The Federal Bank Limited

Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Q1SY27 conference call hosted by Federal Bank. As a reminder, all 5-7 lines will be in the listen-only mode and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during this conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touchtone phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference call over to Mr. Souvik Roy, Head Investor Relations, the Federal Bank Limited. Thank you and over to you sir.

Thank you, Ikhra. Good evening everyone and thank you for joining us. Before we begin, a small note on scheduling. I am sure many of you remember the commitment we made some time ago that we would avoid holding earnings calls on Saturdays. We have stayed true to that commitment and we intend to continue doing so. Turning to the quarter, this has been by almost every measure we track one of the strongest starts to a financial year in the bank's recent history. More importantly, these results have been delivered on the strength of the whole franchise. I won't dwell on the headlines, we prefer to let the numbers speak for themselves. A brief note on our disclosures, our presentation and the press release has been filled and filed with the stock exchanges. Wherever we have presented sequential comparisons, they are on of business as usual basis excluding the one-off item recognized in the March quarter to ensure like-for-like comparison. Your and your comparisons of course remain unaffected. Joining me today are our Managing Director and CEO, Mr. Avis Mannion, our ED and members of our senior team. They will take us through the key highlights of the quarter after which we will be happy to take your questions. Given the number of participants on the call, we would request that everyone limit themselves to two questions initially. If you have any additional questions, please rejoin the queue. We will do the best to accommodate everyone. With that, let me hand the call to our MD.

Thank you, Shobit. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. This has been one of the strongest first quarters in our recent past, and the quality of it matters as much as the outcome itself. There are no one-off gains supporting this performance in this quarter. Through a challenging period for Treasury, we have actually grown our profits, expanded margins, improved efficiency and taken our asset quality to its decadal best. We remain firmly on track against every element of the guidance we have given you earlier. If anything, on several of those metrics, we see a positive bias. Our focus on CASA mix remains unchanged. We continue to target improvement in our CASA ratio over the coming quarters of our stated roadmap. This quarter carries the seasonal movements you would expect in a June quarter, especially on the car front, but our average car and average car growth numbers remain encouraging and our conviction on the objective is undeniable. On the asset side, the portfolio mix is evolving as we said it would. Most of our chosen segments are performing well. There are one or two where execution can be sharper and we expect to address those over the coming quarters. Since we last spoke, there have been three key developments of significance. We have a new chairman, Mr. Elias George, who has succeeded Mr. Hota, and we look forward to his stewardship. Second, we are in the process of acquiring the Standard Chartered India credit card portfolio, and we remain confident of completing the integration before the end of this calendar year. Cards, and especially our organic, the non-co-branded cards, are a segment we have been building deliberately, and this accelerates that. Third, we have secured an investment-grade international credit rating from S&P, one of the only few handful of Indian private sector banks to hold one. Its significance lies in access rather than recognition. It opens global pools of capital to us at competitive rates across bonds, ECBs, IBU funding and other avenues. And it allows us to fund growth more efficiently while diversifying sources of funding. For a bank of our size, this is a door that was not previously opened. We have also entered the leverage-linked FKLR deposit stage. The infrastructure is in place, the product is launched, and we have early customer interest. I would add one point of context here. When a comparable window was available in 2013, we did not have a gift city IDU. We do now. and it is central to how we build the leverage this time. Some limits are tied up and more are in the pipeline. We are also in the process of arranging lines with offshore banks for leverage of our customers directly. We believe that we will be able to get our fair share of this flow. Over this quarter, we see this as a meaningful lever for the liability franchise. Taken together, this quarter reflects the evolving strength of the core franchise. We are executing with discipline across our priorities and we, meaning my team and I, remain confident of delivering on our medium-term objectives. I will now hand over to Venkat, who can take you through the numbers in more detail. Thank you.