Standard Chartered PLC

Good morning and good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our full year 2025 results call. I'm joined here in London by Pete Burrell, our interim group CFO, and Manas Costello, our global head of investor relations. We'll take you through our results and outlook before opening up for questions. 2025 was an extraordinary year by any measure. It tested the resilience of the global system and the relevance of institutions operating within it. It was a year shaped by heightened geopolitical tension, tariff announcements, and periods of significant financial market volatility across multiple asset classes. But it was also a year that demonstrated something fundamental, that global trade, capital flows, and economic connectivity endure and even thrive, and that institutions built to support them responsibly and at scale matter more than ever. Now, when I spoke to you at our first quarter results in the immediate aftermath of the tariff announcements, I said that we were entering that period of global volatility from a position of strength. Our results for 2025 demonstrate exactly what that strength looks like in practice. Our underlying return on tangible equity for the year was 14.7%. This is not just a financial outcome. It's evidence of a strategy that's working and a franchise that's delivering with consistency. We delivered record annual income of $20.9 billion, up 8% year on year. That growth was very broad-based. Global markets and global banking both achieved double-digit growth through the year. Our wealth business grew by 24%, supported by record net new money of $52 billion. Importantly, this growth was delivered despite interest rate headwinds and a softer fourth quarter for episodic income and markets. It speaks to the depth of our client relationships, the relevance of our capabilities, and our ability to deploy them precisely where our clients need us most. And whilst it's early days, we're encouraged by the start of 2026 to cross the engines of non-NII growth, even against what was a strong first quarter last year. Our strong capital position allows us to grow while continuing to deliver attractive returns to shareholders. Today, we're announcing a further share buyback of $1.5 billion, which will start imminently. We're also proposing a full-year dividend per share of 65% year-on-year. And as you'd expect, we're stepping up our shareholder distributions while maintaining a full investment program intended to build on the strong momentum in our business. The outcomes we delivered in 2025 mean that across income growth, return on tangible equity, and shareholder distributions, we've achieved the objectives of our three-year plan, and we've done so a year earlier than initially guided. Our 2025 underlying return on tangible equity was well above the target we set ourselves for 2026, and income met our 2026 guidance a year early. And we did this while achieving strong underlying positive income-to-cost draws in both 2024 and 2025. We've returned significant value to our shareholders by announcing distributions exceeding the $8 billion target since February 2024. These results highlight our strong financial performance and the success of our strategy. As we have exceeded our 2024 to 2026 group targets already, we're introducing new guidance for 2026, which we'll set out later. Additionally, going forward, we'll be presenting our results on a reported basis, shifting away from underlying financials. This move has been in the pipeline for some time. We intend for this to provide ever more focus on a single set of financial outcomes. We believe it will provide a clearer and more consistent framework for both our financial disclosures and future guidance. Our performance is the result of sustained execution over a long period of time. It reflects long-term strategic choices, disciplined focus, and an increasingly high-performance culture that prioritizes collaboration and delivery across markets, products, and sectors. But this plan was only ever a milestone for us. Reaching it sooner is significant because it encourages us to pursue our ambitions with even greater determination. I want to thank our clients for the trust they place in us. I want to thank our partners for working with us in increasingly integrated ways. And I want to thank our colleagues across the group for their professionalism, resilience, and commitment. These results are a direct reflection of their efforts. 2025 marks our fifth consecutive year of improvement in both underlying and statutory return on tangible equity. We've taken advantage of a generally supportive business environment with shifts in trade and investment flows working in our favor and growth remaining strong in most of our key markets. But we've amplified these long-term trends by growing our franchise in a focused, disciplined, and responsible way, by managing costs and capital rigorously, and by communicating clearly and transparently with all of our stakeholders. I am committed to maintaining that focus so that we continue to deliver sustainably higher shareholder value over the long term. At Artifact in May, I and our team will set out our strategy and associated medium-term targets in more detail. We'll explain how we see the evolution of the global economy and trading systems, as I set out in the annual report. We'll discuss how these themes affect us and how we intend to build on the momentum that we have created, how Standard Chartered is playing an increasingly distinctive and valuable role in the global financial system, and we are doing so profitably. We'll discuss how our footprint and connectivity, our expertise, and our differentiated capabilities position us well, not just to perform, but to lead in the environment ahead. Pete will now take you through the 2025 performance in more detail and the outlook for 2026. I'll then return to discuss how we continue to support our clients across our business segments, after which Pete, Manis, and I will be happy to take your questions. Pete, over to you.

Thanks, Bill. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. I will now take you through our 2025 fourth quarter and full year results. In my remarks, I will be comparing underlying performance year-on-year at constant currency, unless otherwise stated. Our full-year 2025 income was $20.9 billion, up 6% or 8% excluding notable items. The performance was primarily attributable to our growth drivers of wealth solutions, global markets, and global banking. These areas delivered strong results, underlying our ability to capture opportunities in our targeted business segments. Q4 income was broadly flat due to weaker global markets, which I will talk about in more detail on the CIB slide. On a full-year basis, costs were up 4%, and we delivered 4% positive income-to-cost draws. Profit before tax for the year was up 18% to $7.9 billion, and our underlying return on tangible equity was 14.7%, including around 70 basis points of FEOCI gains from ventures. Our reported profit before tax was up 18% to $7 billion in 2025, with a statutory return on tangible equity of 11.9%. Our earnings per share increase of 37% reflects the strong underlying performance and ongoing reduction in share count. Now, let's look at the performance components in detail. Fourth quarter NII came in slightly higher than expected and was up around $200 million quarter-on-quarter. This was primarily due to the movement of high order in the quarter, where we benefited from both improved CASA pass-through rates and Treasury-related timing differences. As a result, our full-year NII was $11.2 billion, up 1%, with a negative impact from rates in WRB portfolio actions, offset by volume growth and mix improvement. In 2026, we expect NII to be broadly flat year-on-year based on several factors. First, as mentioned, NII in Q4 was higher than anticipated due to high board increases. This has already reversed in Q1. Second, we outperformed on pass-through rates during 2025, but we expect these to normalize over time. Third, our currency-weighted average rate outlook indicates a 44 basis point reduction in 2026, and consequently, we anticipate a continued headwind due to movements in interest rates throughout the year. Lastly, the impact from WRB portfolio actions is expected to be around a 2% headwind to NII this year. These impacts will be mitigated by volume growth, but the pace and extent of volume growth remains uncertain. Moving on to non-NII. In 2025, our non-NII increased 13% year-on-year, or 17% excluding notable items. This robust growth was primarily driven by the strong performance in wealth solutions, global markets, and global banking. In addition, the year's performance benefited from gains realized on the Solve transaction. I'll talk to the product's performance in more detail when I come to the business segments. Now, turning to expenses. Q4 operating expenses were higher quarter on quarter, driven by a number of factors. First, we continued to invest in our people and businesses. Second, we took some regulatory charges related to a pension code change in India and a PRA rule allowing accelerated vesting of shares. Lastly, during the quarter, we had an increase due to the rise in our share price and the associated impact on deferred compensation costs. In some of our markets, regulatory restrictions, such as exchange controls, prevent us from settling deferred compensation in the form of shares. In such instances, we settle those awards in cash, and therefore the material increase in the share price witnessed in 2025, and especially in the last two months of the year, impacted deferred compensation costs. As a result, full-year 2025 operating expenses were up 4%, with the increase from business growth and inflation partly offset by fit-for-growth savings. We delivered 4% positive income to cost JAWS, excluding notable items, and our underlying cost-income ratio improved 80 basis points to 59%. Our Fit for Growth program continued to progress, with over 300 initiatives driving simplification, standardization, and digitization. We have spent close to $700 million in Cost to Achieve, or CTA, since its inception, and have achieved over $700 million in run rate savings. As we have been explicit in the past, we have remained disciplined on how we spend the CTA, ensuring that we deliver one-for-one return on investment in FFG and finish the program in 2026. As we enter the final year of the FFG program and we reflect on the broader investment opportunities across our business, some of which were not visible at the outset of the program, we have revised our estimates of both CTA and savings from FFG. We now expect FFG savings and total CTA to be around $1.3 billion, rather than our initial expectation of $1.5 billion. As a reminder, from 2026, all financial results and guidance will be based on reported figures. However, to clarify how our costs will evolve this year, we have shown on this page that our 2026 underlying costs would have been $12.6 billion in constant currency, compared to the $12.3 billion in the previous plan. Two things drive the increase. Our business has demonstrated strong performance, consistently exceeding our established targets, including significantly positive income-to-cost draws. That gives us confidence to invest into initiatives which will deliver both productivity and growth benefits in the years ahead, such as data infrastructure and AI enablement. This represents the majority of the difference. The remainder is due to higher performance-rated costs, for example, the need to pay our relationship managers for exceptional performance in Affluent. As we move toward a reported basis this year, we are now targeting costs to be broadly flat in 2026 at constant currency, which would mean around $13.3 billion. Credit impairment for 2025 was $676 million, up around $100 million as 2024 included significant net recoveries in CIB. The level of impairment in WRB improved year-on-year, reflecting the impact of portfolio optimization actions, while CIB impairment remained benign at $4 million. Our overall loan loss rate of 19 basis points was broadly flat year-on-year. We expect this to normalize towards the historical through the cycle 30 to 35 basis points over time. Asset quality remained resilient in the face of a volatile environment, and our high-risk assets were down $1 billion quarter-on-quarter. The $1.5 billion reduction in early alerts was due to a combination of client upgrades, repayments, and a sovereign downgrade from early alerts into Stage 3. We continue to monitor our credit portfolio closely, and we are not seeing any significant signs of new stress emerging across the group. Moving on to the balance sheet. Underlying customer deposits were up 12% in the year, with growth in cost and term deposits across WRB and CIB. Turning now to capital. Risk-weighted assets were $258 billion, up 4% in 2025. As previously guided, we took the annual increase in operational risk RWA in the fourth quarter, which we would usually have taken in the first quarter of the following year. This has resulted in two increases in operational risk RWA in 2025. Going forward, this will be taken every fourth quarter. We closed the year with a CET1 ratio of 14.1%, and as Bill mentioned, we are announcing a new $1.5 billion share buyback, which will take our pro forma CET1 ratio to 13.5%. Since the beginning of 2024, we have announced $9.1 billion of shareholder distributions, including the buyback in dividends announced today. This exceeds our three-year target of at least $8 billion ahead of schedule. On a per-share basis, we have increased our full-year dividend and tangible book value by 65% and 12%, respectively. Now let's take a look at our business segments. CIB income for the year was $12.4 billion, up 4%. Global banking was up 15%, driven by strong growth in both origination and distribution. The 7% decline in transaction services was a result of lower rates. Global markets was up 12% as we delivered consistent growth and flow income above our long-term trajectory. Episodic income was a small negative in Q4 and down significantly from last year. This was due to the timing of large client deals and broad-based market movements across a range of asset classes which impacted inventory held for client activity towards the end of the year. As we've noted in the past, episodic income is less predictable and can be volatile from quarter to quarter, but on a 12-month rolling basis, it continues to be within its historical range and remains a meaningful contributor to our global market's income. Moving to WRB, 2025 income of $8.5 billion was up 6%, driven by consistent strong growth in wealth solutions, up 24%. During Q4, we generated $10 billion in affluent net new money, This contributed to a cumulative total of $52 billion in net new money for 2025, equivalent to 14% growth in affluent AUM, reflecting excellent momentum in the affluent segment. We onboarded 275,000 new-to-bank affluent clients in the year and up-tiered over 300,000 individual clients across the continuum. As I mentioned earlier, we'll be making some changes to our financial disclosures effective from the first quarter of 2026. we will be moving away from presenting our financials on an underlying basis by allocating restructuring and other items from below the line to above the line. We are also going to report our digital banks within WRB, and SE Ventures will be reported within the central and other segment. We will publish a data pack showing the representation of financial data on this basis prior to our Q1 results. So, to conclude... We expect 2026 year-on-year income growth to be around the bottom end of our historical 5% to 7% range at constant currency, with adjusted NII expected to be broadly flat. Our reported costs for 2026 are expected to be broadly flat at constant currency. We will no longer provide underlying cost disclosures. And we are now targeting a statutory return on tangible equity of greater than 12% in 2026. A medium-term financial framework will be provided at our investor event in May. With that, I will hand back to Bill to give you an update on our strategic progress. Over to you, Bill.

Thank you, Pete. First, let me talk about CIB. At Q1, we told you that our network business, which represents around 60% of our CIB income, is highly diversified, resilient, and agile. And that has continued to be the case. Our strength in providing network services in and around China, payments, FX, financing, etc., has been a key part of our outperformance as Chinese and international corporates diversify manufacturing and shift their supply chains. We often play a central role in those shifts, as demonstrated in our China corridors to markets across ASEAN, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Trade and investment flows are also picking up pace as regions seek elements of self-sufficiency in search for more resilient middle power status. Regional and bilateral trade pacts in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and ASEAN will support growth in trade and investments across our footprint markets, playing to our core cross-border strengths. Now, as you can see, our network income remains diversified by product, such as trade, and despite interest rate headwinds in transaction banking, our network business has continued to grow. We also have continued to see growth in income from financial institution clients, and we've made further progress towards our 60% medium-term target. The financial institution's client segment, which generally delivers a higher return on risk-weighted assets, remains an attractive area for Standard Chartered. We stand out in serving financial institution clients due to our differentiated products, extensive local market and global networks, and specialized capabilities in areas like security services, financial markets, and financing. These strengths enable us to meet the diverse needs of a wide range of clients, including banks and broker-dealers, investors, sponsors, insurers, and sovereign wealth funds. Meanwhile, we've remained disciplined in managing resources within CIB to make sure that we're focusing on serving our top-tier clients and doing so more effectively. These are the ones where we can provide more value. In 2024, we spoke about how we were planning to exit around 3,000 clients by the end of 2025, and I can confirm that we've hit this target with minimal loss to income. Our focus on optimization does not end here, and we continue to manage our RWAs in order to maximize the returns for shareholders and invest to serve our client needs. Now, if I can shift to our wealth and retail business, we announced just over a year ago that we were targeting $200 billion of net new money over five years. In the first year, we've been ahead of that pace, delivering $52 billion, which is equivalent to 14% growth of AUM and makes us the fastest-growing wealth manager in Asia. We also now rank as the number three wealth manager overall across Asia with affluent AUM of $447 billion. Our wealth solutions income continues to grow strongly across asset classes. Our product innovation and advisory capabilities, including initiatives and AI, put us in a great position to capture market opportunities and cater to changing client preferences. The growth in wealth solutions, combined with the decisions we've made to exit single product relationships and the entirety of our retail operations in certain markets, have helped us drive affluent to 70% of WRB income. This is great progress towards our 75% medium-term target. Turning to ventures, we have made strong progress across the digital banks. In 2025, MOX continued its strong growth trajectory, achieving a 15% year-on-year increase in customer base and reaching around 750,000 customers. TrustBank also continued its momentum with customer numbers up 15% year-on-year, reaching over 1 million customers, and taking its share of the adult population of Singapore beyond 20%. Within our SE Ventures portfolio, we're building ecosystems and areas of the future of finance, including digital assets, tokenization, and blockchain settlements, as well as data and technology capabilities that will serve our bank and our clients well in future years. We actively manage the portfolio, building ongoing momentum across a number of fronts. You'll recall that we had a successful merger of Solve India into Jumbo Tail in the first half of 2025. We've also seen unrealized gains, particularly from our stakes in Ripple and TOS, which have contributed around 70 basis points to our underlying ROTE in 2025. Now, as Pete mentioned earlier, this is the final quarter that we're reporting the venture segment separately. We'll be reporting digital banks as a product within WRB, reflecting how they're managed within the group and the increasing synergy we see between the digital banks and the rest of our WRB business. Given the maturity of the portfolio of investments, SC Ventures will be reported as part of Central and other going forward, but we'll continue to call out key investments, gains, and disposals as and when they occur. Now, if you only listen to the noise in the markets, you might think that sustainable and transition finance was going the way of the dodo. This could not be further from the truth. Our clients are sticking with their commitments, and our capabilities continue to improve. We've exceeded our income target of at least $1 billion in 2025 and see further growth from here. With $157 billion mobilized in sustainable finance since the beginning of 2021, we're over halfway towards our commitment to mobilize $300 billion by 2030. Highlights in the year include our €1 billion inaugural green senior bond, and we're proud to be ranked first in the Global Bank Climate Adaptation Assessment 2025, ranking the world's 50 largest commercial banks on their adaptation maturity. Bottom line, we're committed to our sustainable finance agenda, seeking to do the right thing and earn good returns doing that. So, to conclude, 2025, including Q4, was very strong for us, and we're delighted with the outcome, even with some noise in the fourth quarter. We completed our three-year plan in just two years, which speaks to our discipline, execution, and momentum. We've started the first quarter of 2026 strongly, particularly across our growth engines and CIB and WRB, where we see continued client activity and opportunity. We're announcing a new $1.5 billion share buyback and a 65% increase in full-year dividend per share. This is a clear signal of confidence in our performance today and in the strength of our outlook. We're targeting a statutory ROTE of over 12% in 2026. Before we move to questions, I want to lift the lens and look ahead a bit. As mentioned earlier and in the annual report, we see a number of major structural trends, long-term shifts that are reshaping global trade, capital flows, and growth. These are not short-cycle opportunities. They're powerful forces that will play out over many years and will play directly to our strengths. We've already positioned against those trends, and importantly, we continue to invest in and sharpen our focus on our critical and relevant competitive advantages. Our ambition is clear, to create an ever more distinctive, exciting, and high-performing Standard Chartered, one that delivers growth across every dimension that matters for our clients, for our communities, for our top line, our bottom line, and, of course, for our shareholders. We'll go into this in much greater detail in May, but the direction of travel is clear. The momentum is real, and we're building a business that is set up for sustained high-quality growth. And with that, I'm going to hand you over to the operator, and Pete, Manis, and I can take your questions.