DBS Group Holdings Ltd

Okay, good morning, everyone, and welcome to DBS's first quarter 2024 financial results briefing. This morning, we announced net profit rose 15% to $2.96 billion. Return on equity increased 19.4%. Both were at new highs. To give us more colour on the quarter, we have our CEO, Piyush Gupta, and our CFO, Chen Sokhui. They will take us through their presentations, which can be found on the DBS Investor Relations website, and you can follow along. Without further ado, Sokhi Piyush. Thank you, Agnes.

Good morning, everyone. We start with slide 2. We achieved a net record performance in the first quarter with total income, net profit and ROE at new highs. Net profit rose 15% from a year ago to $2.96 billion and return on equity climbed to 19.4%. Total income increased 13% to $5.56 billion with commercial book total income increasing 14% to $5.31 billion. Net interest income grew 8% lifted by higher net interest margin which rose 8 basis points to 2.77% from higher interest rates while loans grew 1%. Net fee income grew by 23% and crossed $1 billion for the first time, with the increase led by wealth management and loan fees. Treasury customer sales income also reached a new record. Markets trading income recorded a good quarter at $446 million despite the higher funding cost, but nevertheless fell 9% from the high base in the previous year. The strong growth in commercial book total income more than offset the decline in markets trading income, propelling group total income to $5.56 billion, up 13% from a year ago and also a new high. Expenses rose 10% to $2.08 billion and the cost-to-income ratio was little changed at 37%. Compared to the previous quarter, net profit was 24% higher. Commercial book total income increased 9%, led by growth in fee income and treasury customer sales, while net interest margin was slightly higher. Markets trading income more than doubled from low fourth quarter levels. The balance sheet continued to be strong. The NPR ratio was unchanged from the previous quarter at 1.1%. Specific allowances remain low at 10 basis points of loans similar to recent quarters. Allowance coverage was at 125% and at 223% after considering collateral. Capital was healthy with the CET1 ratio at 14.7%. Liquidity was also healthy with the NSFR and LCR well above liquidity requirements. The board declared a dividend of $0.54 per share over the enlarged post-bonus share base. Slide 3. Compared to a year ago, net profit rose 15% to $2.96 billion as total income grew 13% to $5.56 billion. Commercial book total income rose 14% or $644 million to $5.31 billion. The growth was broad-based. City Taiwan contributed 4 percentage points to the increase. In other words, the majority of the 14% growth was organic. Net interest income grew 8%, or $263 million from a higher net interest margin, as well as loan growth. Fee income grew 23%, or $192 million, on the back of strong wealth management and loan fees. Treasury customer sales and other non-interest income grew 44%, or $189 million, led by an increase in Treasury customer sales to a record. There was also a non-recurring gain of around $100 million on FX hedges we took on our overseas operations. Moderating the increase in commercial book total income was a decline in markets trading income of 9% of $23 million from the previous year's high base to $246 million. As we have guided previously, $246 million is a good quarter for markets trading income, especially in the light of higher funding costs. Expenses rose 10% of $197 million to $2.08 billion, with City Taiwan accounting for 5 percentage points. Profit before allowances was 14% higher at $3.48 million. Total allowances fell 16% or $26 million to $135 million. Slide 4 Compared to the previous quarter, net profit rose 24% as total income grew 11% and expenses declined 6%. City Taiwan was included for the full period in both quarters. Commercial book total income rose 9% or $417 million with non-interest income driving the increase. Net interest income was little changed. Net interest margin increased 2 basis points while loans grew 1%. Fee income increased 20% or $176 million led by wealth management and loan fees. Treasury customer sales at other non-interest income rose 59% or $231 million due to record Treasury customer sales and a non-recurring gain on FX hedges. Market trading income more than doubled, rising $133 million from a low base in the fourth quarter. Expenses fell 6% or $126 million. The previous quarter had included several non-recurring items. Profit before allowances was 24% higher. Total allowances were little changed. Reported net profit was 30% higher as there had been charges in the previous quarter of $100 million for CSR provision and $24 million for city integration. Slide 5. Compared to the previous quarter, commercial book net interest income was stable at $3.65 billion. Net interest margin improved by two basis points to 2.77% with higher asset yields from fixed asset repricing moderated by lower HIBOR. Deposit costs increased at a slower pace compared to previous quarters as the rate of CASA outflows decelerated. Compared to a year ago, commercial book net interest income rose 8%, driven by its basis point expansion in net interest margin and the consolidation of City Taiwan. Markets trading net interest income was a negative $142 million. We took advantage of opportunities to deploy funds into high-quality assets, which was accretive to net interest income but dilutive to NIM. This quarter, we also reclassified income from perpetual securities, which have stated coupons akin to conventional bonds, from non-interest income to net interest income to align the accounting from these securities with their associated funding costs. You recall that the funding for perpetual securities are shown at the net interest expense while the income is reflected in other income line. So this alignment and reclassification applied prospectively at 56 million to this quarter's markets trading net interest income with a corresponding reduction in markets trading non-interest income. The comparative amounts for each of the previous four quarters were 59 to 60 million and remain classified as non-interest income. The contribution from these perpetual securities is expected to be stable going forward. Combining commercial book and markets trading, the group's net interest income grew 2% from the previous quarter to $3.51 billion, while net interest margin rose one basis point to 2.14%. Excluding a 1.6 basis point impact from reclassifying perpetual income in market trading, net interest margin was stable. Compared to a year ago, net interest income grew 7% with net interest margin improving by 2 basis points. Slide 6. Loans grew 1% or $6 billion in constant currency terms during the quarter to $431 billion. Non-trade corporate loans rose 3% or $7 billion, with a growth broad-based across sectors. Trade loans and consumer loans were little changed. Slide 7. Deposits increased by 1% or $7 billion on a constant currency basis this quarter, driven by growth in fixed deposits. CASA outflows slowed from the previous year. LCR of 144% and NSFR of 116% remain well above regulatory requirements. Slide 8. Compared to a year ago, Gross fee income rose 26% to $1.27 billion as momentum was sustained. Excluding City Taiwan, which had been consolidated in Q3 2023, gross fee income grew 17% in the first quarter, unchanged from the 17% in the fourth quarter and faster than the 11% in the third quarter. The first quarter growth was led by wealth management fees, which rose 47% to $536 million. Excluding Citi, the growth was 35%, as stronger market sentiment and sustained net new money inflows boosted sales in a wide range of investment products. Bank assurance fees were also higher. Card fees grew 33% to $301 million from higher customer spending as well as Citi which accounted for two-thirds of the increase. Loan-related fees were also higher, rising 30% to $185 million. Transaction service fees were stable at $431 million. Investment banking fees declined 59% to $18 million from lower capital market activities. Compared to the previous quarter, gross fee income rose 19%. Leading the increase was a 45% rise in wealth management fees from a continued strengthening of market sentiment and from seasonal factors. Loan-related fees and transaction service fees were also higher. Slide 9. Commercial book non-interest income, which you see in the red box, rose 30% from a year ago and 32% from the previous quarter to $1.66 billion. The increases were due mainly to fee income and Treasury customer sales, which both reached new heights. There was also a non-recurring gain of around $100 million on FX hedges we take for overseas operations. The commercial book accounted for 81% of total non-interest income in the first quarter. After the reclassification of markets trading perp out of non-interest income to net interest income, markets trading non-interest income was at $388 million in the first quarter, exceeding the levels in the previous year and previous quarter. Combining commercial book and markets trading, total non-interest income rose 23% from a year ago and 30% from the previous quarter to $2.05 billion. Slide 10. Compared to a year ago, expenses rose 10% to $2.08 billion, with City Taiwan accounting for 5 percentage points of the increase. The cost-to-income ratio of 37% was stable. Compared to the previous quarter, which had included non-recurring items, expenses fell 6%. Slide 11. Asset quality remained resilient in the first quarter. Non-performing assets rose 3% from the previous quarter to $5.22 billion. New non-performing asset formation was partially offset by repayments and write-offs. The NPL ratio was unchanged at 1.1%. Slide 12. Specific allowances remain low at $115 million or 10 basis points of loans in line with recent quarters. Slide 13. Total allowance reserves stood at $6.53 billion with $2.60 billion in specific allowance reserves and $3.93 billion in general allowance reserves. Allowance coverage stood at 125% and at 223% of the considerate collateral. Slide 14. The CET1 ratio rose 0.1 percentage points from the previous quarter to 14.7% as profit accretion was partly offset by higher risk-weighted assets. The leverage ratio of 6.5% was more than twice the regulatory minimum of 3%. Slide 15. The board declared a dividend of $0.54 per share for the first quarter over the enlarged post-bonus share base. In other words, shareholders received 10% more dividend for the first quarter 2024 compared with fourth quarter 2023. This morning, our market capitalization crossed $100 billion, the first time a Singapore-listed company has done so. Based on Tuesday's closing share price and assuming that dividends are held at $0.54 per quarter, the annualized dividend yield is 6.2%. For the year to date, up to Tuesday's closing price, we have delivered total shareholder returns, comprising share price gains and the already paid fourth quarter 2023 dividend of 17%. Slide 16. In summary, we achieved record quarterly results with total income, net profit, and ROE, all at new highs. The year started with broad-based business momentum as loans grew and both fee income and treasury customer sales reached new highs. While geopolitical tensions persist, macroeconomic conditions remain resilient, which has put Fed rate cut expectations. Against this backdrop, our franchise is well positioned to deliver strong earnings and shareholder returns in the coming year. Thank you very much, and I'll now hand you over to Piyush.

Thank you, Sakli. So let me start with this. Picking up where Sokhi left off. I mean, this was obviously a very, very strong first quarter. It's exceptional by any measure. And I guess it's safe to say everything went our way, including some, you know, one-timers and everything, but everything went our way. If you look at the underlying, just to give you some more color on some of the features that Sokhi has already addressed, On loan growth, actually loan growth was more robust than we expected. Quite broad-based, but a chunk of it was in Singapore and in India. India is actually quite broad-based. Being able to elaborate the gift city branch and being able to build the book nicely across everything, public sector, energy, auto, NBFIs. Singapore was strong. Some of it to do with the government land, state, and property, but a large chunk of it to do with the commodity complex. both the softs and the energy traders, so it is quite broad-based. The headwinds in loan growth, still Hong Kong, because loans are still shifting from Hong Kong to the mainland, so that still countries will be slow. And Singapore, the mortgage book, um the overall market sentiment is soft uh some of the releases planned for uh largest plan for this year are actually being deferred uh and we are continuing to maintain pricing discipline so our bargain book actually came off a little bit is likely to come off through the first half of the years we maintain pricing discipline on the front but uh nevertheless you put all of that together um you know six billion dollars the loan growth was very robust On NIM, again, the commercial book NIM was actually slightly better than we expected. It went up by two basis points. And that's despite the headwinds from high ball, which came off by 50, 60 basis points in the quarter. The uptake in the commercial book is really coming from the fixed asset repricing. We had guided earlier that we have about $40 billion of fixed asset, fixed rate loans, which are likely to reprice this year. $16 billion of that came up for repricing in the first quarter, and we're getting a better uptake on that than we had originally forecast in terms of the new rates we're being able to book it at. And so that's been helpful to the commercial book NIM. At the same time, our assumptions on CASA outflow or CASA repricing, it's coming in better than we forecast. So net-net commercial book NIM was stronger. On the markets front, we actually are finding a great opportunity to be able to do the carry trade, be able to take money and place it out at very good yields in the short end with central banks and short end paper. It's a creative net interest income, even though it is detrimental to NIMH. So, the market's NIM came off a bit, but partly because of the declassifications, how we explained, the stated NIM actually looks okay. And therefore, when you put all of that together, our NIM was flat for the quarter, and we still think our original NIM guidance that we will see a slight decline over exit NIMs from last year is intact. Fees was particularly pleasing. It was very, very strong. Wealth management across the board is looking like it's 45% up, but if you take out the city impact, obviously there's a one-time impact, it's 35%. Now, it's 35% up from last year. Last year, the base was low. The first quarter last year was particularly low because the credit suites impact happened in the first quarter of last year. But even if you adjust for that and you compare with first quarter of the year before, for example, we still grew 20-odd percent on the wealth management line. And that comes from a lot of stuff. customers are increasingly beginning to put money to work. So our conversion of deposits into investment products continue to grow. It was about 50% last year, this time that's up to about 55% in investment products. By the same time, customers are also adding more duration. So the nature of the risk that they're putting on is also a little bit different and therefore the fee income has been actually quite strong. Our net new money continued to do well. We continue to see the same net new money as we have over the last few quarters. Card fee was also strong. Sales are going up across the board in all of our key card markets. Of course, the 33% fee is flattered by the Citi edition. If I back out Citi, it's still about 12% double digit growth in card fees. So again, that's very robust. Treasury customer sales was the other thing which hit a huge high. Now, this is, again, Sokhi pointed out. We were, this is again, flattered. We had about 100 million gain on some hedges we take for our overseas operation. That's a one-timer. We saw a negative mark to market in the fourth quarter. We saw a positive mark to market in the first quarter. But we're going to adjust that so we don't see the toys going forward. But even if you take that out, the growth overall is a strong 22% and that is also broad-based. It's both from the individual side, wealth management, but also equally from the corporate side where the outlook on rates caused a lot of people to start hedging or even restructuring old hedges. So that was actually very strong as well. Cost-income ratio at 37% is 5% growth if you exclude the city, Taiwan, which means I think our expenses are relatively well managed. Finally, on asset quality, the 1.1% NPL rate is unchanged. Our NPA formation is a little bit higher than the last couple of quarters, but it's quite idiosyncratic. There's no trend over there. And if you look at the 300 odd million, it's not too far from other quarters we've had in the last couple of years. So given where we are in the cycle and the interest rate outlook, I don't think there is any thing to take away from that. So moving forward to slide four, I thought we would make a quick commentary on our tech situation. As you know, I may have decided not to extend the six-month pause, and I said that we made substantive progress. I'm also quite pleased with the progress we've made over the last six months. And it's multi-pronged. We focused on improving service availability. We focused on getting alternative channels for payments and inquiries. We focused on quicker recovery of services. Something should go down. We focused on trying to make sure there's greater transaction certainty for both payers and recipients. And so we've done a lot of the heavy lifting. But in truth, we still have more work to do. And so through the balance of this year, there are still areas that are a work in process. We have found other opportunities to simplify our system architecture so that some stuff will continue to do. We realized in some areas we need to build deeper engineering skills and centers of excellence in some critical third-party technologies. We're doing that both by hiring people and training people, but that obviously would take a few more months. We figured that we can improve our chain management and the use of AI, especially Gen-AI in that is quite helpful. That would take the rest of this year to bed down. And finally, in terms of monitoring, so we can pick up issues quickly, we've done a lot of very good dashboards, but again, there are opportunities for us to continue to building up more detailed and granular dashboards. So there is still work to do in the course of this year, but like I said, I think we've done most of the heavy lifting at this point in time. Finally, I'll move to slide five in terms of outlook. You know, all of these, geopolitically, it's still uncertain. Quite clearly, the Middle East, you know, the wars, the Ukraine-Russia situation, even the China-US, all countries may be tricky. But the macroeconomic conditions seem to be quite resilient. I think growth rates in Asia are quite stable. PMIs have been positive now for the last couple of months across most of the countries. Consumer demand is generally holding up. And even though the strong dollar means there will be some currency depreciation in a couple of countries, it doesn't look like anything that should cause us too much worry. So against the backdrop, we take each of the pieces of our income statement. Interest income, I think, will be modestly better than 2023. And I use the word modestly advisedly, even though we originally factored in five interest rate increases when we guided for flat net interest income. Two of those net interest increases had been factored in for the tail end of the year, November, December. And so they didn't really have too much impact on this year's net interest income outlook anyway. We're currently forecasting about two rate increases, so we'll get some tailwind from interest rate increase and maybe $100 million upside from interest income. On non-interest income, we had guided for double digits. I think we'll get mid to high teens because the first quarter was already very strong. And we are seeing that momentum in wealth management, treasury customer sales, et cetera, is quite strong. So we do think that mid to high teens growth in that line is possible. If you blend those two together, I think total income could be one or two percentage points higher than our previous guidance of mid single digit. Our cost income ratio, we haven't changed our guidance. We said low 40% range given the first quarter was 37. A lot of this depends on actually the income line more than the cost line. I think a cost at the high single digit cost growth is still intact. SPs, we've kept our guidance at 70 to 20 only because of the uncertainty. Given that rates are going to be higher, like I've said before, we've got to continue to keep an eye on the unsecured consumer book. We've got to continue to keep an eye on the SME book. and so on. And therefore, it's not unreasonable to assume that at some stage, you should start seeing a pickup in provisions to go back to long-term averages. Having said that, as Saqib pointed out in our presentation, we are not seeing any obvious signs of stress anywhere. And therefore, it is conceivable that there is some upside on that line. But at this point in time, I think it's just prudent to keep our guidance at the original levels. But when you put all of that together, it was guided for the fact that we thought we could protect our $10 billion net profit number. And at this stage, at the end of the first quarter, I think it's a reasonable assumption that we should be able to beat last year's profit number. So why don't I stop there, and we can then throw it open for questions.