HSBC Holdings, plc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Investor and Analyst Conference Call for HSBC Holdings PLC's Interim Results for 2023. For your information, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I will hand it over to your host, Mr. Noel Quinn, Group Chief Executive.

Good afternoon to those joining us here in Hong Kong and good morning to those in London and elsewhere. Noel and George will present on strategy and the results and we will allow plenty of time for questions from the telephone lines and the live audience here in Hong Kong. With that, over to Noel who will host the conference.

Thank you, Richard. And good afternoon to everyone in the room here in Hong Kong. Thank you for joining us and great to see you again. And good morning to everyone watching from London and elsewhere. Before George takes you through the second quarter numbers, I'll start with a summary of the first half performance and progress. First, I show this slide every quarter. It's critical in that it summarizes our strategy and our strategy remains unchanged. It is summarized by the four pillars at the bottom of the slide. Let me take you through the latest outcomes of that strategy. We had a good first six months. I'm pleased with the broad base profit and revenue generated by our global businesses and geographies. I'm also pleased with our strong capital generation and returns. We delivered an annualized return on tangible equity of 22.4%, including the two material notable items reported in the first quarter, or 18.5% if you exclude those notable items. And we've announced a second interim dividend of 10 cents per share and a second share buyback of up to $2 billion. Today, we're also upgrading our guidance. Now we expect to achieve a return on tangible equity in the mid-teens for 2023 and 2024. Prior to 2023, we were very focused on transforming the business. Now, while still continuing to improve operational efficiency, we are very focused on driving growth, diversifying revenue and creating incremental value. We have a plan built around six areas. I will take you through some of these over the next few slides. Starting with our international connectivity, we grew wholesale cross-border client business in the first half by around 50%, with growth across all regions driven by higher rates. Our international proposition in wealth and personal banking continues to gain traction. We now have 6.3 million international WPB customers, and that is up 500,000 or 8% over the last 12 months. That's significant because these international customers generate around two and a half times the average customer revenue. Finally, we drove strong revenue growth in transaction banking, which was up 63%. There were good performances in foreign exchange and in global payment solutions. Trade was slightly down year on year, in line with global trade volumes. But trade balances stabilized in the second quarter, particularly in Asia. And HSBC was named best bank for trade finance by Euromoney for the second year in a row, as well as best bank in Asia. The next slide sets out our latest progress on another area of focus, the redeployment of capital from less strategic or low connectivity businesses into higher growth international opportunities. I'm pleased that we agreed new terms for the sale of our French retail banking operations in the quarter. The deal is subject to regulatory approval and we now have a lot of work to do to complete migration in early 2024. The sale of our banking operations in Canada remains on track to complete in early 2024 with a special dividend of 21 cents per share planned thereafter. We completed the disposal of our Greek business last weekend and we've announced the disposal of our Russian operations. We are changing the nature of our business in Oman, and we will wind down our WPB operations in New Zealand. Crucially, this is allowing us to target growth opportunities, some of which are set out on the right-hand side. The first is the continued development of our wealth business across the whole of Asia. Our digitally enabled wealth and insurance business in mainland China now has 1,400 wealth planners and is driving good new business growth. We launched global private banking in India last month. In June, we launched HSBC Innovation Banking, a strengthened, globally connected proposition on the back of our purchase of SVB UK. we will nurture the specialism that we acquired, back it with HSBC's balance sheet strength and global network, and build further innovation banking businesses in the US, here in Hong Kong, and Israel. The process is already well underway and will enable us to support our clients in the technology and life sciences sectors to achieve their global ambitions. Finally, we've announced today that we are also increasing our shareholding in TradeShift and have agreed to launch a jointly owned business in early 2024 to provide embedded financing solutions within their trade ecosystem. We believe this will help us to grow our client base in commercial banking, giving us a new avenue for growth outside of traditional relationship banking. The next slide looks at how we are diversifying revenue by growing fee income and collaboration. As I've said, our wealth strategy continues to gather momentum, especially in Asia. Net new invested assets were down in the rest of the world due to lower third party asset management liquidity products, mainly in the US. but they were up in Asia by 21% to $27 billion. Over the last 12 months, we took in a total of 75 billion of net new invested assets and grew our invested assets by 8% globally. This all underlines the growth potential of our wealth business. Free income in commercial banking was up 6% in the first half. and collaboration revenues between our global businesses were up 5%. Collaboration revenue is particularly important in a relatively low growth economic environment because we can drive growth from within the organization. The next slide focuses on the tight cost discipline we've maintained and how it enables us to invest in the bank of the future. We remain committed to discipline cost management and have continued to use cost savings to increase investment in digitization. We increased spending on technology by 12.8% in the first half. And this spending now accounts for 23% of our target base operating expenses. This investment has translated into faster services, reduced friction, and more competitive products, all of which will improve the customer experience and our operational efficiency. We've made good progress in increasing digital penetration amongst personal and business customers, while increasing our product release frequency. Investing in technology is also enhancing our capabilities. We now have a range of test and learn use cases for generative AI across HSBC and are in the process of scaling up a small number of those. Last month, we became the first bank to join BT and Toshiba's quantum secured metro network. This uses quantum technology for secure transmission of data, which should mitigate the risk of future cyber threats. And we are pleased to be working with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority on two pilots to test the Hong Kong dollar in a new payments ecosystem and to trial tokenized deposits. My last slide shows how we've continued to build on our position as an enabler of the net zero transition. In the first half, we provided and facilitated $45 billion of sustainable finance and investments as we continue to work closely with our clients on their transition plans. This consisted of capital markets financing and on balance sheet lending to clients. and included a number of key deals in Asia and the Middle East. We were recently named best bank for sustainable finance in Asia by Euromoney for the sixth consecutive year. I'll now hand over to George to take you through the Q2 numbers.