Lloyds Banking Group plc

Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today. I'm delighted to welcome you to our 2026 half-year results and strategy update presentation. Today represents an important milestone as we approach the end of our current five-year plan and announce ambitious new strategy to take us through to the end of 2030. We've got a lot to cover this morning so let me start with a brief overview of the agenda and key messages. I'll begin with a look back on our progress to date. We've successfully executed our 2022 to 26 strategic plan and are on track to deliver our 2026 financial targets. This lays strong foundations for the next phase. William will then cover our first half results that show sustained strength in financial performance. We are today announcing a significant step up in our ordinary dividend with a 30% increase in the interim, alongside a share buyback of £1 billion. We will then shift focus to our new strategic plan, Accelerate 2030, and the financial outlook. I'm hugely excited by this next phase, where we will reimagine customer journeys, increase group connectivity, and deliver a productivity step change, all enabled by pioneering technology. These actions will extend our track record of profitable growth and support long-term, sustainable value creation for shareholders. Following the presentation, we'll have plenty of time for your questions. So let us begin with a look back on our progress, starting on slide four. We are the UK's financial services leader, with competitive advantages that reflect our scale, digital and AI capabilities, and cost and capital focus. These competitive advantages underpin sustainable value creation. Our customer lending and deposit balances today total nearly one trillion pounds, in addition to circa 250 billion pounds of open book AUA. These support a diversified revenue base that's on course to reach circa 20 billion pounds in 2026. And we expect to deliver a return on tangible equity in excess of 16% this year and above this in the years to come. I'll discuss some of these areas in more detail, starting with our market leadership and revenue growth on the slide five. Our strategy over the last four and a half years has represented a clear shift in focus towards growth. To this end, we are on course to deliver around £5 billion of net income growth by the end of 2026. Benefits from the structural hedge, BAU growth and our strategic initiatives have more than offset material headwinds in the period, including those from the runoff of our SBR mortgage book and highly competitive lending and deposit markets. Growth has been broad-based. Our focus on improving customer propositions and service has improved satisfaction scores and supported market share growth in key areas, up around three percentage points on average. This includes gains in PCAs, transport, unsecured lending, home insurance and SME deposits amongst others, supporting strong balance sheet growth. We've also meaningfully diversified the business, increasing our OOI contribution by four percentage points despite strong NII growth and building our presence in high value areas such as mass affluent. Complementing this, we've realized significant benefits from our investment and are on track to deliver circa 2 billion pounds of strategic initiatives revenues by the end of 2026, higher than originally targeted in 2022. Turning now to digital and AI leadership on slide six. We've been delivering against a clear strategy to enhance our capabilities, deliver new propositions for customers, and position ourselves to benefit from new technologies. We have significantly modernized our infrastructure, actively unlocking our legacy data estate and technology. Investment in our people has been a key enabler of this, with around 11,000 technology and data hires since 2021. These actions mean that our organization is better equipped to deliver significant change at pace. This has created the platform for increased innovation, driving clear benefits for both customers and the group. At the same time, we've established leadership positions across new technologies, launching industry first use cases and realizing value from AI. Our actions here position us well for the future, increasing our confidence as a scale leader. Moving to cost and capital efficiency on slide seven. Our growth has been enabled by a continued focus on delivering a more efficient organization. We've now realized more than two billion pounds of gross cost savings since 2021, having surpassed our original targets. Savings have been broad-based, including meaningful contributions from technology modernization and the rationalization of our office footprint. These savings have more than offset pay and inflation headwinds in the period, creating capacity for the group to invest. At the same time, we've delivered 28 billion pounds of RWA optimization, offsetting regulatory headwinds to ensure that RWA growth more closely aligns with revenue generating activities. These actions combined with ongoing portfolio de-risking and steps to clarify legacy remediation charges have helped increase the predictability of capital generation. This has supported growing shareholder distributions, The ordinary dividend has more than doubled versus 2021. And we've now announced circa 17 billion pounds of distributions in the period, equivalent to around 25% of our current market cap. Now turning to slide eight. Delivery against our long-standing purpose of helping Britain prosper provides clear benefits for customers and communities across the UK, supports the real economy and creates profitable growth opportunities for the group. Over many years, we've made a significant impact towards addressing key societal issues, such as increasing access to housing and supporting the shift to a more sustainable future. Importantly, our actions have supported healthy franchise momentum, delivering profitable growth across both sides of the balance sheet. Looking ahead, we see further opportunities to help Britain prosper with bold ambitions for the next phase. Let me close this section on slide nine. Our successful strategic execution supports strong shareholder outcomes, diversified income growth, improving operating leverage, and higher, more sustainable returns and capital generation. We're on track to meet the financial targets that we laid out over four years ago, having upgraded many of these along the way. By the end of 2026, we will have delivered a cost income ratio of less than 50%, a ROTI of greater than 16%, and more than 200 basis points of capital generation. I'm very pleased with how well we have delivered for customers, colleagues, and shareholders in this period. This creates the platform from which we can accelerate, further reinforcing our competitive advantages in the next phase. I'll discuss this in more detail shortly but for now let me hand over to William to run through our first half results.

Thank you Charlie and good morning everyone and thank you again for joining. As usual let me start with an overview of the financials on slide 11. Lloyds Banking Group again demonstrates sustained strength in financial performance during the first six months of the year. As Charlie mentioned, we're on track to deliver our 2026 commitments. Statutory profit after tax was 3.1 billion with a return on tangible equity of 17.1%. Within this, we delivered net income of 9.7 billion, up 9% on the previous year. Q2 net income was 4% higher than Q1. This was driven by continued strong momentum across both net interest income and other income. We remain committed to cost discipline. H1 operating costs of 4.9 billion were flat year on year. Notably, the Q2 cost income ratio at 49% was in line with our guidance for less than 50% for the full year. Credit performance meanwhile remains strong and stable. The H1 impairment charge of 617 million equates to an asset quality ratio of 25 basis points. Our performance resulted in strong capital generation of 108 basis points in the first half and a pro forma CET1 ratio after distributions of 13.1%. Given our confidence in the Group's strong capital position and earnings trajectory, we are announcing a significant step up in our dividend, increasing the interim dividend by 30%. We'll also implement a 1 billion interim share buyback, and together this represents over 1.9 billion of capital distributions as at the half. Let me now turn to slide 12 to look at developments in our customer franchise. Our customer balances showed strong growth in the first six months across both the lending and the deposit franchises. Focusing on Q2, Group lending balances of $492 billion were up over $5 billion or 1% versus Q1. We saw broad-based customer-led growth across all business lines. Within retail, mortgages were up 0.2 billion in the quarter. This was net of a legacy mortgage book securitization of 1.8 billion. Excluding this, mortgages grew by 2 billion. And that reflects a positive trading performance and share of around 18% of net new lending. Mortgage applications remain strong. It's slightly below the level seen in Q1, given the context of a higher rate environment. Pleasingly, completion margins were slightly higher quarter on quarter, albeit again rounding to 70 basis points. Elsewhere in the retail business, we saw continued and broad-based growth across each of our cards, loans and motor businesses, as well as European retail. Commercial balances, meanwhile, were up in the quarter by 3.1 billion. This reflects strong growth in CIB, particularly in securitized products and infrastructure. BCB also continued to grow before the impact of 0.3 billion government-backed lending repayments, after which balances were flat. In looking at the liability franchise, we saw a good performance in deposits, up 5 billion or 1% in Q2, to now over half a trillion. Retail deposits were flat as we maintained price discipline in the remainder of what was a competitive tax year end and focused value on our relationship customers with broader product holdings and other selective propositions. We were also happy to see PCA stability in the quarter, maintaining our greater than 24% market share of balances. Commercial deposits meanwhile were up 5.2 billion, driven by growth in targeted sectors across both CIB and BCB, continuing recent strength in this area. And in insurance, pensions and investments, we saw significant open book AUA growth of around 25 billion in the quarter to 251 billion. Let me now turn to net interest income on slide 13. Net interest income continues to grow robustly. H1 NII was up 9% year on year to 7.3 billion. This included a 4% growth in Q2, helped a little by day count. NII was underpinned by average interest earning assets of 476 billion for the first half, up 4% or roughly 18 billion year on year. Income growth continues to be supported by positive momentum in the net interest margin. In H1, the margin was 319 basis points, and this included a second quarter margin of 322 basis points, up five basis points in the quarter. In this context, the growing structural hedge contribution continues to more than offset mortgage refinancing and other pressures. The non-banking NRI charge meanwhile in the first half was 251 million, with Q2 down slightly on Q1. Structural hedge earnings were 3.4 billion for the half, with an average yield of 2.7%, still well below market refinancing rates. Within this, the notional of 246 billion and the weighted average life of around 3.75 years was stable in the quarter. We continue to expect hedge income to grow to greater than $7 billion in 2026 and greater than $8 billion in 2027, further growth thereafter to the end of the decade. Coming back to this year, we continue to expect net interest income for 2026 to be greater than $14.9 billion. Let me now turn to other income on slide 14. We continue to build momentum in other income across our franchise. Other income was 3.3 billion in the first half, up 11% on the prior year, with Q2 up 6% versus Q1. Pleasingly, this growth is driven by broad-based momentum across our businesses, linked to strategic initiatives as well as BAU activities. Within retail, we saw 10% growth in H1 versus the prior year, supported by continued strength in our motor leasing business and our payments business. There was also a one-off benefit from the mortgage securitization in Q2 that I mentioned earlier on. In commercial, year-on-year growth in fees on lending activity and transaction banking was more than offset by lower markets income in the context of market volatility. Importantly, however, Commercial and CIB in particular was up in the second quarter after the slightly weaker Q1. And that's as markets and issuance activity recovered. Insurance, pensions and investments continued to deliver a positive performance in the first half, up 19% versus H1-25. Growth in workplace income was particularly positive alongside a full half of strong performance from Lloyds Wealth. Equity Investments OI meanwhile was up more than 40% year on year in what was a very good half for LDC realizations alongside ongoing Lloyd's Living growth. Looking forward, while Q3 won't grow quite as fast as Q2, given the benefit of the securitization that I mentioned earlier on, growth in other income will continue. Diversification of our income remains a strategic focus and indeed our base case expectation. Operating lease appreciation was 452 million in Q2, up 63 million quarter on quarter. This was driven by fleet growth, but also by a 41 million charge for used car price adversity. Going forward, we expect this charge to revert back to a normalised run rate, growing more in line with the fleet size. Moving to costs on slide 15. Cost discipline continues to be an imperative. H1 operating costs were 4.9 billion flat year on year. This reflects continued efficiency savings, some timing impacts, and slightly lower investment, including severance. Same time, we've been able to effectively absorb the operating expenses of both the Lloyds Wealth and the Curve acquisitions. Alongside, the remediation charge remains low at 39 million and a half. and taken together this has resulted in a cost to income ratio of 50.4% in H1 and again notably a ratio of 49% in Q2. Overall operating costs are in line with full year expectations reinforcing our confidence in delivery of a cost income ratio of below 50% for 2026. Let me turn to credit performance on slide 16. Credit performance was again strong and stable in the period. Retail and commercial both continue to see low and stable impairments. New to arrears and other early warning indicators remain benign. The first half impairment charge was 617 million. That equates to an asset quality ratio of 25 basis points, which of course is in line with our guidance. The Q2 impairment charge was 322 million, including a pre-MES AQR of 28 basis points in the quarter. This was slightly higher than Q1, given model updates and the non-repeat of Q1 releases. As always, we updated our economics in the second quarter. This resulted in a small Q2 release from modest improvements to our forecast. And looking forward, we continue to expect a 2026 AQR of around 25 basis points. Let me now address returns and TNAV on slide 17. Our return on tangible equity of 17.1% for the first half represents a strong performance. Within H1, the restructuring charge of 34 million includes costs for the integration of Curve and Lloyds Wealth. The volatility and other items credit of 112 million was largely driven by insurance-related gains. Tangible net asset value per share ended the half at 57 pence in line with our full year 2025. This included a 0.9 pence decrease in Q2 with strong profitability build offset by shareholder distributions including the full year ordinary dividend payment in May. And as usual at this time, TNAV is also temporarily suppressed by an accrual for the share buyback over the H1 close period with no corresponding share count reduction. This is worth one pence per share and it will mechanically reverse in Q3. Looking ahead, we continue to expect material TNAV per share growth in both the short and the medium term. We also continue to expect return on tangible equity to be more than 16% in 2026. Clearly, our H1 performance reinforces our confidence in this regard. Turning now to capital generation on slide 18. Capital generation was strong in the first half of the year at 108 basis points, particularly in the second quarter. Within this, total RWAs ended H1 at 242 billion, up 6.3 billion from the year end. This increase reflects healthy lending growth partly offset by continued optimization activities, notably in Q2. The pro forma CET1 after deductions for distributions is 13.1%. We continue to expect to pay down to a CET1 ratio of 13% by the end of the year. We also continue to guide the 2026 capital generation of more than 200 basis points. I'll now move on to capital distributions on slide 19. The Group's strong capital generation supports sustained growth in shareholder distributions. Today, the Board announces an increased interim dividend of 1.58 pence per share, 30% growth on last year's interim. This significant step-up reflects the actions taken to de-risk the business, our strong capital position, and our confidence in the future earnings trajectory of the Group. Looking back, dividends per share have grown significantly over our strategic plan. As Charlie said, now more than double the equivalent interim dividend in 2021. And beyond 2026, we continue to target a progressive and sustainable dividend, expecting good growth in future years, albeit likely more akin to recent periods. Additionally, today we announced our first interim share buyback of one billion. This is in line with our stated intention of moving to excess capital reviews over and above the dividend every half year. We expect this growth in distributions to continue both this year and into the new strategy, returning substantial excess capital to our shareholders year in, year out. I'll now wrap up the financials on slide 20. To summarize, in H1, the Group showed sustained strength in its financial performance and delivery on its strategic ambitions in the final year of our plan. In the first half, we saw continued net income growth, cost discipline, and strong and stable credit performance, all contributing to strong capital generation. This allows us to deliver a significant step up in interim dividend and to announce an interim share buyback for the first time, together providing over 1.9 billion of capital return for the first half alone. As we look ahead to the remainder of 2026, we are confident of meeting our financial guidance as laid out in the slide. I'll now hand back to Charlie to talk about our exciting and ambitious new strategic plan. I'll return later, of course, to discuss the associated financial framework. And needless to say, this will include continued income growth, improved operating leverage, stronger sustainable returns, and of course, growing capital generation for our shareholders.

Thank you, William. So I'll now discuss the vision and priorities that define our new strategic plan, Accelerate 2030. I hope by the end that you'll be as excited as I am about the group's future. Before getting into detail, I'd like to start on slide 22 by reflecting on the external environment that we operate in and outline why we are well positioned to continue to grow faster than the wider economy over the coming years. Our base case outlook for the UK economy is one of stability with resilient fundamentals. At the same time, we see clear opportunities for the UK to move to a higher growth trajectory than is forecast today. This reflects the improving capacity for spending and investment combined with the government's ongoing focus on regulatory reform and growth. The latter is likely to drive structural shifts in key areas, including housing, infrastructure and wealth and pensions, creating long-term nominal GDP plus opportunities. As the UK's only integrated financial services provider, we are uniquely positioned with established leadership positions and a proven track record of driving growth in these faster growing high potential areas. And as you'll hear today, our strategic choices reinforce these strengths. Let me now unpack Accelerate 2030 starting on slide 23. Our strategy represents an acceleration of our transformation and ambition. But fundamentally, the business model we have today is the right one. Therefore, Accelerate 2030 will also reflect a strategy of evolution and build on our existing participation choices. This includes our UK focus, product breadth, connectivity, reach and low-risk diversified balance sheet. These provide us with confidence in our ability to deliver unique propositions for customers, diversified growth and long-term sustainable value creation for our shareholders. On slide 24, I'll highlight the new components we're adding to this. Our purpose of helping Britain prosper remains at the core of Accelerate 2030, supported by a clear promise to our customers to make finance simpler, smarter, and more connected for every moment that matters. Building upon our existing strengths, we will reimagine experiences to delight our customers, better connect than ever before, making the group more than the sum of its parts, and deliver a productivity step change to create value. All of this will be enabled by pioneering technology and a clear commitment to investing in the business. Our strategic priorities will be delivered through three pillars, grow the core, innovate to deepen and diversify, and simplify to outperform. and successfully executed, our plan will reinforce a clear financial framework with our investment supporting continued income growth, improving operating leverage, stronger sustainable returns and growing capital generation. Let me explain in more detail on slide 25. Our pillars represent distinct opportunities. Grow the Core is focused on reinforcing our position as the UK's financial services leader. We will meet more needs in areas of strength and accelerate in faster growing areas where we have headroom, maintaining or gaining share across the core franchise. To achieve this, we will reimagine customer experience, embedding AI to make things simpler and more personalized than ever before. Innovate to deepen and diversify is focused on increasing group connectivity whilst extending into higher value fee generating adjacencies and building new businesses We will also increase the group's presence in third party and AI channels to be where our customers are. Our delivery here will support a high single digit OOI CAGR. And finally, Simplify to Outperform is focused on how we'll create the capacity, pace and discipline to enable our acceleration. Investment in our people, data and AI are the cornerstones of this and are critical to enabling our growth ambitions and a productivity step change. This includes a further £2 billion of growth cost saves. I'll shortly run through our strategic priorities by business area with deep dives on opportunities where we can differentiate. This includes things like our unique group-wide rewards offering and bank assurance. This will help you better understand both our ambition and how grounded our plans are in these areas. As well as delivering unique value for customers, Accelerate 2030 will further improve our financial performance, as shown on slide 26. By building upon our competitive advantages and raising our ambition, Accelerate 2030 will create the foundations for long-term outperformance. Growing business momentum will support continued income growth, with net income growing at mid-single digit CAGR. As highlighted already, OOI will be a significant contributor to this. Strong income growth combined with our continued efficiency focus will further improve operating leverage. We're targeting a cost income ratio of less than 45% in 2030 with year on year reductions. This will support stronger sustainable returns and growing capital generation. We're targeting a ROTI of circa 20% and more than 225 basis points of capital generation in 2030, including continued investment in the business and growth in the balance sheet. We believe this represents an attractive shareholder proposition focused on long-term sustainable value creation, both in this strategic cycle and beyond. Having introduced the strategy, I'll now cover our priorities in more detail. Firstly, I'll discuss our refreshed purpose ambitions on slide 28. In line with Helping Britain Prosper, we remain focused on addressing critical societal issues. The strategic actions across our business units are aligned to these aims. Whilst our purpose remains unchanged, our 2030 ambitions are bold. For example, we're targeting more than £45 billion of new finance to small business customers and more than £100 billion of sustainable and transition financing. These actions will reinforce our existing leadership positions, deliver significant impact for customers and communities, and create attractive growth opportunities. Let me now move to our business priorities, starting with retail on slide 29. Our retail business has significant scale and reach, including relationships with half of the UK adult population, colleagues present in around a thousand communities, and nearly 22 million mobile app users. We also have leading market shares in our key product areas. Our strategic priorities are focused on further deepening relationships through an even more connected, personalized offering and AI-enabled experiences. In addition, having established a digitally-led European mortgage business with strong returns, we will selectively scale this, supported by European deposit growth. To support these aims, we will progressively extend our new core banking engine, which will improve speed to market and personalization. Agentic AI powered customer journeys will also drive further improvements in our ability to grow and serve customers significantly more cost effectively. We recently announced the decision to move our Halifax customers under the Lloyds brand, operating alongside our other relationship brand, Bank of Scotland. This will make it simpler for our customers to access all of the group's products and servicing capabilities, as well as positioning us to stay connected in a more digital and AI world going forward. Our strategic priorities will deliver improvements in both income growth and operating leverage. We're targeting a mid single digit net income CAGR and CIR reduction over the plan. Over the next few slides, I'll deep dive on three priorities that will support around 80% of our retail net income today, starting with rewards on slide 30. We have deep customer relationships today with around 70% recognizing us as their main bank. This supports leading positions in high value areas, including a greater than 24% share of PCA balances, a significant underpin of the group's structural hedge. We see opportunities to reinforce our scale position further by building a truly unique group-wide rewards offering. This will increase advocacy and retain primary relationships, rewarding our most valuable customers in a group in the world of multibanking. We've taken the first steps here by relaunching our rewards portal earlier this year. More than 8 million of our customers have already used this and are benefiting from discounts and cashback offers, participating in challenges and monthly prize draws. But this is just the start and we want to take this much further. In the future, we'll leverage AI to make better use of our extensive data and provide offers with even greater personalization tailored to key life moments and based on spending behaviors. Rewards will also be increasingly based on loyalty and relationships across the whole of the group. This will include differentiated pricing, providing greater benefits to our most valuable customers. And to encourage regular engagement, customers will be able to track the value of their rewards over time. We see significant value upside here with rewards customers typically having greater monthly account contributions, larger payments values and higher depth of relationship. As we strengthen these primary relationships, we look to meet even more of these needs and reinforce our leading deposit franchise. Now moving to our homes offering on slide 31. We are the market leader for homes today with a 19% mortgage market share. From this position of strength, we understand that there are currently many challenges for prospective and existing owners, including saving for deposits, affordability and complexity in the mortgaging journey. We want to change that and deliver a broader, transformed home experience. There are two main parts to this. Firstly, we'll launch new propositions that broaden our reach. This includes better serving first-time buyers and buy-to-let customers, and meeting more of the customers' home-owning needs, including protection insurance and retrofit solutions. We will also innovate to help unlock the nine trillion of residential property value in the UK today. At the same time, we're committed to transforming customer journeys, Directory mortgaging is live today and has reduced times to offer, but we have a lot more to do. The home's journey of the future will be AI and blockchain powered, increasing both personalization and speed. Agentic AI will make it easier than ever for customers to get advice and better value on their mortgages and broader home ownership needs. This will position the group to have closer, longer lasting and deeper relationships with its mortgage customers, complementing our leading position with intermediaries. I'll now cover our last retail deep dive on slide 32. We're the UK's largest motor financing and leasing provider with significant scale. Through our Blackhorse, Lex and Tusca brands, we finance or lease more than 1 million vehicles Transport is a core need of UK consumers, SMEs and large corporates. Given its importance, customers are demanding simplicity, confidence and personalised support. We believe we are uniquely placed to reimagine vehicle ownership, working closely with our OEM and broader partners. By delivering simple, joined-up solutions within a single trusted platform for broader transport needs, we will create a smoother, more empowering experience for customers. The first phase of this is already live today within the Lloyds app. As you can see on the screen, customers already have access to tools including MOT, tax and insurance reminders. We'll add more functionality over time before broadening the ecosystem to serve more needs supported by greater connectivity with a wider group and industry partnerships. To bring this to life, in future years, customers will be able to search verified listings from branded partners to select their next vehicle within the app. AI will offer tailored guidance, helping customers choose vehicles that suit their needs and budgets. We view this as a significant opportunity to acquire, serve, and retain customers at scale, driving OOI growth. Moving now to commercial on slide 33. Commercial captures both our BCB and CRB franchises with around 1 million relationships. In BCB, we are a leading provider of lending and deposits to small businesses. Whilst in CIB, we have strong positions in our core areas of participation. I'll elaborate on the different priorities across each of these businesses within the deep dives. But in short, we're focused on deepening penetration of our existing client base, broadening our reach to capture new clients, and enhancing our capabilities to further improve both cost and capital efficiency. The two businesses have a broadly 50-50 net income contribution today of a circa £6 billion total. Combined, we're targeting a mid single digit net income CAGR and a low single digit CIR reduction by 2030. On slide 34, I'll cover our priorities for BCB. BCB is a highly profitable area built on longstanding trusted relationships. However, we have more to do to digitize end-to-end to improve experience. Additionally, whilst we have strong market shares across lending and deposits, we have the opportunity to grow in higher value areas such as trade, mid-market corporates, and within specific sectors. Our strategy therefore focuses on digital and AI enabled differentiation and doubling the size of our relationship team to support clients and growth and further enhancing our products. We will offer seamless digital experiences, improving access to cash alongside simple, flexible payment solutions for small businesses. On product, we'll focus on delivering more comprehensive offerings across both trade and working capital. Enhancements here will be complementary to our heightened focus on mid-market corporates. Relationship managers will leverage AI tools to establish us as the leading partner for this vital segment, supported by our deep regional presence. We will also increase connectivity with the rest of the group, building our presence with high-growth companies across the UK innovation economy and connecting our merchants with retail customers to facilitate two-sided growth. I'll discuss this in more detail later. Now turning to CIB on slide 35. CIB is an important source of diversification for the group, contributing to OOI growth and acting as a key enabler of group connectivity. The business is built upon disciplined participation choices across our cash, debt and risk management offering. However, only 15% of our clients have needs met across all three areas today. As we've highlighted previously, there is significant revenue multiplier effect as relationships deepen, representing clear upside as we become a broader solutions provider. To support this, we're continuing to enhance our capabilities across the full spectrum, supported by investment in our technology infrastructure and data. We also see opportunities from selectively increasing our international presence. Around 70% of our clients operate internationally today, with UK issuance activity increasingly in US dollars and Euros. We're underweight here and have headroom for growth. Building on an established base, we will broaden our European offering and further deploy our existing product capabilities and expertise in the US, supporting UK-linked clients. This represents a continuation of our strategy in this area and you should expect us to be disciplined in our participation and returns on this growth. I'll now discuss IP&I on slide 36. IP&I is a profitable business and a key differentiator for the group. The business is a scale provider in UK insurance and retirement markets with leading positions across home insurance, annuities and workplace pensions. We've refocused the business in recent years and have delivered strong growth with open book AUA of 250 billion pounds, doubling since 2021. In addition to reinforcing our leadership positions, our priorities are focused on further improving our propositions with digital and AI innovation and better connecting the group to transform our bank assurance and wealth offerings. These initiatives will support a high single digit net income CAGR. At the same time, we're highly focused on driving productivity in this area to support a high-teens CIR reduction. Combined, IP&I will further strengthen its returns, supporting larger and more predictable distributions from Scottish widows to the Group. Let me deep dive on the bank assurance opportunity on slide 37. Since 2021, we've focused on better connecting our scale retail and insurance franchises and have made strong progress. Our retail customer penetration has increased in this period with growth in both protection and home insurance as examples. Given the scale of our customer base, we have a significant further opportunity. Indeed, over 20 million of our retail customers still do not have an insurance relationship with us and 17 million have their home insurance needs met elsewhere. Our industry-recognized digital bank will be a key driver of growth with simpler, more integrated journeys and greater insight to increase engagement. AI-enabled claims management will also increase certainty and lead to faster resolution times, improving satisfaction. We will also broaden our core product capabilities, including increasing customer access to protection through ready-made and micro products. Above all, we believe the scale of our data and insight can help to provide differentiated customer value, supporting market-leading pricing and rewarding loyalty and relationship depth as part of the group-wide rewards offering I discussed earlier. We're encouraged by the progress we've made to date and believe we're better positioned to address this opportunity than ever before, supported by a more constructive regulatory backdrop. by leveraging the full capabilities of our business model, we'll be able to maximize the potential of a unique growth lever. Now turning to wealth on slide 38. The group operates a full service wealth offering today with around 110 billion pounds of open book AUA. This includes a top five DTC platform, scale intermediary business and Lloyd's Wealth. This is in addition to our top three workplace pensions business These are strong businesses positioned in an attractive growing market, but we have the potential to better connect them to retain value across the group and offset outflows to third parties. Our vision is to offer a lifetime wealth management proposition that caters for a broad spectrum of customers across accumulation, decumulation and generational wealth transfer. By increasing interaction with our banking and workplace customer base, we can turn savers to investors and mitigate workplace outflows at the point of retirement. We'll also increase customer access to advice through an agentic AI enabled offering, Invest AI. The initial version of this is currently live within Scottish Widows app, but over time will further its capabilities with targeted support and extend it to the retail banking app alongside coaching agents, significantly increasing the addressable customer base. In an increasingly fragmented market, we believe the ability to help customers build, manage and transfer their wealth with one provider is a unique differentiator that will allow us to grow in a high value area. Now turning to our final area, equity investments, on slide 39. Equity investments primarily captures Lloyds Development Capital, an award-winning private equity firm, and Lloyds Living, our residential landlord business. Here, we're primarily focused on consolidating and establishing leading positions across these high-quality non-banking businesses, whilst increasing connectivity with the rest of the group. We're targeting a high single digit net income CAGR and to maintain a low CIR with the current position, roughly half of the wider group. Let me elaborate on our plans on slide 40. Equity Investments is a growing contributor to the group representing more than 10% of OOI in the first half of 2026 with a ROTI in excess of 20%. In LDC, we've delivered strong momentum in the first half of the year with nine new investments made, and we're focused on supporting higher growth businesses through the lifecycle to maximize potential returns. We'll also further increase connectivity within our BCB franchise. For Lloyd's Living, we're aiming to become the UK's leading private institutional landlord, doubling the home's portfolio to more than 20,000 by the end of 2030. This will be supported by strong relationships with CIB, with 85% of new homes today in collaboration with house builder clients. We will also increase connectivity to the rest of the group, providing insurance solutions for renters and moving customers to shared ownership through our Pathways proposition. Across both, we'll retain a disciplined focus on efficiency. Taken together, equity investments will continue to support the group's diversification efforts. On slide 41, I'll bring all of these areas together with a focus on connected opportunities. As you can see, we have exciting plans across all of our businesses and expect to deliver broad-based revenue growth and efficiency improvements over the plan. Each of these plans is enhanced by our focus on further increasing group connectivity. We've talked about a number of these areas already, such as bank assurance and wealth. But beyond these, we see many more outstanding opportunities as we look ahead. For example, we've grown Tusca from a fleet of 23,000 in 2023 to more than 100,000 today, benefiting from increased connectivity with our commercial client base and funding synergies. We'll scale this business even further as part of Accelerate 2030. We will also add new growth levers in this period, unlocking the full potential of the connected group to further diversify our revenue streams. I'd like to highlight some of these new opportunities in more detail, starting with slide 42. By combining our scale retail and commercial franchises and digital and AI leadership, we see the potential to offer value to customers on both sides in a way that only we can. Connected Commerce will enable our business customers to provide targeted campaigns and offers to our retail customer base. For merchants, this has clear potential benefits, including increased sales and more effective marketing spend. Whilst our retail customers will feel more rewarded with access to offers that only they can receive. I'm also delighted to announce that we are today opening the waitlist for Lloyd's Smart Wallet, which builds on Curve's pioneering capabilities to provide an enhanced payments experience for customers. Retail customers will be able to store their payment and loyalty cards in one place, apply spending rules and rewind payments. Over time, customers will also be able to increase payment flexibility with the potential to offer point of sale financing options for merchants. We will also look to integrate a personal digital vault for customers, allowing secure document storage. You'll be able to hear more about the vision for this exciting proposition later today. Moving now to digital assets on slide 43. We've been an early mover on digital assets, co-chairing the GB tokenized deposits project and delivering notable UK first transactions. We continue to support various industry initiatives that are critical to establishing the necessary foundations for future growth. At the same time, we're developing our own capabilities so that we can move from pilot to production at the earliest opportunity, with initial proposition launches to take place for our commercial clients during the second half of this year. We're also establishing the capability to facilitate stablecoin payments, recognizing that adoption is likely to increase over the medium term. We believe that digital assets have the potential to deliver meaningful benefits for customers, with these likely to be amplified by the interaction with agentic AI. The effective integration of these solutions into broader customer journeys will support our competitive advantage over time. And we're well-placed to do this given the proactive stance we've taken. I've spoken a lot about the opportunities across our Grow and Innovate pillars so far. but a strategic acceleration of this scale is only possible with ongoing investment in our organization and capabilities. With that in mind, let me now turn to an overview of simplify to outperform on slide 44. This pillar is critical to enabling the innovation and pace that underpins our growth and efficiency ambitions. I've already described many of the important elements in the business updates and therefore will not go into too much detail here, but would like to highlight a few key points. Talent, data and technology are the key unlocks of this. In the next phase, we'll further build out our in-house expertise through a constant commitment to colleague upskilling alongside targeted hiring, whilst we'll take our technology and data modernization efforts to the next level. At the same time, investment in AI and specifically agentic AI will deliver value across all divisions and functions. I'll expand on some of the main opportunities we see in more detail on the next slide. And finally, as you'll hear from William, capital efficiency remains of the utmost importance, creating the capacity for further growth. This is supported by our continued shift towards OOI and increased balance sheet velocity through origination and optimization initiatives. Moving now to a deep dive on AI specifically on slide 45. As I outlined in November, I believe there to be four key characteristics of a scale AI leader. Trust, breadth, data, and capabilities. We're uniquely positioned across all four of these areas and have a differentiated starting point. Added to that, we've made significant strides in recent years to both adopt AI at scale and measure its impact. As you can see on the slide, we have many examples where AI is driving significant benefits today for both customers and colleagues. It is with this in mind that I see significant revenue and cost opportunities over the coming period as we scale further As covered in the deep dives, every part of the group has a clear AI-enabled strategy that will further enhance our ability to differentiate our services, grow and deliver improved productivity. Indeed, by 2030, we expect AI-powered tools will support every customer interaction and all of our colleagues. As these opportunities scale, so will too will the value that we realize. We're on course to deliver more than £100 million of value from generative and agentic AI in 2026, with substantial benefits driving our revenue growth and efficiency in Accelerate 2030. Fundamentally, we expect to remain right at the forefront of this change and are extremely well equipped to realise value, given our scale leadership and starting position. I'll now close the section on slide 46. I appreciate I've covered a lot of detail, but hopefully this has given you a feel for the breadth of the opportunity across the group and has given you confidence that we are uniquely positioned to deliver it. We will, of course, provide more progress, detailed progress in future updates, and you'll hear more on divisional plans in the interim years through investor seminars, with the first of these likely next year. The group has strong growth momentum today and our plans will further reinforce this, supporting nearly a decade of ongoing mid-single-digit revenue growth by 2030 and continued improvements in operating leverage. These actions will drive stronger, sustainable returns as we target a ROTI of circa 20% in 2030. With that in mind, I'll now hand over to William to discuss the financial outlook in more detail.