2/4/2025

speaker
Jean-Laurent Bonnafé
Chief Executive Officer

So good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm pleased to present to you today a summary of our strong force quarter results. We will also be providing detail on our trajectory of profitability and capital return for 25 and 26. We'll be relatively short on divisional details, as you have most of them in our documents. So on slide four, On fourth quarter 24, net profit is up a strong 16% year-on-year to 2.3 billion euros. Earning growth was supported by an elevated 10.8% revenue growth year-on-year, a very high 6.5-pound Jaws effect, and continued low cost of risk. Our CT1 is up 20 bps quarter-on-quarter to 12.9%, thanks to return earnings and securitization operations. During the quarter, CIB posted an impressive 20.1% revenue growth, with double-digit increases in all businesses. Global markets stood up, driving revenue up 32.4% in the quarter. CPBS was up nearly 5%, despite lower used car sales results at Aval. The quarter confirmed the gradual inflection of our Eurozone commercial banks, but also a strong rebound in Europe made thanks to the reconsolidation of Ukraine and the rebound in Turkey. Finally, IPS posted a strong 8.4% growth driven by insurance, wealth management and asset management, but real estate continues to wait. We obviously confirmed our distribution policy of 60% and I will comment more on this later. On slide five, you can see we have fully delivered our 24 targets. So I'm not going to comment that with further details, and I will move on to slide six, where I will now be moving. We present the new trajectory with our ambition remains to reach our return on tangible equity of 11.5% in 25. and 12% in 26 based on 12.3% core equity tier 1 pre-FRTB. This should lead to more than 8% EPS growth stagger, as you see on the slide. Our 26 return on tangible equity is a stepping stone towards further improvement. Our targets will be achieved thanks to six key levers, starting with CIB, We'll continue to grow market shares in a capital-conscious manner thanks to our state-of-the-art CIB platforms that are uniquely positioned to deliver the highest added value products to clients. Moving to CPBS, we launched a new strategic plan for CPBS this summer and extend the one of personal finance. We intend to lift the return on national equity of these businesses to 17% by 2028 adding about one percentage point to group return on tangible equity. Our top line in the Eurozone commercial banks should benefit from normalization of the yield curve, and we will prioritize protecting commercial margins in a competitive market environment. Moving to IPS, we continue the dynamic organic growth of insurance, asset management, and wealth management. This will be amplified but the integration of recent acquisitions such as HSBC Germany's wealth management business and of course the AXA-IM acquisition. We'll continue our efficiency efforts with additional savings of Euro 600 million in 26 after the Euro 600 million savings announced previously for 25. Moving to slide seven, let me now move on to our distribution policy. We reconfirmed our payout targets of 60% for 2024. For 2024, this means a dividend per share of €4.79 and €1.08 billion share buyback programs. We are on track to distribute the €20 billion we aim to return by the end of 2026. We have also decided to implement an interim dividend Starting this year, that would be the equivalent of 50% of the first half EPS and paid on the 30th of September. This reflects our confidence in the strength of the business and our ability to drive organic growth. Illustrating with the first half 24 earnings, our total shareholder return would be equivalent to about 13% this year. I now hand over to Lars, who will briefly summarize the achievements of the quarter, and then I'll detail our trajectory for 25 and 26.

speaker
Lars Machuel
Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Jean-Laurent. Good afternoon, everyone. I'll briefly describe the trends in our main businesses, our cost discipline, as well as strong cost of risk management, and I'll end up with the capitals. So if you accompany me on slide 11, you see that the fourth quarter was driven by solid business performance, and this within each division. So group revenues were up 10.8% year on year, and CIB in particular had an impressive quarter, as Jean-Laurent mentioned, up 20% year on year, driven by the strong performance of the three business lines within CIB. First, global banking, up 10.8%, supported by capital markets in EMEA and in the Americas. In particular, trade finance had good momentum and advisory was robust, particularly in EMEA. If we go to the second division, global markets, and their activities were up 32%, driven by a strong performance both in equity and prime services, as well as robust performance for FIC thanks to strong activity in primary, macro and forex. The third division being security services was up 13.4% driven by a sustained growth in fees as well as higher client balances and transaction volumes and margin resilience. So that's our first division. If we turn to the second one, CPBS had a good performance, up nearly 5%, supported by the commercial and personal banking activities with higher deposits and stable loans. A few points are worth highlighting. First, a positive inflection point in the revenue trend was confirmed for the commercial banks in the Eurozone with strong growth in fees across all markets and net interest revenues stabilizing. The exception is Belgium, where competition remains tough. We have been affected throughout the year by lower current account deposits, but as you can see, the trend is stabilizing. All this gives us confidence in our ability to deliver decent growth in 25 and beyond, as we will explain when we come to the 26 trajectory. If we then look at France, side deposits are also stabilizing and we see positive momentum on corporate and private banking activities supporting a positive growth in revenues this quarter. We are very pleased also to see that gross operating income was up 2.4% for 2024, which demonstrates our ability to adjust to adverse market conditions. And this supports our ambition to improve the overall profitability of our business in France, as also we will show in our 2025-2026 trajectory. If we then look at the other part within CPBS, namely the specialized businesses, they were stable year on year, but still impacted by the ongoing normalization of used car prices. Organically, the Arval business again performed extremely well this quarter, up double digits. We anticipate that arval and leasing revenues should be down by about 10% in 2025, as we announced before, and this is due to used car prices, but specialised businesses are nonetheless expected to deliver positive growth, as shown in our trajectory slide 25. And this includes a 5% growth target for the core parameter at personal finance in 2025. Last, a very good performance from the new digital businesses and personal investors, up 10% this quarter, thanks to further growth in client acquisition. So that's our second division. If we now turn to the third one, the last but definitely not the least, IPS. We saw strong growth in fees and assets under management. IPS is about to become a major driver of our growth with, in particular, the acquisition of AXA-IM. All activities in this department, bar real estate, perform extremely well this quarter and revenues for the division were up 8.4% year on year. Moreover, activity levels, higher assets under management and strong inflows contributed to our performance. Our recent acquisitions will accelerate growth as we detail in our trajectory 25-26. If we do this, you'll stay with me on slide 12, which shows the relentless focus on cost discipline and the way it's paying off. Particularly, you've seen we delivered very positive jobs at group level this quarter at 6.5 percentage points. This demonstrates our capacity to improve efficiency in our three divisions while funding growth. If we now turn to slide 13, where we focus on our cost savings and efficiency measures. Here you can see that we have managed to fully offset the impact of inflation with cost savings at the promised 1 billion euros. leaving room to fund our expansion and enabling strong top-line growth. We delivered significantly more than the two points in Joel in Q4, and as our trajectory 25-26 shows, we expect to continue at a pace of about 1.5 points per annum on average. What are the key levers for this Joel's effect? Well, there's several of them. Personal finance with a comprehensive adaptation plan delivering positive jobs more than 4% in 2024. An easier base of comparison in CIB, outsourcing initiatives of non-core functions, increasing the usage of service centers where we have actually increased the FTEs by 2,200 since 2023. And finally, our real estate, so our internal real estate rationalization, including branches. In total, we have reduced our office space by 120,000 square meters. So with this talk about cost, I will now turn to slide 14 and cover our excellent risk management. On this slide, you can see that our diversified balance sheet enabled us to protect profitability. Only 16% of our gross operating income, so revenues minus cost, was absorbed by provision. Focusing on the performance in the fourth quarter, our cost of risk reached 38 basis points over outstanding, meeting our stated intention to stay below 40 basis points, and it's down compared to a year ago. If we look in detail, Our stock of so-called Stage 1 and Stage 2 provisions is comfortable at a whopping €4.2 billion, equivalent to more than one year's worth of the current Stage 3 run rate. I will not much elaborate on slide 15, but let me highlight the key points. So cost of risk in CPVS is up year on year and quarter on quarter due to one specific file, and we continue to monitor the French economic environment given the political landscape. For now, our portfolio is strong, but we prefer to tighten risk limits that overgrow. Global banking continues to deliver an impressive performance with a nearly nil cost of risk on average in the last four years, and actually a release in 24 demonstrating a powerful low risk CIB platform. Let me end on slide 16 with the third scarce resource capital management. As we indicated in the third quarter, we implemented securitization transactions in the fourth quarter for an equivalent of 10 basis points. This enabled us to reach a robust common equity tier one of 12.9%, up 20 basis points compared to the third quarter, including our organic capital generation. This 12.9% at the year end has become 12.4% on January 1st, given the day one implementation of Basel IV in Europe. This 12.4% remains significantly above our SREP requirement of 10.3% and above our 12.3% target of pre-FRTB or 12% fully loaded, so including and assuming an FRTB implementation, enabling us to enter the year 2025 in a comfortable position. In particular, the chart at the bottom of slide 16 shows you that net of distribution, we built about 30 basis points organically in 24, close to the normal pattern for BNP Paribas. Moreover, we absorbed the impact of Arval reconsolidation, model updates, and redeployment of Bank of the West capital. We intend, as suggested before, to be FRTB ready on January 1st, 26, as we await detail on timing, magnitude, or even implementation, if any, of FRTB, as we continue to ask European authorities to be vigilant and ensure a level playing field between jurisdictions. If we look at other elements, our leverage ratio came in 4.6%, and liquidity also remained a key strength with a liquidity coverage ratio of 137%. I'll now hand back to Jean-Laurent for our 25-26 trajectory.

speaker
Jean-Laurent Bonnafé
Chief Executive Officer

So now on slide 25, let's focus on our priorities for 25 and 26. So as you can see, we have to deliver above 5% top line growth CAGR. more than 1.5% JAWS effect on average, cost of risk below 40 bps, net earning growth of more than 7% CAGR, and EPS growth of more than 8% CAGR. And now I'll go through the growth rate with tech by division. On slide 26, focusing on CIB, Our CAB division has been a fantastic growth and profitability story since its refocus and deployment phases. We believe that it is now uniquely positioned to continue to gain market shares on high growth, high annual segments of customers and products. The intimacy we develop with our clients and our cutting edge distribution capabilities have led us to become a trusted and needed partner for most of our counterparts. we will obviously be in a strong position to capitalize on the progress to come from the capital markets union, given our strong relationship with both borrowers and investors. This will help us continue to optimize capital consumption. We are well positioned as well to participate in the growth the USA is most likely going to see. On slide 26 and 28, you can see that our growth has been achieved with capital productivity cost efficiency, and a low risk profile, a key feature of our DNA. As a result, we raised our ROAN by 10 percentage points over the last four years. Our second priority, slide 29, is to focus on improving profitability at CPBF and personal finance, currently significantly below group average. We are launching a new strategic plan for CPBF later this year, which will be submitted to the consultation process of the employee representative bodies, and we're extending the personal finance plan until 28. These two businesses account for about 24% of group risk weight, and we expect to improve their respective return on national equity to about 70% in 28. This should add about one percentage point to group return on tangible equity, with 0.5 percentage points coming by 26. Regarding CPBF, we will benefit from a better red curve. We believe that we have a powerful position on corporates, private banking, and mass affluent clients. We'll therefore continue to focus on growing market shares in synergy with IPS and CIB. Regarding the retail segment, We transform the relationship model via digitalization and optimization, which will lead us to adapt the operational model. We will elaborate on this at a deep dive on 26th of June. The plan for personal finance is already well engaged with a refocus on the core businesses, gradual recovery expected on the margin from front lower rates and a good positioning on mobility. We will extend the plan to 28 to optimize our operational model. This will be presented at a deep dive on the 10th of June. And now before my conclusion, Lars will now say a word on NII in our Eurozone Commercial Bank and on IPS.

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