our finance team are always available. Thank you again for joining us, and we look forward to talking to you again after our half yearly results. Till then, please stay safe. As was said, we live in extraordinary times, so I think health is the most important currently. Thank you very much.