AIB Group plc

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to AAB Group PLC Q1 Trading Update Conference Call, hosted by Colin Hunt, Chief Executive Officer, and Donald Galvin, Chief Financial Officer. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in the listen-only mode. You may register for questions at any time by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. And now I'm handing over to AAB CEO, who will give some brief opening remarks, and then we will open for Q&A.

Thank you. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our trading call for the first quarter of 2025. Thank you for your time this morning. The business has had a strong opening quarter. Our Q1 performance is ahead of plan, and we are reiterating all our guidance. We are continuing to grow our loan book prudently and to attract new customers, over 500 every single day to AIB, while making significant progress on the implementation of our strategy. Year-on-year, new lending increased by 14%, of which 38% was green. Net interest income was in line with expectations, while net fees and commissions were up 7%. Costs were 3% up, in line with guidance, delivering a cost-income ratio of 43% in the quarter. We remain exceptionally well-capitalized, with the NMARCH CE21 ratio standing at 16.8%. We are, of course, conscious that the external environment is uncertain. But that said, the domestic economy continues to perform solidly with employment growth running at 2.5% and modified domestic demand going by 3% in real terms currently. Our own PMIs remain in expansion territory and this morning we released our manufacturing PMI with a very robust result. Trade tensions externally have increased and have the potential to be dampening of global growth and put upward pressure on global prices. While growth domestically is expected to be more modest than experienced in recent years, it will still be comfortably ahead of other economies across the Eurozone and further afield. The Irish economy remains strong, characterized by high employment, 2.8 million people at work, 400,000 more, than pre-pandemic, low leverage, high savings ratios, and a robust fiscal position. This management team has been ambitious in our strategy and conservative in our execution, conservative in our underwriting, in our provisioning, and in our guidance. And that remains very much our modus operandi, and we're confident that we will meaningfully exceed our ROTI targets for 2025 and comfortably meet it in 2026. I'll stop there for the moment and hand over to you for your questions.

Thank you, sir. As a reminder, to ask a question, please signal the person to stall one. Shamsa, JP Morgan, please go ahead.