UBS Group AG

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Welcome to the first quarter 2022 results presentation. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. Should you need operator assistance, please press star and zero. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Sarah Mackey, UBS Investor Relations. Please go ahead, madam.

Good morning and welcome, everyone. Before we start, I would like to draw your attention to our cautionary statement slide at the back of today's results presentation. Please also refer to the risk factors in our 2021 annual report, together with additional disclosures in our SEC filings. On slide two, you can see our agenda for today. It's now my pleasure to hand over to Ralph Hammers, Group CEO.

Thank you, Sarah. Good morning, everyone. The first quarter of 22 was dominated by extraordinary geopolitical macro events as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And during these turbulent times, we've remained focused on three key priorities. Executing our strategic plans, serving our clients, and managing risk. We once again proved the benefits of our global scale and the power of our ecosystem for investing. And we're working hard to enhance them every day. Our clients had to navigate a challenging and complex environment, as you can well understand, so our focus was to really stay close to them and advise them on their portfolios and risk management. At the same time, we prudently manage our own risks. By working together across the businesses and the control functions, we further reduced our exposure to Russia. Our focus on clients and risk management resulted in another strong quarter financially, and it highlighted the resilience of our diversified business. We have and will continue to execute on our strategy regardless of the market's volatility. On slide four, you can see some of the milestones that we have achieved so far this year. In an environment of higher rates, higher inflation, higher volatility, it's more important than ever to ensure that portfolios are well diversified including exposure to alternatives. And during the last quarter, our wealth management clients committed $8 billion to private markets. Our US clients continue to value our seamless offering for separately managed accounts. And we saw another $7.5 billion of inflows in the first quarter. Sustainability, as you can well imagine, remains important for our clients, for us as well. And this quarter, we launched a number of sustainable finance products. For example, a new climate transition fund in collaboration with Aon. And in Switzerland, we now also offer mortgages with preferential interest rates if the proceeds are used to improve energy efficiency of buildings. Our clients are at the center of our strategy, so we're particularly proud to have been named number one in client satisfaction across U.S. wealth management firms in the J.D. Power Survey. But also in the latest Euromoney private banking survey, we received 192 awards, including best wealth manager in Asia Pacific, best wealth manager in Western Europe, as well as the best wealth manager in sustainable investing globally. And we were awarded currency derivatives house of the year in 22 risk awards. So accolades from many different institutions for how we're doing. We're also continuously evolving our mobile applications, making it even easier for our clients to stay connected with us. More than half of our personal clients in Switzerland are active on mobile banking now. We process more than three times as many mobile logins as we do desktop logins. So you see also that trend here moving away from desktop to mobile. To make us even better in delivering our client promise, we're driving cultural change across the firm. Early this month, 10,000 colleagues became part of Agile at UBS, our Agile way of working. We're removing silos and bringing different types of expertise together in teams. We continue also to support hybrid working. For example, in the US, we launched an industry-leading approach to flexible working that will provide employees in eligible roles with the opportunity to work 100% remotely. And that's in addition to the two-thirds of employees who we've already enabled to work in hybrid models. Now, in short, we're continuing to focus on our strategic imperatives, as you can see. One of those is also sustainability, core to our ecosystem, part of our purpose, a strategic focus as well, especially in these volatile times where we should not forget about this. And you see an update on this on slide five. On the people side, we're supporting the people in Ukraine and those who have fled the country. Clients and employees can donate towards relief efforts through the Optimist Foundation. Together with XCX Markets, we have committed to match those donations. So far, the total amount of around $30 million is raised, and with our goal to reach up to $50 million. So still going to a higher number here, but we have 30 million raised up to now We also advanced on our priority to address wealth inequality For example, we introduced an inclusive investing group in the US and that team specialized in helping clients promote diversity and inclusive growth through their investments on the planet side as you may well remember We had our AGM earlier this month. Our shareholders voted in favor of our client roadmap across the different scopes. We've also received valuable feedback there. So we'll stay engaged with shareholders as we further evolve our targets and methodologies that we apply. One way in which we'll evolve our climate reporting is by disclosing emissions based on the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials, PCAF in short. This standard should also help us expand our Scope 3 disclosures over time. We also became a founding member of Carbon Place, an innovative trading platform being developed to create a truly scalable voluntary carbon market. And we joined the Green Software Foundation as a steering member to help us achieve net zero emissions from our own operations. So you see it's been another important quarter also from a sustainability agenda perspective. As mentioned before, the market backdrop was dominated by the war in Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions against Russia. But even before the war, markets were volatile. Lower growth expectations dampened investor sentiment, especially in China. Inflation was already fueling fears of tighter monetary policy. And in this environment, our ecosystem continued to grow. And you can see that on slide six. Our clients turned to us for advice execution, and liquidity. And this is a true reflection of their confidence in our stability, our global reach, but also our knowledge, our local knowledge, our sector knowledge. And we intensified our client engagements and provided more insights through our Chief Investment Office research that covered topics ranging from the war to inflation to interest rates and more. And just to give you a bit of an idea as to how close we stayed to our clients, our CIO hosted over 1,000 dedicated events reaching more than 100,000 clients and prospects advising as to how to deal with the current situation. And that proactive outreach, research, and advice gave our clients guidance in their investment decisions. We saw 19 billion inflows into the fee-generating assets. And that's a 5% annualized growth rate. And the bulk of these were in mandates. In addition, we saw strong inflows in our asset management capabilities. We continued to see growth across our hedge fund business as well. The passive products, separately managed accounts, and sustainable investments with net new money excluding money market at $14 billion. Our personal banking clients in Switzerland also continued to put their money to work in investment products. Inflows were a billion in the quarter, and that's a 16% analyzed growth rate. And the majority of these inflows were also into mandates, where sustainable investing is a major driver of growth. Our institutional clients had many opportunities to trade as well. Volatile markets drove trading volumes, especially in EMEA. Our clients were particularly active in equity derivatives and foreign exchange. where we were able to facilitate high volumes, manage risk, provide access to liquidity, and all this resulted in the highest global market revenues on record. So to conclude, throughout these complex times, our clients continue to put their trust in us. And one of the reasons is that the value is being a source of stability, seeing our strong capital position and our strong control environment They see that as important assets to work with us. Slide seven, we give you an update on Russia. So being a strong partner for our clients also means managing our own risk proactively. And as you can see on the right-hand side here, we significantly reduced our already low exposure to Russia during this quarter. We're focused on complying with all applicable sanctions as the situation rapidly evolves. Now, this diligent risk management combined with our global diversification made us more resilient. Our clients turned, as indicated, for advice through these challenging times. These times give challenges, but also opportunities. We remained disciplined in cost, and this led to a strong firm-wide financial result, as you can see on slide eight. Operating income was up 8% versus a year ago, making this the seventh consecutive quarter of year-on-year growth. Positive operating leverage meant pre-tax profit was up 19% and net profit was up 17%. Return on CT1 capital reached 19%. Our cost-income ratio decreased over three percentage points to 70.7%. We also repurchased 1.7 billion of shares in the quarter, And we're well on track to buy back around $5 billion by the end of the year. So we captured the opportunities to drive the growth on both top and bottom lines. And as we do that, we're executing our strategic plans, as well as our vision to convene the global ecosystem for investing. And with that, I'll hand over to Kurt, who will take us through our numbers before we get into Q&A.