First question is from Aakash Rawat from UBS. UBS. Everyone. Yes. I have four questions. The first one is, the recent acquisition and the future expansion plans that you've talked about, I think they're all great strategic moves. Alongside these, should investors also be expecting some sort of fine-tuning on your payout policy? You might see a need for preserving a bit more capital than before. Do you think you can continue with the more aggressive dividend policy that you've had, especially like compared to the peers? Are you going to ask all four questions together or? Maybe we can go one by one, if that's okay. Okay. Yeah. I think we have adequate capital. We're about 14.2% at this point in time. That's after both Lakshmi Vilas and Shenzhen Rural Bank. There was a question earlier in the media, would we look at Citi, and I said, yes, we look at them. Even if we wound up doing a liberal Citi, we still have enough capital. At this point in time, we do think we have the capacity to go back to our pre-COVID dividend levels, notwithstanding the M&A that we've done. Okay. Understood. The second question I have is on the digital exchange. Are you already seeing any income from that? If yes, where is this showing up on the income statement? On a related note, what sort of contribution do you see from this business this year and maybe in the steady state? Aakash, so far, the income we see from that will be in decimals or points. It doesn't matter where in the income statement it won't show up. Like I said, unlike the big exchanges which are sort of going for the mass market, because we're trying to position ourselves differently. The way we compete with Binance and Coinbase, et cetera, is we want people to figure that we are regulated in parts of the business at least, that we come from a bank. We have a much higher threshold and standard for everything. Our custody is bank standard custody capabilities. It's not exchange standard custody capability and so on. We've been quite deliberate in opening up that business. Like I said, we've only got 120 clients. I know for us that we have hundreds of more, probably thousands of clients who are waiting in the queue, but we're being slightly thoughtful about how we bring them on board. Similarly, on the asset side. Also, we started off just keeping it open in the Asia trading hours. Obviously the serious traders want 24 seven access to trading. It's going to be a steady process for us between now and the end of the year. I think we'll start seeing material contribution to income, which I can point to, only from 2022. I won't hold my breath on looking for income in 2021. Got it. Any sense of what that material contribution might be? Like some rough range around 10%, 15%? No, no. We make SGD 16 billion, so it will be SGD one and a half billion dollars, 10%. I don't know whether we get there. See, the thinking I have on many of these, what I call infrastructure and this thing activities, is the markets are changing and customers are doing more and more. We need to figure how we get into the game and start monetizing. I really don't have really good line of sight for how big any of these could get. I do think given the amount of interest in all the four cryptos that we trade now, the interest is quite high. Therefore, I do think it will pick up. Whether it picks up to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of income over the next three years is hard to say. My thing is we should get in there, figure it out, and grow, and then we'll get a better sense for how big this could be in time. By the way, the same is true for other parts of the business, not just the trading. On the digital custody, we are getting a lot of approaches now from other exchanges who want to use us for the digital custody capability because it's obviously superior. We obviously clip a coupon. We charge a little bit for people who want to use the custody capability. The journey is still a little clunky when we provide the service to other exchanges, so we're trying to streamline that and make that more straight through and this thing. We're also being careful about how we bring that on. I don't want to create an operations nightmare. Finally, on the Security Token Offering, like I said, we will try and do at least one, maybe a couple smaller tickets in the Q2 just to make sure that it works, we know how to do it, we can get it out. We're trying to do fixed income equity, maybe some property. All of this is frankly as much a learning and seasoning for us as well before we can really scale it up. Got it. Thanks, Aakash. Third question I have is on the credit risk RWA, which went up by SGD 7 billion quarter-on-quarter. Of course, it was offset by the market risk reduction. What drove these two things? If you're thinking that asset quality is actually looking better, why did the credit risk RWA actually go up so much? The loan went up by SGD 12 billion. It's primarily driven by asset growth. We grew loans at SGD 12 billion. SGD 12 billion in loans are typically our credit density is around 50%. If you grow loans at SGD 12 billion, you expect RWA to grow at SGD 6 billion, and then there'll be some noise in the numbers beyond that. Understood. On the market risk side, what was it that actually drove the RWA down by SGD 6 billion? We made an improvement in our market risk model. I'm going to let Chng Sok Hui explain it. Previously we were basically using what we call a maturity method, and we have now moved to a duration method, which is more efficient. The duration method allows you to use the cash flow-based sensitivity, which is PV of one in slotting the bucket, as opposed to taking sort of the entire NPV and slotting it. This refinement model required MAS approval, so we have been in discussions for a year. It's been approved, and that's why we're using the more refined method. It is more consistent with the way we manage the risk in the dealing room. Understood. For the rest of the year, do you see any RWA growth because of the credit migration, not because of asset growth? Actually, as I said, we are actually seeing the reverse. The portfolio quality is improving and not deteriorating. In the first quarter, I saw more upgrades than downgrades, frankly, overall. No, as the moratoriums end, you might see something. The Singapore moratoriums, the chunk of them are behind us. The Hong Kong moratoriums won't end until 2022. You could see some, but on the whole, I don't think it's going to be material. Aakash, one easy way for you to look at that is actually look at the Pillar Three. Pillar Three actually have that breakdown. If you look at A6 of the Pillar Three, basically you'll see the RWA was SGD 204, it went up to SGD 211, and the breakdown is given for you. Asset size basically increased by SGD 7.4 billion. Asset quality improved, you got a reduction of SGD 1.8 billion, and foreign exchange movements contributed another SGD 1.6. You can actually see the breakdown quite readily in that schedule. Got it. Thank you for that. The last question is just on the loan growth. What the asset size and foreign exchange movements were the big contributors, offset by improvement in credit quality, which we just went through the same reasons for why ECL came down. Understood. Thank you for that. The last question is on the loan growth. This SGD 12 billion increase is quite big QOQ. Could you share some breakdown? You did say it was broad-based, but could you give some color on what sectors in the corporate side drove that? Actually, out of the SGD 12 billion, about SGD 3 billion was actually reverse repo transactions, which was liquidity for financial institution counterparties. If you park that aside, the balance, we had about SGD 4 billion of corporate loan growth, which was broad-based. We got TMT, we had real estate, we had transportation. I think it was very broad-based. I try to figure if there's any concentration, but it was just very broad. Manufacturing, trading, et cetera. We had about SGD 2 billion in trade was mostly commodity trade, but some manufacturing trade as well. That was generally up. We got SGD 1 billion growth in the housing portfolio that I've spoken about before. We got close to SGD 2 billion growth supporting the wealth management and the activities around that, it was quite dispersed. Okay, understood. Thank you for that. That is all questions from me. Thank you. Thank you, Aakash. All due participants with questions to pose, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. You will be placed in the queue. To cancel the queue, please press zero two. Once again, zero one on your telephone keypad now. Next we have Nicholas Teh from Credit Suisse. Yep. Thanks for taking my question. Just a couple of questions from me. Just wanted to ask on the GP side. I guess if I look at pre-pandemic levels in 2019, the GP was about 0.7% of your total loans. I guess, as we go forward, as you're thinking about where your GP amount could settle, are you looking at settling at that kind of level, I guess towards the end of 2022? Or do you think it could be lower or higher than that? The other question I had was just on dividends. I think previously you mentioned that you would go up to your SGD 0.33 in kind of two steps. With the improved outlook, are you looking at sort of just moving it up in one fell swoop? On the GP, I'm going to let Chng Sok Hui handle that, but there's a MAS expectation on GP, which is one percent of what is the qualified portfolio, including some secured assets, and maybe Chng Sok Hui can elaborate a little bit more on that. That's the benchmark that we likely to use. Chng Sok Hui? Yeah. It's one percent of this qualifying base, and this base excludes. Effectively, because housing loans are all fully secured, basically it's one chunk that gets removed. Overall, that's why you notice maybe it's just 0.7% of the total loan. The whole stack of SGD 4.1, like we mentioned earlier, is two parts, right? It is the model reserve, plus what we feel the models may not adequately take care of in the pandemic situation, and we have a management overlay. In total, SGD 4.1 billion, how it moves, we don't fix a percentage around it. We will say that cases like in this quarter where they had upgrades, the worser names get paid off or the maturity gets shortened or the flow rates improve, you get a natural write-back. The call on the management overlay will be a view that we have to assess, taking into account on the retail side, I think we say that we'll look at unemployment rates, et cetera, in each location, and there could be opportunity to free up some GP if the conditions driving those models for management overlay are conducive. SMEs will look at moratorium tapering off, and for the larger corporates, I think we'll have to assess the sort of global situation. At any point in time, we'll be sort of quite vigilant. We'll always have a weight on the stress environment. It's only a question of how much weight we place on the stress. That's how we've always managed our GP on a prudent basis. Your other question on dividends. Actually, I said last time, and frankly, it's not entirely in our hands. It depends on what the MAS wants to do. If the MAS decides to remove all restrictions on dividend payment, yes, I think there'll be likelihood that we will go back to the pre-COVID levels right away. If the MAS put in restrictions and only allow us to move back in a graduated way or couple of steps, obviously we're going to have to follow what the guidelines are. So far, we've not had any direction or indications from MAS about what they're planning to do. Okay, got it. Thanks so much. Thank you, Nicholas. Next in questions, we have Nick Lord from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Thanks very much. Thanks for taking my question. Couple of questions from me. The first, just in terms of wealth management volumes have been obviously pretty strong in Q1. I just wonder if you could give us any commentary as to what activity levels are like sort of as we go into April. My second question would just be on the loan growth. You've given us a good description of where it's come from. I guess if we were to annualize Q1, we would end up well ahead of double or high single digits. I just wonder if you could talk about where you think the slowdown comes or what happens in Q2 that restrains you from mid to high single digits. Finally, one of your global competitors yesterday in their reporting season spoke about, as you have, cutting sort of the commercial office space, but also said they were looking to halve their branch network. I just wonder if the sort of increased use of digitization and the impacts of what we've learned from COVID would lead you to lower your branch footprint at some stage. On the wealth management, it's been a tad bit slower than March, but it's sort of in line with previous things. Overall environment is still good and activity is positive. It's just that the first quarter, January and March were very strong, so it's not at the same level. It's quite solid so far. I think a lot depends on what happens to the market. If the markets don't tank. I think the markets have been a little iffy for the last couple of weeks, so people aren't sure whether they're going up or down. If the markets hold up or if we actually see a run-up, then that activity will come back. On loan growth, as I said, one is the repo loans in the first quarter. I think we should park them aside because those tend to be opportunistic. I don't count that into our normal business or as I forecast the business. I really look at SGD 9 odd billion of growth in the first quarter as opposed to SGD 12 billion as I'm thinking about the outlook. Within that, the corporate lending pipeline and the trade pipeline are actually quite robust. At least as far as I can see, second quarter is safe on those two fronts. The wealth management related loans, which are material, those again, are a function of first question. If wealth management is not as strong, then that loan book won't grow that strong. That could be softer. On mortgages, I think you'll see a stronger mortgage growth in the first half of the year than the second half of the year. I think a large part of this is the front-ending of people doing their resale and et cetera. I do think you'll see some potentially slowdown in mortgages in the second half of the year. Therefore, if you back our repo, we did about two percent in the Q1. If you annualize that, you'd be looking at eight percent, and I think you might not hit eight, but you could get high single digits somewhere there. Your third question is on the branch footprint. We already actually said that before, that one of the things that we've been doing is rationalizing our branches, not through reduction of footprint as a number of branches per se, but in transforming the nature of our branches. All our branches are not the old fashioned put lots of people, foot sold branches. We now have digital branches. We have what we call NAV Hub, which are sort of in between branches. That is already allowing us the opportunity to trim the branch footprint in terms of square feet without necessarily reducing the absolute number of branches per se. The actual presence for us in various parts of the city and having a shingle out there is actually quite important. Yes, we will see some benefits from the commercial real estate in the branch network as well. We're also seeing that outside Singapore, and we'll probably do some rationalization of the LVB footprint in time. We're seeing something in Taiwan. We're getting some benefit. When I say we probably save 20 odd% saving in commercial space, it's not just the headquarter space. There is some impact to the branches as well. Thanks very much. Thank you. We have Melissa Kuang from Goldman Sachs next. Please go ahead. Hi there. Thank you for taking my questions. I have a few questions. Just firstly, in terms of the AUM, just wanted to understand, are you seeing also quite strong AUM flow coming into Singapore and into UBS? That's what's also driving your fee income. If you have some color on the regions which it's coming in, would be helpful. Secondly, perhaps in terms of your digital side and Digibank, you mentioned that in terms of the current players in the market on those digital guys coming in, there's not much action and there's nothing yet. Those guys also have been a bit strong in the pay later side. Do you think that is something that UBS would launch ahead of these virtual banks coming on board in Singapore? That's my second question. Then, thirdly. Maybe a really odd question to ask here, but I just wanted to understand if you know when banks buy assets outside of the banking system, they get actually penalized in terms of capital deductions. I was just thinking in terms of the virtual banks, they are part of a consumer company or sort of. Do they have the same kind of penalization in terms of their capital that will hinder them? If not the case, then would at some point UBS consider looking at maybe something in the consumer space as well to kind of enhance the whole ecosystem? Thank you. Oh. Melissa Kuang, the first one on AUM. Our AUMs are growing but it's not dramatically different from most things. I think our net new money was about SGD 1.5 billion for the quarter of our total AUM growth. That's fairly steady, and it comes from all over the place, including some from North Asia. If the extent of the question, are we seeing a big pickup of money flows coming in from Hong Kong or China or this thing? Not really. We're seeing fairly steady flows from all our usual sources of inflow of money. On the digibanks, the pay later scheme. First of all, I'm not sure how much opportunity there is in the pay later schemes in Singapore because I said before, by and large, the Singapore SMEs are fairly well banked. All of the surveys and our own surveys suggest that most people have adequate access to financing. Especially last year with the pandemic, all the government support programs. For example, we gave out 20,000 small merchant loans, which they didn't have before. There is some benefit, but it's not huge. The flip side of the pay later is I think it has the possibility of creating social issues. When you go through the regulated banking space, the central banks have a fairly tight eye on how much net credit is being created. Is there overextension of credit? What is the total credit? The pay later space allows people to actually circumvent some of those controls, and consequently, many regulators are not comfortable with that. I do think that there will be some sharper oversight of the pay later space. In short, I think the opportunity is there, but it's not huge. In any case, I think there will be regulatory oversight over it. Your last question on capital and capital deductions. There is a limit with MAS, lets us go and buy anything we want now, and MAS changed the regulations some years ago. We can go outside of our traditional business and participate in other activities up to some reasonable limits. 10% of our total capital, I think we can, which is quite a bit. We could put SGD 5 billion into different things without a challenge. We're really not necessarily that disadvantaged from that standpoint. When you look at capital for these three companies, the thing you got to remember is it's not that constrained in terms of capital adequacy. The real issue is that their source of capital is what gives them arbitrage. They get a lot of money from a lot of private equity and other investors on terms which public companies like us are unable to access. That's really the source of advantage. The gist of your question is, would we do stuff outside of our core thing? We do in small pockets. We put in small investments in those ecosystem arrangements where we think that we can bring some value. They've been in the handful of SGD million. They're not large. I do think that we have some opportunities to expand beyond the core banking space. We're quite thoughtful to make sure that these are adjacencies that make sense. The way we are trending to lean into it is to see where can we provide infrastructure services, where can we use our technology capabilities, and how can we get into a broader revenue stream leveraging some of those things, as opposed to trying to get into completely new businesses we don't understand. Right. Thank you very much. Operator, do you have another call? Thank you. Thank you, Minli, for your question. Next, we have Harsh from JP Morgan. Hi. Thanks for the call. Yes. More than a couple of questions, actually. First one, on CET1 gives this 12.5 to 13.5, let's say midpoint 13. Taking into consideration both the organic and inorganic growth, assuming you go back to SGD 0.13 on dividend. By when do you think you should get back to that 13 odd% CET1? It all depends on M&A. If we don't do, we have a lot of surplus capital, and every quarter, we accrete more capital. Even at SGD 0.33, we accrete capital. Therefore, if we don't do M&A, we'll have to start returning a lot more capital to get back to 12 and a half to 13 and a half. Yeah. Okay. It does give us the cushion to do M&A, and we've talked about things that we could look at. It's all a function of that. Okay. The second bit is just on this things like the digital exchange. I don't know if Partior also ticks that box. Is there any capital commitment to these initiatives in terms of, SGD 80 million is small number, but let's say it becomes SGD 1 billion of assets under custody. There would be some operational risk, likely some sort of counterparty risk and so on. Does the capital consumption move up meaningfully in some of these new businesses that you're looking at? Actually, no. All the businesses we've looked at. It's quite interesting that the way the rules and structure work, you don't need a lot of capital in these instances. What you said is correct. The real issue is op risk, and when you think about the op risk and op risk capital, it's not huge. You don't get any credit risk. You really don't get any market risk. You add on some op risk. You've got to be tight about that. It's not very capital consumptive, no. Okay. Moving on to provisions for guidance of SGD 1 billion sounds a bit conservative. How should we think about that number, given it was close to zero in Q1? How much of that is conservative guidance? How much of that is realistic? What are the numbers which will change that? Let's say if end of the year we end up at, let's say 400 or 500 number, what would have led to that kind of outcome? Harsh, I think I'm going to let you figure out what you want to put into your model. I'm not giving you any guidance. All I can say is that, yeah, I think we'll be well shy of SGD 1 billion. If you look at the outlook, the first quarter, like I said. There are really three pieces. I'm going to make it easier for you. There are three pieces, right? One is specific provision. At this point in time, I'm not seeing anything on the wins fee which is giving me cause to believe that there will be big pickup in specific provision. The provision in the Q1 of SGD 200 odd billion go back to pre-COVID. I'm not seeing anything which says there'll be a lot more. The second is the improvement in the portfolio, which is a model-driven GP, and the repayment. Like I said, that came from both things. One, some of the weaker names paid down, and I think partly it's because people have been able to go to bond market, raise money alternatively, and they paid us down. The bigger thing was that companies are improving. We had a shipyard company that improved. We had an automotive company that improved. We're seeing improvement in companies. If that improvement in companies continues, you should expect to see a continued reversal of that model-driven GP. The question is, should we expect the improvement to continue? That goes back to macroeconomics. With that tremendous bounce back in all of the economies and whether it's the U.S. or China or everywhere else, logically you should expect it should flow through to corporate earnings. If it flows through to corporate earnings, then it'll flow through the improvement in the portfolio. That's the way to think about it. Exactly how much that improvement is and how much we might be able to get back is hard to call, and that's why I don't want to put a number around it. The last category is that SGD 1 billion odd or so we put in, principally because we didn't know how to model the moratorium impact and didn't know how to model some of those things in our model, so we added it on. That really is a function of if the moratoriums keep winding up through the course of the year, the consumer keeps improving, then do we keep some of it for the residual moratorium? Hong Kong is going to carry on till 2022. There are some other areas. We'll have to have conversations with our regulators because in some cases the regulators might want us to keep more or keep less. These are all things we would have to worry about in the course of the next couple of quarters. If I add all of that together, I think there's every likelihood that we'll be well south of SGD 1 billion. It's hard to dimension what the number could be. Got it. Sorry, if I may, Piyush. Just on Partior. Massive positive. I'm not saying because I'm from JP Morgan. Blockchain was just a concept and when you actually think about monetizing it, let's say for a DBS customer who is doing a cross-border payment, is it just better quality service, more secure, or do you also charge a premium for this? Let's say, how do you start monetizing it and two years out how do you think it takes the shape in terms of actual PNL impact and/or actual revenue client impact for you? Harsh, I think the actual benefit of it to our direct customers will be there but limited. We already charge. The cross-border payments, we charge some money. For large corporate it's a flat fee. I don't think you can charge a lot more. For SMBs, it tends to be, and Rajaram said for large number of SMEs, if you can improve their payment, this thing by a couple of days, you could squeeze something out, but I doubt you'll get a lot. What you will get, if you can get a lot more volume because you can do it more efficiently, then you tend to make a lot more on things like FX. That adds up. That's not the principal driver. The principal driver of the infrastructure play is to think like Visa or Mastercard or SWIFT. Visa and Mastercard take a coupon just for providing the wheels on which global settlement takes place in the card space. They make SGD 15 billion and SGD 20 billion respectively just doing that. They do more than that for just doing that. If you can be part of an infrastructure play and you can effectively take a small coupon on payments to facilitate the thing, then that's where effectively the platform winds up making money. You essentially gain from the value of the platform more than the customer revenues that you make directly. Right. I don't know if I'm pushing it, but do you think this replaces SWIFT? Is that the utopian goal? Well, SWIFT want to do something similar. If you really look at the underlying nature and just sort of focus on SWIFT. The issue, I've been doing this for 30 years, this has been for me one of the holy grail. We did a version of it, a shortcut of it four, five years ago. We launched DBS Remit and PayLah!. The whole notion of settlement, which it takes two T plus two because it goes through Like you, JPMorgan is a correspondent bank. If I have to pay somebody in London, I pay to JP Morgan. JPMorgan then pays to Citi. Citi then pays to Barclays. Those hops take two days. Now, the problem with that is FX is happening in real time, securities is happening in real time, but the cash settlement is taking two days, and that creates massive inefficiencies in the system. When we launched Remit, we said, "Forget going through the hop. I'll just set up direct bilateral relationships in the countries that matter." That's why I can now do payments into all of the countries that are meaningful to me in three seconds. That's allowed us to build a big business. We make over SGD 100 million. I tell you, we do much better than TransferWise, and that's basically because we changed the hub and spoke nature of that. That unfortunately, you can do a bilateral arrangement only so far. What the blockchain lets you do is take it and democratize it at scale for any counterparty in the world. I'm not limited to places I've set up an arrangement. Therefore, anybody on this platform can effectively pay in real time instantly. Your settlement of security, settlement of FX, settlement of actual payment, you do in real time. I think that's a game changer, and it's much better than the current extant infrastructure, including the SWIFT infrastructure. The challenge with all of these, which will be a challenge for Partior as well, is how do you get enough usage? How do you get people to embrace it? Which is why we are creating this open platform. We are also hopeful about two things. One is this does have the support of the central banks. MAS is a big participant of Project Ubin and Thor. They're talking to other central banks, they're talking to other agencies to see how we could actually push this platform and make it generally available. I'm also quietly optimistic that as you see more of the CBDCs, every country is generating its own CBDC. Finally, I think you need a platform to be able to settle CBDCs from one country CBDC to another CBDC. Again, this blockchain-driven platform, it might be a good way to do that. Now, I'm optimistic that the use cases you can develop, but obviously the biggest challenge is getting enough people to embrace those use cases. Right. Yeah, no, there's a more involved conversation on that. This is brilliant. Thank you so much, Piyush. Those are all the questions I have for now. Thank you, Harsh. Next, we have Anand from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Sure. Thank you. Piyush, you mentioned a bit about the structural changes to wealth management and the treasury side. Just to put some numbers in context, the TPOP ROA that you showed this quarter, 1.38%, is just shy of three, four basis points of the peak TPOP ROA you showed in 2019, when the rate cycle was so high. Margins are down almost 50 basis points, but your TPOP margins have barely budged. In that context, if I adjust your credit cost to 25 basis points levels, I already get to a 13% ROE at the bottom of the rate cycle. In that context, where do you think is your kind of new structural TPOP, how much of this improvement is structural? How much of this is cyclical? Obviously, there is some component of fee income and some opex here. When credit costs and rates normalize, are we looking at a much higher base for your ROE compared to what we have seen historically? Thank you. Actually, apart from credit cost, we didn't take out another big thing for this quarter, that's trading. Trading, it was a big quarter. A normal trading quarter, I expect SGD 250 million. This time it was SGD 500 million. That SGD 500 million is not going to repeat. It is just a very unusual quarter for trading, and the problem is us. It was every big bank in the world. You've got to adjust down not just the unusual credit cost, but you also got to adjust out the trading. If you adjust both those out, then ROE is not as high as it appears on surface once you take trading out. My own thing is that the structural changes are helping. Without a doubt the changes in our business in transaction banking, the changes in our business in treasury customer flows, the changes in wealth management, they're all helping. I said before, the cumulative of that should give us, over time, maybe a percentage point of improvement in ROE, but it's not going to be huge. The impact of the interest rates is very material. My own sense is that if you look at our ROE before the interest rate hike, we were hanging around trying to get to 10.5, 11% ROE. The structural changes might get us north of 11. We might get to 11.5% ROE, but I don't think we'll get to 13 or thereabout unless the rate cycle comes back. Sure. On the OpEx side also, you could see some more upside, or that cyclicality will come back in the next few quarters? It depends on what prism you look. I think the absolute management of expenses, there clearly are upsides. We're running a huge transformation program, which includes our distribution. We're moving things digital, we're changing whatever. We will see some upside coming through from that. At the same time, as I do, the wage pressures are building up. I do think we're going to have to dial up a little bit on the wages and our variable comp this year. That will be a bit of a match. I think we can control expenses, like I said, to maybe three-four percent over the 2019 levels. The cost income ratio will creep up. It'll creep up because the income will be down because of the interest this thing. If you look at the cost income ratio prism, that will go up because the income will come down. Sure. Thank you. Anand. Next we have Danny Beattie. from HSBC. Please go ahead. Hi, this is Welden Financial. One is on the overseas strategy. Can I ask basically what kind of target segment do you want to look at? Because I guess with ANZ you're looking at wealth and Shenzhen is some SMEs and some amount of wealth as well. The Citi assets, I guess, are mostly more like retail stuff because they've skipped out the wealth. I'm trying to see, do you think it sits under what you're looking for? I think there are two pieces of the Citi business which are very similar to the ANZ book. One is the Citigold business, which is very similar to what we got from the ANZ wealth piece. That is very similar to what we have in our mass affluent, in our Treasures segment. Even the low end of the TBD segment. That is quite interesting. The other big piece is they have a fantastic card franchise, which is again, very similar to what we got from ANZ in Taiwan and Indonesia. That piece is also actually quite attractive. Okay. I see. Can I also ask about the platform? How scalable is it? Do you have a pipeline, or how many international banks is on your pipeline? If you extend to different currencies, do you need the regulatory approval of each regulator? Because this is basically putting your trust onto the ledger, right? Actually what we are going to let Kwee Juan on a group strategy talk to give a better sense for which banks and how many banks and things are in the pipeline. The basic thing you got to figure is that we are not creating a new cryptocurrency, right? That's the important thing to understand. It's not a new Bitcoin or a new Diem or whatever. All we are doing is digitizing fiat money. To the extent we're digitizing fiat money, it doesn't create an extended new way of this thing. I do think the regulatory forbearance is much better than if you start trying to create a new currency. Kwee Juan, you want to take that question on how do we get other players onto the platform, which are the currencies? Yeah. If you think about it, there is the whole concept of a settlement bank and a participating bank for the platform. We are talking to banks to be the core settlement bank that will be other currencies like JPY, EUR, and hopefully if we can, RMB, where PBOC allows. Those would be the important ones. The other one would be participant banks, where banks will come in to take advantage of this to clear a lot of their corporate and treasury payments. If you look at it in totality, today, we are speaking to right now, 67 of them. This is where the partners in the JV, which is JP, ourselves and Temasek, are talking. The entity has yet to be fully operational, and we already have quite a fair share of interest. This is where we are and with the setup itself, more will come. Since the announcement itself, we have been getting more inquiries from banks that we didn't target initially because we're just looking at those who can give us flows to get the platform growing. Right. Sure. Okay. Can I just one last question, I guess also on in the digital area is the digital bank in Indonesia. I guess there is some other players like Bank Jago now and all that. What do you think really is the difference between digibank and some of these digital players and how can you be more competitive? Actually, in many cases you won't see too much difference. Our customer experience and our customer journeys are actually quite similar. To me, in the big markets, the way to think about it is that you'll never see a winner take all. It's not that there'll be one big provider who will get suddenly dominant 100% market share. I think there'll be multiple providers who will continue to win market share, not just because of the digital product out there, but the rest of the suite of services and products they put together. We've got some very good ecosystem partnerships with several providers, e-commerce companies, loan origination companies, card issuing companies. By plugging our platform into some of those, we are actually getting some fairly decent volume and traction. Bottom line, I think we'll be a competitive player in the market. Doesn't necessarily mean that Jago won't be successful or someone else. Right. You also have partnerships with all the e-commerce and all these players. Yeah. We have plugged in. Essentially, a large part of our origination now is coming in through other partners. We just don't go direct to market. We are going in through this ecosystem strategy. Okay. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have Robert Kong from Citi Research. Hi. Thanks for the briefing and congrats again on the great result. Just some small questions, if I may. For India and LVB, what's the long term? I guess you're moving much to a hybrid strategy between the digibank and the LVB. I'm just trying to think what the long-term structure of the business will look like. You still have something like 600 branches, which I suppose is a little bit on the high side. Second, on the Shenzhen Rural Commercial Bank, you're going to be the biggest shareholder with 13% stake. What kind of management control do you expect to be able to get? I know you're going to get some sort of board representation. Will the revenue model be more seeing growth in UBS Hong Kong? Will that be where we will see the positive upside on that? Those are the two questions. Thank you. Robert, I guess on both LVB and Shenzhen Rural, the basic premise, which is a little bit of a shift in our thinking in the last five years, is that a pure digital play is not that easy to monetize to profitability. That's why if you look at all our things, we're getting a lot of top-line growth. I mean, numbers of customers growth, we're getting a lot of eyeball growth, a lot of the people who join us as pure digital banks are young millennial kids. They get the deals, they get the PB, it's not been that easy to monetize them. Therefore, we've been a little thoughtful about how much to keep pouring down that spigot because we're unlike many of the other people who are only trying to focus on the valuation game. We're trying to focus on a cash flow and a profitability game at the same time. We realize that in those places where we create phygital, where we add that digital along with the branch footprint, we get much better customer performance. We get better quality customers, we do a lot more with them. We saw that with the ANZ addition in Indonesia. It gave us a clear differentiation between that and what we are doing pure digitally. That thinking is what we're trying to carry out, that if we can actually scale up some degree of physical presence so we get brand, we get recognition, we get the people's willingness to accept that we are now a local bank. All of those things matter. That's what we're trying to achieve in some of these markets. In LVB, the five states where LVB has a presence, South Indian states, like Tamil Nadu, is quite attractive for us for many reasons. It's the better performing part of the system. The economy is better, everything's better into Singapore. It also allows us to change the profile of our business because today in India, it is very heavily large corporate. Whereas all the big returns, where if you take HDFC or Kotak, their returns are mostly SME and retail. We haven't had access to that. This changes that game. It allows us to build out and scale up the retail SME. It gives us a much better deposit base. It gives a better retail footprint. There's a lot of good strategic reasons for doing that. I think this is correct. Over time, I don't think we need 600 branches. 600 branches also include 100 and some branches which are rural unbanked. Those will do what the local banks do, use the business correspondent arrangement to take care of those. Of the others, we try and concentrate and focus on the districts and the centers where we get value. I think we will be able to rationalize some of that network. We will also overlay digital on top of that. Now, that's going to take us a year because the technology platform alignment doesn't happen overnight, and we were already doing some work in India. We will put digital products in there. We will rationalize some of the network. We will add on some of the assets that they have, including the gold loans and loan against property. We'll create an integrated presence, but that allows us to get into that SME and retail space in a far more compelling way than we've been able to do with just the pure digital strategy. That's the thinking. On the Shenzhen Rural, so right now, one of the advantages, this thing of they have a really good management team. We think that the Chairman, the CEO, the management team are very good. They have skin in the game. They run the place really well. We really don't think we need to do a lot of interfering in the day-to-day management of the bank. Obviously, we have a couple of board seats, so we'll keep an eye on the risk and help them with some stuff. The real thing that we think we can bring value is how do you transform the bank for becoming more international and becoming more digital. They don't have that. That's what they're reaching out to us for. That's what we will put our energies behind. You're right, a large part of the resourcing and the driving of that is going to come from Hong Kong and our own team. We've got a fairly large presence now in Shenzhen and in Guangzhou. We will be using our onshore teams in GBA as well as the Hong Kong team to work with Shenzhen Rural Commercial Bank to drive some of these incremental capabilities. The core running of the bank, they're very good. I don't think we need to necessarily get involved with that. Just one quick one on the Partior. I understand the phenomenal upside if you can clip a coupon on the volumes, but do you expect it to have a material impact on your own bank's fee income? As you say, you're going to be able to offer potentially a much more attractive way of settling payments than anybody else on the street. It remains to be seen, Robert. I think what we will see, and I'm already seeing that, if you look at my transaction banking business, both cash and trade, and look at the volume growth we've seen, and particularly through the pandemic, it's been off the chart. I think that results in not that I charge higher fee because I now have APIs, I can give them this thing. I charge them the same kind of fee structure, maybe slightly more. I get a lot more volume. My current take is that this should allow me to scale up the volumes we get and that will be attendant in larger fee pools and larger CASA balances and corporate deposits, et cetera. I think that will happen. It's less clear to me whether we'll be able to charge premium pricing, and we would have to test that in the market as it evolves. Thanks very much.