Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation

Full year 2024, group net profit was S$7.59 billion, up 8%. This was driven by robust income growth across our three key pillars of banking, wealth management and insurance. Total income surged above S$14 billion for the first time to a new high, from broad-based income growth. Net interest income rose to a record of 9.76 billion, supported by 5% asset growth. Non-interest income grew 22% to 4.72 billion. Wealth-related fees and insurance income delivered strong growth, while our trading income rose to a record high. cost-to-income ratio was below 40% at 39.7%. We achieved high single-digit loan growth and deposit growth this year. Loan growth of 8% was above our guidance level. Portfolio quality remained healthy with our NPL ratio lower at 0.9% year-on-year. Total credit costs were also lower at 19 basis points. Our capital position remained strong. Transitional CET1 ratio was 17.1% and fully phased-in CET1 ratio at 15.3%. With our resilient results and strong capital position, we are pleased to announce a new two-year capital return plan to enhance shareholders' return. S$2.5 billion capital distribution over two years through special dividends and share buybacks. We will initiate our capital return to start early. with a special dividend for FY24 and another one for FY25, set at 10% of our group net profit. The balance of around SGD1 billion will be via share buybacks over two years at management discretion and barring any unforeseen circumstances. The shares will be acquired from open market and will be cancelled. This means that total dividend payout of 60% annually for FY24 and FY25, i.e. 50% target payout ratio for ordinary dividend and an additional 10% in special dividend. For FY24, we propose final ordinary dividend of $0.41 per share, bringing our total ordinary dividends to $0.85 or 50% of our group profit. We further propose a special dividend at $0.16 per share or 10% of our group profit. that comes to a total of 101 cents per share, 23% higher than 82 cents that we paid in FY23. We will repeat the 60% dividend payout for FY25. Now our capital return plan is set after a comprehensive review of our capital position, taking into consideration the capital required to support our business growth, investment options available to us, and based on our target 14% fully phased-in CET1 ratio. Now let's move back to our financial results on slide five. For full year of 24, we reported record profits for both grouped and banking operations for the third consecutive year. For the fourth quarter, group net profit was 4% higher year on year. Quarter on quarter, group net profit declined 15%. This was partly due to the decline in insurance income from Great Eastern arising from changes in medical insurance business in its core markets of both Singapore and Malaysia. These changes were explained in Great Eastern's results which was released yesterday. At banking operations level, net profit declined by a smaller degree of 9%, due primarily to seasonal slowdown in trading and investment activities. Earlier on, I mentioned that our record profit was driven by strong contribution and performance across three key business pillars of banking, wealth management and insurance. This reflected the power of our diversified franchise and collective strength as one OCBC Group to deliver continuous sustainable growth and improve shareholders' returns. Banking operations reported a third year of record profit, driven by strong income growth. Wealth management businesses continue to grow from strength to strength. both wealth management, income and assets under management delivered double-digit growth to new record levels. Our wealth management income rose 13% to $4.89 billion. Assets under management rose 14% to $299 billion, led by continuous net new money inflows. for insurance profit contribution from Great Eastern rose 39% year-on-year to $882 million, driven by strong underlying insurance business as well as improved investment performance in its shareholders' funds. Moving on to net interest income in slide 11. Our full-year net interest income of $9.76 billion was a new high, supported by 5% average asset growth from both customer loans and lower-yielding high-quality assets such as government securities and interbank lending. In 2024, we deploy assessed liquidity into these high-quality assets as part of our ongoing balance sheet management to sustain net interest income in a declining interest rate environment. Net interest margin was down 8 basis points to 2.20% as funding costs rose faster than asset yields over the year on average for FY24 compared to FY23. NIM was also partly impacted by the increase in high-quality assets which are income-accretive but lower yielding compared to our customer loans. Looking into 2025, we expect full-year NIM to trend lower to around 2.0%. This takes into consideration the lagged effects from Fed rate cuts of a total of 50 basis points in late November as well as in December of last year and our House view of 3 rate cuts of up to 75 basis points in 2025. As at the end of December 2024, meme sensitivity, based on one basis point, dropped in rates across our four major currencies of Singapore dollars, US dollars, Hong Kong dollars and Malaysian ringgit was about 4 to 5 million for one basis point of drop. Now this is lower than the $7 million a year ago as we continuously took steps to reduce NIMS sensitivity including growing fixed rate loans and putting on more cash flow hedges. Touching on non-interest income now. Non-interest income rose 22% to $4.72 billion, driven by broad-based growth. Wealth-related and insurance income rose higher. Trading income rose to a record high. For the fourth quarter, non-interest income was up 18% year-on-year but down 30% queue-on-queue. As I've highlighted earlier, this was partly impacted by lower insurance income from Great Eastern in the fourth quarter. Wealth and trading income were also seasonally lower in the fourth quarter. However, we see strong momentum coming back in January. Full-year fee income rose 9% year on year, led by higher wealth-related investment banking and loan-related fees. Wealth management fees rose 22%. We saw higher fees across all our wealth channels. This was driven by a rise in customer activities from improved investment sentiment. Our higher AUM base of $299 billion also contributed to fee income growth as this higher percentage of AUM was placed in investment products compared to a year ago, contributing to our fee income growth. Now, on average, we have around 60% of our AUM invested in investment products across all our wealth segments. In the fourth quarter, it's notable that fee income was actually slightly higher despite a seasonally quieter quarter in 4Q. Trading Income Our trading income for the full year was at a new high of S$1.54 billion. The 53% increase from a year ago was driven by record customer flow treasury income. We also saw strong growth in non-customer flow trading income, coming from improved investment performance from both our global markets as well as Great Eastern. The robust growth in customer flow treasury income was contributed by both our consumer and corporate segments. for the fourth quarter, trading income declined from the high base that we achieved in the third quarter, and in part also due to the seasonality that I mentioned earlier. Full-year operating expenses were up 9% as we continue to invest in strategic initiatives and pursue business growth. The increase was led by staff costs mainly from a combination of higher variable compensation in line with our income growth and business activities growth. We also saw headcount increase and annual salary increments. The consolidation of PT Bank Commonwealth from May 2024 onwards also added to expense growth this year. Cost-to-income ratio for FY24 was still maintained at below 40%. Our loan portfolio remained healthy and we are currently not seeing any systemic stress in any particular sectors. NPR ratio was 0.9%, lower than a year ago. Total NPAs as at end December were lower year on year at 2.87 billion. In the fourth quarter, our new corporate MPA formation was mainly from a downgrade of one Hong Kong CRE account. We did not observe any significant stress in Hong Kong CRE sector and we remain watchful and closely monitoring the portfolio for any signs of early indicators of weakness, if any. Our full year, 24, total allowances were $690 million, down 6% year-on-year. Allowances set aside in the fourth quarter was mainly related to the Hong Kong CRE account that I mentioned earlier. Total credit costs for the full year were 19 basis points, lower than the credit cost guidance of 20 basis points. Now turning on to MPA coverage, our group's MPA coverage ratio was higher as 159% compared to a year ago. As we can see, NPL has been declining and we have been progressively building up our allowances resulting in MPA coverage of exceeding 150%. Turning on to loans, Loan portfolio continued to be well diversified across geography and industries. Group loans grew 8% year-on-year to $319 billion, driven by broad-based growth across geographies and industries. We saw increases in housing loans as well as trade and non-trade loans. Looking at the chart on loans by industry, I want to point out that we saw notable increase in loans to transport, storage and communications sector. This is in line with our group's strategic focus to capture opportunities in the new economy sectors as well as high growth industries. Another of our fastest growing segments is our Sustainable Financing Loans portfolio, which expanded 31% to $50 billion. This portfolio now made up 16% of our group loans. Turning on to deposits. Now, our group's strong and stable funding position was supported by customer deposits, which represented about 80% of our funding base. Customer deposits were 7% higher at $391 billion from both CASA and fixed deposit growth. Importantly, the increase in CASA was from both corporate operating accounts as well as consumers' savings accounts. This reflected the results of our efforts to grow these lower cost and sticky deposits as part of our proactive balance sheet management to manage funding costs and defend our net interest margin. CASA ratio of 48.8% was higher from the previous quarter as well as from a year ago. Our group strong capital position is reflected in our transitionary CET1 ratio of 17.1%, but slightly lower than 17.2% in the last quarter. CET1 ratio would be 15.3% on a fully face-in basis. After paying the proposed final and special dividend for FY24, pro forma CET1 ratio will be at 14.3%. That's closer to our target CET1 ratio of 14%. My final slide is on dividends. Basically sets out what I shared earlier. Now just to recap, 60% dividend payout for FY24 and a repeat of 60% dividend payout for FY25. The balance in the region of around $1 billion will be returned to shareholders via share buybacks. and all in this translate to 2.5 billion capital return plan and that's on top of the 50% target ordinary dividend payout for the coming two years. With that, I thank you very much for your attention today and I will now hand the floor over to Helen. Helen, please.

Thank you, Chen Yi, and good morning to everyone again. It's always good to see all of you here. I have a few slides to share, but I do want to spend a bit more time maybe on this first one. We talked about record profit for 2017. three years in a row, but I just want to dive a bit more into what brings us to where we are today. So allow me to spend a bit more time, as I said, on this slide. A lot of you would remember we refreshed our corporate strategy back in 2022, and then we talked about different growth pillars and how we actually managed to continue to grow it. We also announced what sort of initiatives will help us to improve our revenues and what sort of different business that we are investing in. So I'd like to recap that a little bit. I think you remember when we talked about the corporate strategy, we're talking about our four growth pillars, which is the crypto-China, ASEAN, investment and trade growth. which is also about the wealth growth in particular in Asia, ASEAN, and also the wealth, the cross-border growth in wealth. We talk about new economies and fast growth industry, that's the first pillar, and then we talk about sustainability. as of course something that is non-negotiable but also a growth pillar for us because of our focus on helping our customers to transition and we continue to build our sustainable finance book. So a lot has been said on that and indeed in 2023 we announced what does all this translate into. We're talking about incremental revenues of 3 billion Singapore dollars from 2023 to 2025. and we have reported on that number. So we did say that the first year, one sixth of it, we make $500 million and then the second year is one half of it, so the target was $1 billion. By the September results, I think I mentioned that we're already close to the target. So just want to say that two years together, we are a bit closer to $2 billion. So hopefully, if we continue with this, all this translate to the profits growth. But how do we translate it? It very much depends on what we call the enablers, which is managing our capital, put capital in where we need it, managing our risk. And you can see the quality of our book, how NPL has also come down. And then it is all about one group as well. I think I talk about it so much. that some of my colleagues at Helen, we all know, we all know, and we are doing it. So it is because of this strategy that we're able to put our eggs together, and indeed over the last two years plus, we talk a lot about innovative market-first products, and don't want to recap them here, but indeed digital acquisition, This is something very important for the CFS business, cross-border regional premier initiatives. These are all progressing well. And we talked about cross-border flow of investment and trade. Indeed, we are supporting a lot of the Chinese commercial banking customers expanding to ASEAN. And we have expanded our good-to-China non-bank FI portfolio as well, resulting in revenue exceeding our targets in that 3 billion, to that extent. So we also see good progress in targeting what we call new economy and also fast-growing industry. So I want to highlight that we've been capturing electric vehicles, mainly in the battery industry. And also, of course, you know that there's a lot of opportunity in Indonesia which is a big manufacturer in that. And that's why we're talking about the value chain along this and also about data infrastructure. We are constantly looking for new opportunities. I think a big thing that we're looking at the moment is Singapore Johor Special Economic Zone. Actually we started even before the final agreement was signed in January. So we started more than a year ago. are putting together a committee looking at what sort of customer we can help. And I want to say that we have dedicated teams to help in particular SME customers across Singapore and Malaysia, providing advisory services to help them start and grow their business as well as connect them with suitable partners. in both sides. I just want to mention this in 2024 alone, we have about 260 mid-sized enterprises in the region to start in Malaysia, setting up in Malaysia and helping them to set up account and look at how they are going to expand. And these cover the services sector, construction, manufacturing, wholesale and retail. and et cetera, et cetera. So for this sector in particular, we think we can continue to grow something like 20% in 2025. So just to illustrate how the corporate strategy work supported when we are working together as one group. The collaboration has allowed us also to look at how as we sell products and new business, more customers to be onboarded but indeed together with that as we say we work together we know where to put resources in and indeed we did look at two investments in 2024 right and you will recall we completed acquisition of PT Bank Commonwealth in Indonesia and we make our promise and our target. We finished the acquisition since it was announced in November 23. We finished the acquisition in May and then in four months time we merged the whole bank into OCBC Indonesia. I have to say we actually have a target of integrated expenses and whether we will take in the business was loss making I think is a understanding but we did reduce immediately that amount and I think we are doing good integrating the people and the customers into OCBC Indonesia The other investment I must mention has to be Great Eastern. I think we talked about this so much in the past six to nine months, but this is a major step for us to strengthen our wealth management franchise, right? We're talking about GE and I will spend, there was another slide that I will talk about it a bit later on. But indeed, I want to recap that. Without all this, without the strategy, and also another investment obviously has to be in Bank of Singapore, where we talk about increasing and we're hiring quite a large number of relationship managers over the last 18 months. And if you're interested, Jason can cover that a bit more. And all these results, as we said, in banking operations achieving record profit, right? And wealth management income delivered double-digit growth, and then profit contribution from Great Eastern was also higher, as Ching-Yi has covered that earlier on. Our loan book also continued to grow. and indeed for wealth management AUM, we grew double digit with net new money, net new money, fresh funds inflow for the year at about 21 billion Singapore dollars, which is I think quite a handsome number. I quite like it. Asset quality, we mentioned, remained healthy. NPR ratio has been trending down the last few years. It is now, at the end of the year, it is 0.9%. And Ching-Yin mentioned we have one case on CRE in Hong Kong, which is a mid-cap name. one of our old customers, but in a way for the last 18 months or so we have been very vigilant on the mid-tier corporate on our Hong Kong CRE exposure and we have been bringing it down. So today more than two-thirds of Hong Kong CRE, the CRE Longbo, is to large corporates. The names that you would know very well and that we're very comfortable with. And on the whole portfolio, more than about two-thirds is fully secure with LTV, still at around 50% and below. So we have also built in the comfortable level of NPL coverage as well. as you actually see in our results. So for Hong Kong, there are still global opportunities, but I do understand the challenge in the CRE sector, which I just mentioned we've been trying to help our clients to deliver over the last 18 months or so. I think with the resilience performance, that is why we do talk about, we have a comprehensive plan for now capital. I mean, this goes side by side with any growth, any investments, et cetera, and we come up with this new two-year capital return plan to increase shareholders' returns. So I don't need to go into the details. Junyi has mentioned all of this, and it is in our results announcement. So if we turn to the next slide, this is a simple one. A lot of people ask me why GE, why your banking operations is doing well, you have corporate strategy, but indeed it is important to see that we have always talked about a balanced portfolio with three important pillars. So we do want to continue to deliver a well-balanced earnings growth across our franchise So double-digit earning growth demonstrated solid structural income, generating capabilities, and include the incremental revenue we talked about to react the successful execution of our corporate strategy. And this is, if you look at all the three pillars, that is what we're talking about, all have illustrated growth. So indeed, with this, I want to turn to the next slide to talk a bit about Great Eastern. There has been, as I said, quite a lot of questions raised. Why do you want to increase your earnings or increase, sorry, your owning or your shareholdings in Great Eastern? And indeed, through the offer last year, our shareholding in Great Eastern is now 93.72%. and the offer is indeed I would say a natural progression in our strategy. Natural progression because we define where we are, we define our three pillar franchise, we know a balanced portfolio can help us to overcome in particular the uncertainty and the volatility in the market over the decade and our ambition as we openly stated is to for OCBC to become Asia's leading wealth management player right which is part of our We are a leading financial services partner for sustainable Asia. That's our ambition. But indeed we want to become, as part of our strategy, to be Asia's leading wealth management player. So capturing Asia's rising wealth and strengthening our business franchise is pivotal to this ambition. So the offer is the move to integrate GE closer with our OCBC One Group strategy. Imagine if we manage to delist it, and if we own 100% of it, or we delist it, we have control and integrate GE to us, then it will help us to realize even more synergy value, right? I give you some data to think about. and indeed we're saying that we have always have GE to have access to our, of course, banker channels. But in a typical banker arrangement, the issuer have, of course, access to the bank's customer. But it's not the other way around, right? If you think about a typical insurance which is not part of the banking group, they have a banker arrangement. then the insurance have access to the bank's customer, but the bank do not have access to the insurance company's customer. For us, with Great Eastern, we should actually have that access. We should. I give you some data as I said. In Singapore, 70% of Great Eastern's customer also hold OCBC's products. and 40% of OCBC's customer hold a Great Eastern policy. You see there's still room to grow for OCBC customers to hold more Great Eastern's products. But 70% of Great Eastern's customer hold OCBC products. if you think about it. This may not be workable if Great Eastern is not part of us. But we still say that there is more room to grow and in particular for Malaysia where GE is truly, truly the leading and recognized as a local insurer for Malaysia. there would be more opportunities for our Malaysia banking business to work closer with GE in Malaysia and tapping into that. So the strengths, indeed the strengths of one OCBC group can be amplified if we tightly integrate Great Eastern with us. through a bigger ownership, and if we manage to delist it. And we plan to accelerate our synergies further, and you think about if we are so tightly integrated, you can also think about what about resources in capital. right at the moment GE of course it is a very regulated industry they do manage capital on a very safe basis and you think about that and even some of our normal day-to-day work right and for example just how we manage our expenses together how we actually share expertise and building investments together, looking together of all together, sorry, the two of us as a group, right? So I think GE's position is very powerful in Singapore and Malaysia. And if our core markets include Singapore and Malaysia, we are a Singapore headquarters bank. Why do we want to give up GE in that sense, right? So with this in consideration, we also did express when we launched the offer that Great Eastern is equity to OCBC and it contributes long-term strategic value to us, right? And it has been a subsidiary, it has been part of the group since I think 1958. and it has been a subsidiary for past 20 years and has been a strong earnings contributor to the group. Profit contribution to the group over the last decade hit as high as 20% at certain point and it's important, thus we say it's important for risk diversification, for balance of earnings, for longer term synergy value, it is important to keep GE in the group. And that is why we say for our investment, investing further in GE is one of the things, one of the natural progression of our corporate strategy. So I have a last, I have another slide to share about the capital plan. I think Ching-Hee talked about it quite a bit, but I want to express the thought that we put through in this. Indeed, we talk about, we have three key pillars of business, banking, wealth management, and insurance, right? And that will bring us well-balanced earnings and also actually further growth opportunities getting into the future. Then we look at the investment options we have, right? I mentioned last year we bought PDBC, we merged it into Indonesia's business, and we are not short of other people showing us other opportunities. Some of you always ask me, Helen, are there something you're looking at? And I could say that we've turned away some of these approaches. I always say based on a few guiding principle, right? We know our core markets, we know our core business, so it has to be something that is related. to our corporate strategy. And indeed, if we assess the final synergistic value is not high enough, or it has very high integration risk, it's not something we're interested in. We think about buying something, it has to generate the value after you bought it, right? Even for PDBC, we did buy at a discounted book, but indeed we know that once we put it into into the bank, we are getting on more customers and also more talent as well to our Indonesia business. So as we record and we are exploring plans to consider with development of the OCBC center and its clusters as well, right? We take further assessment and we decided that we can delay that planning for a while. No exact timetable where we visit it, but as we said, we explored it. and we come to a conclusion. We still have a very iconic building here. Our buildings, our presence, our use of it is still very important to us and we now decided that we can delay that for a while. So with all this in mind, and we keep talking about we have a CT1 target of 14%, and that is already good for us to keep a strong credit ratings, have capacity to pursue further growth. If we grow our loan book, if we grow our AUM, of course, growing our loan book, that means we will continue to build our risk-rated assets, et cetera. And I think with all this in mind, we now come to a stage where we say that we have flexibility. to consider deliver enhanced shareholder returns. So we come to this plan and we already see some feedback this morning after we talk about the results and why is it two years while your peers talk about three years, right? So I thought, isn't it better when we say we actually deliver the return faster in two years and we talk about 2.5 billion, right? So if you just divide it by two, we're talking about 1.25 billion a year. and indeed this is a combination but with a bit more commitment into the special dividend. passing the cash back directly to our shareholders. And we said that for 2024, it is a final payout of 60%. And this is already higher than the last two years of 53%. And I do have a question. People say, why are you lowering your ordinary dividend? And hey, this is not lowering our dividend, right? We are paying more dividend. But we always say our ordinary dividend, we have a target of 50%. Yeah, we have flexibility to pay more, which was evidenced by last year. But when we are paying 60, I think it's good always to say that this is not that ordinary, right? And we are paying 50% ordinary, thus we call the 10% special dividend. because you don't pay a high special dividend every single year. So I think we're sticking to what we promise and what we target. I think Chi may not want me to say this, but if you want to say that it is a 53% ordinary dividend in your own mind as a shareholder, and you treat 7% as a special dividend, in your own mind you can treat it that way. But it is how we say that we follow our dividend policy and we're giving out 50% ordinary dividend. I think this is how I want to actually emphasized that because I already see people talking about why you lower your ordinary dividend. It's not like that, right? So I think the two-year capital return plan is expected to reduce our CET1 ratio by about one percentage point. I think the last page of Ching Yeh's presentation showed that, right? And then it will improve ROE by nearly one percentage point as well. And indeed, if you say, Helen, then what was it about after two years? I would want to say that capital plan is an ongoing thing. It's just not like we stop planning on our capital. This is what we said in the past, right? We plan on our capital, and as we said, we will continue to look at. And we think we have options. and this time we decided it's a combination of special dividend and share buyback. And we will continue to review this as we go along. But the key again, coming back to this, if we cannot grow our business, there would not be building up of capital to return to shareholders. and the dividends would not be going up, right? So important is we are committed to continue to grow our business, steer through the uncertainties, which leads me to the very last page, indeed, of my presentation. A lot of people ask me outlook tariffs, and I can address that later on if you are more interested. But indeed, we are seeing all this. We are expecting the Trump administration to talk about tariffs. and we are talking about potential heightened trade tensions and this could impede global growth and slow down in trade activities. We're talking about interest rate potentially coming down. Is that faster, slower? There's a lot of different talks. Yes, we do talk about a view of free rate cuts in 2025. And you can say, why, Helen, are you conservative? But if you just look at the overnight numbers, if you want to hear more market views, I can invite Ken to talk a bit more about it. that expectation on the market changed very fast. Indeed, it changed very fast. Indeed, we were talking about a very high rate cut and then it gradually moved down with many people talking about one rate cut. Overnight, the view changed again. So no matter what, we have to plan with a base, and we have a house rule of three rate cuts, and we expect LIMDAS to be around 2%. Is there upside? Yes, depending on the market situation. Yes, depending on equity market performance. Yes, depending where customers, as we expect, will come back and be more active. Yes, it also depends on how global trade is impacted, and yes, depending on how the China market is reviving. So is there always upside? Yes, there is always upside. But we want to always follow prudence in our planning and there must be a base for us to plan our 2025 numbers. We also plan mid-single-digit loan growth. I want to express that the very high 8% loan growth In 2024, we see actually big trade. Some of the things that we have done well, we have some big trade deals coming in in the last quarter and somehow make us eventually perform an 8% loan growth compared to the mid-single-digit we talked about. And so I'm happy about it, but coming into this year, we are focusing on mid-single-digit loan growth. Cost-to-income ratio, low 40s, and we continue to exercise strict cost discipline. And credit costs remain at similar levels. We always talk about 20 to 25 basis points. Last year, we ended up at 19. And there's no particular indication of any sector having a very high weakness in our portfolio, but of course we have to do proactive risk management. As we said, I think because so many people talk about Hong Kong CLE, I have to reiterate again, we have started to help our clients to reduce the leverage. more than a year ago. And we don't see systemic risk in our book in that sense. We're committed to deliver 60% dividend payout ratio for 2025, coupled with share buybacks. And we want to use a 60% dividend rather than an absolute amount because we hope that as we grow, that hopefully that 60% will be a larger number. So with that, I think I'll end my very long expression on our corporate strategy on Great Eastern, on how we look at capital, and indeed how we look into 2025. Thank you.

Okay, any questions from maybe the media first? We have Bernadette from Bloomberg.

Hi, thank you so much for your presentation. I have three questions that I would like to ask. The first question is, the share price reaction seems to suggest that OCBC might need to do more. Helen, what would you have to say to that? The second question is, what are your thoughts on OCBC's retail operations on China mainland? Are you considering exiting it following UOB's example? And my last question is, as OCBC is among the banks that adopt AI, what are your thoughts on job creation and on the workforce? Thank you.

The first one, I almost missed it, but you're saying that share buyback, right? Are we going... A share price reaction. Sorry, Dan, repeat your question or Ching Ching can repeat it.

What Bernadette is asking that our share price reaction reflects that more needs to be done in addition to our currently announced capital plan, right? Is that what you're saying?

Okay, I don't comment on share price. Share price is something sensitive, right? I am not in a position and we should not be talking about things that would impact share price. Share price is something that our investors will decide for us to an extent, right? So as I said just earlier, we decided to actually have a two-year plan which is to return, in a way, return capital faster, right? Would we do something more? Yes, of course, we always say we review, we review. And if we can continue to grow the bank, accumulate more capital, what stop us in doing more? And if you ask me, Helen, do you have a plan to grow? Yes, we have a plan to grow. I gave you examples and that we have delivered over the last three years. So I think hopefully that address your question. The second one is about mainland retail operations. We don't follow any peers, whatever they do. We look at what is good for us and what is good for our business and what is good for our shareholders. We actually have already transformed our mainland retail operations. We completed that already and we pivot that more to the higher net website and Jason is very much involved in looking in building the onshore private banking business. So we already completed that. We don't need to sell our retail operations in that sense in China. The third thing, I love the topic, AI is so many people talk about it. And if you look at us, I think in some of my gatherings with the media, and we do talk about the use of AI. And over the last couple of years, a lot of investments actually into technology. Yeah, when we talk about, Helen, what have you been doing in your investments? Yes, a lot is into technology. And we have been applying AI internally. I think we are the first one to talk about we have our own GPT system that is used in coding, that is used in a lot of our writings, but it is it is developed internally by ourselves and actually we track that the use of OCBC GPT allow our coders to be actually 20% faster when they first started using it. so these are all very important but we also said that we mentioned before in particular I think that is beginning of last year we are putting 30 million Singapore dollars to train our people to upskill our people We talked about it much much earlier on and indeed we have been upskilling our people and it is important that's why when AI creates some new jobs when we are still content to hire more people and some of you remember we said we are building up an engineering hub in China in Shenzhen and Shanghai, and we are also starting in Indonesia, building a bigger engineering hub. So if we upskill our people, we continue to be able to make our processes better. So if you later on look at headcount, last year we have not increased headcount, but we have increased headcount because we have bought a bank, and Indonesia has increased headcount, and in that Jason has increases headcount in relationship managers, right? So this upskilling our people has been ongoing for quite a long while. And so in a way, I think AI has been creating more jobs, but you don't need to be an engineer to be able to say, I'm involved in applying AI to make our processes better. we are involved in using AI in digitalization to reach out to our customer. Earlier on, I talked about digital acquisition of customer become very big for us. For example, if you talk to Sunny, I think when we started to have facial recognition, on our ATM, right? This is something new to market. It is applying AI, but that means some of these people have to be able to work with their engineers to have that launch on our ATM. So I want to say AI does create more jobs, but in particular, it is important we make sure that we continue to upskill our people so that they will be able either to be part of it or to use AI and to use AI to apply to how we do our business and how do we improve our product offering.

Hush from JP Morgan. Hi, thanks, Helen. Three questions. First on the CT1 target of 14, By when do you think you will hit that? Is it a two, three-year target? Is it more medium term, five-year target? And I'll have other questions by and by.

Can you want to take that? in fact already you know as I showed earlier as I mentioned earlier you know if we have 60% dividend payout for FY24 we are already almost there on a pro forma basis 14.3% on a fully phase-in basis

Yeah, but that doesn't take into account in 2025 you're going to generate a lot of profits, right? So that pro forma number is kind of double counting the deductions. So let's say if we have to on a year-end basis hit 14% number, is there a timeline to it or is it a fluid number and just an indication?

In our comprehensive capital plan that I mentioned earlier, we do have a forecast out for three years. I always talk about the three-year rolling plan that we have you know which is used for capital planning and over the next two years as we roll out and return capital to this 2.5 billion we do see CET1 moving towards the 14% target in 26

right because that would suggest significantly higher ability unless you grow much faster organically or inorganically or you end up doing much faster buyback or increase payout that's the reason why I'm trying to understand the time frame we do have a growth strategy as Helen has highlighted you know and based on the growth strategy we do have

forecasts in RWA growth as well, which will use up the capital. And we have also some investment options that we are looking at. So all these have been taken into consideration.

Right, because even a mid-single-digit loan growth or RWA growth doesn't get you to 14 by 26 at this pace. The second question is on... margins the guidance of about two sounds conservative given your 4Q NIM of 215. Is it fair to say it's a super conservative guidance and the likelihood is going to be a bit higher or how do we think about the range around the two percent NIM guidance?

Yes, this also is a question that Helen has addressed even before you asked. We do take into consideration the house view of three rate cuts of up to 75 basis points and there are quite a lot of uncertainties relating to the rate cuts prospects you know as we can see initially market was pricing in just one red card and after last night's news is like another you know probably two and a half red cards so there are just so many of these uncertainties we plan on the basis of more prudence in taking into consideration our house view of three red cards and we will look at revising that probably in March the next FOMC to see where the direction is and I recall also you know Helen mentioned few factors that could contribute to the potential upside in that

So the way to think about the sensitivity is, as you said, 4 to 5 million per basis point. So 75 into, let's say, 4 to 5, about 300 million is the kind of excess. So in case we do not get, let's say, rate cut, that is the potential upside with the guidance. Is that how we should think about the range?

Yeah, you can look at user sensitivity to sort of project what happened to the rate cuts, you know, and impact.

Yeah, I want to add one more point is that rate cuts is not a direct translation into your low margin or your NIM, right? Because it depends on the competitiveness of the market and whether how much you need to actually pass on to your customer.

And the final question is on cost-income ratio. Again, low 40 seems a bit high. Is it flowing through from a conservative NIM expectation or do you expect a significant yet another year of reasonably high top-line growth in operating costs? Thank you.

We continue to invest. I talk about investment, so what we call BAU expenses, we're controlling very well in that sense. But I think low 40s is a good number. We always talk about 40 to 45%. You think about it because of the corporate strategy, because of a high-interest environment, that substantially bring down it to below 40. And we say that is uncertainty. Of course, we said we have something to plan on, right? to talk about loan growth, to talk about expenses, to talk about the rate cuts, etc. We come up with this guidance. Would that be better? Yes, if we do grow our income better, if we say that interest rates have a positive impact on our revenues, and if our wealth management is growing faster than what we planned, we're already obviously playing double-digit growth. then yes, potentially the income higher, then the CRR will be lower. But this is where we are in the beginning of the year where we start off to plan our numbers. So these are the guidance we are putting out at this point of time.

Okay, next is Gola from The Edge.

Hello. OK. Yes, thanks. Anyway, thank you, Helen. The capital management, the special dividends are very welcome. Could I just ask another question based on this dividends and relating to Great Eastern? At one point, some of the minority investors Great Eastern were asking whether you have any plans to pay out OCBC's Great Eastern shares as a dividend in species. So I just wondered whether you would ever consider that. So that's one question. Second question is actually on Johor. Do you plan to invest more in Johor? Could you give us a figure if you did? And do you plan on opening more branches or plan for a digital bank in Malaysia to reach out to more retail and SME customers? And if you could give us some idea of what you plan to do in terms of percentage or...

Okay, very good questions. Actually, interesting one as well. Regarding some shareholders saying that, why don't we distribute GE shares out? to OCBC shareholders, right? I think the ask was to distribute it all out. And it's an interesting thing to suggest, and they talk about whether I will table a resolution to do this. I have to say that tabling any resolution on our AGM has to be of interest to our OCBC shareholders and also beneficial to the OCBC group, right? And if you think about what does it mean by distributing? I think when we say distributing is for free, right? So we are not charging anyone in getting the shares. So if you're distributing all the GE shares out, you think about it, it's equal to dividend-ing our profits in specie, right? Because it is our asset and I give you something of value. We sort of, you can almost work out, depending how you actually value GE, we are saying that that is above 10 billion Singapore dollars. how do we distribute 10 billions of our retained earnings to our shareholders in that sort of magnitude without any consideration, meaning we're distributing out for free. and in particular, as we look at our capital, how we use our capital, I said so much about why we want GE to be part of us. There's no reason why we don't own it anymore. And indeed, if you, so two points, right? The first thing is if we distribute GE all out, we would not be capturing the profit contribution from GE to us, which eventually leading to future dividend streams to our shareholder. And we will not be realizing the synergy that we are planning on. So that's one important thing and will substantially reduce the scale of the OCBC group in that sense as well. So that is not beneficial to OCBC. nor is it beneficial to the shareholder. And as I said, we focus on how we manage our capital. So that leads to our capital return plan in two years. And so to actually give out GE shares to our shareholder does not make sense, both in future growth prospect and also in terms of the amount we pay out to our shareholders. So I think that's GE. The second question is on Johor, something very dear to my heart. I think a lot of people in particular were, we actually have been in Johor for many, many, many years. And indeed we have seven branches in Johor already. out of our Malaysian OCBC Malaysia presence. And we can do both what we call traditional commercial banking, but also we can do the, sorry, I must to say we can also do focusing on Bumi Putra to do our sorry, our business of our business L-Amin, OCBC L-Amin, right? So we all have a big presence there and indeed I earlier said that we started looking in this potential of the special economic zone more than a year ago and we have been seeing interest of our customer base looking at potential in Johor and if you have a chance to talked to our CEO in Malaysia in a certain time. Maybe we can arrange that. You can see that he was talking about the amount of business we have already starting to build for the last years. And I did say that there are more interest in both, not just on the commercial banking side, but also on the retail side. So we are going to focus on the cross-border convenience of our customers. When they want to have an account with us and also an account in Johor, we are looking and planning to have a KYC process. that can actually help customers open account faster. So this is one of the things. But all in all, we're putting resources. We have a lot of experience in Johor. We've been there for 100 years, actually. And then in data, we have the presence and we have the people. So I think by putting our acts together, we should be able to do it very well. You talk about whether we will build a digital bank. OCBC already have a digital bank in that sense. I think suddenly you can talk a lot more about how we digitally acquire customers and how much transaction is now done these days digitally. Linus is here. I think, Gulang, you know Linus. And we have been so focused on our SME book. how we use digitalization to allow account opening on a very fast speed and also how we use data analytics also to have pre-approved loans for some of our SME customers. So a lot of digital investments has gone in to the business which is aptly adopted by our Malaysian colleagues.

Alan, if I can add in. On the Jawa side, I think many of you may be aware we are also the for the RTS. That means the trade between Singapore and Malaysia, and we have exclusive period. And they give us a lot of opportunities to do a lot of acquisition opportunities. and also in line with our one group strategy. The consumer bank and the commercial bank are also working together to see how we can jointly acquire customers together, especially serving the needs of the small business owner in the Johor area. And we work out a whole slew of activities to help customers in purchasing Singaporean properties in Malaysia and for the Malaysians to open accounts in Singapore and vice versa. On the digital bank, I think today as of today, there's 90% of our customers' financial transactions are done digitally as well. I'm sure the corporate side has an equally high amount. That's 98%, right, Linus? So I think if you think about a digital bank, that is for somebody who doesn't have a banking license. We already have a banking license. We have all the fiscal branches. If you look at the product suites and all this, we have a lot more products with everything inside there. In fact, I always say if you take a look at our digital bank mobile app, it's like your Apple phone. There are many features inside there that you're not aware. Same thing for our mobile app. There's a lot of features there that you do not know because we're all feature-packed, service-packed inside there. So I think that is something which is I think we already have one technically. And the fact that we have a physical branch do help today is when in terms of needs, you want to talk to somebody face-to-face, I think that's where there is advantage that we have to come since really readily. Thank you.

If I can add really the very last point on this exciting opportunity is our Malaysian bank, as we said, is as old as us in Singapore. It's been part of us, part and parcel of us for many, many years. And in Malaysia, other than the full banking license on retail, on the corporate, commercial, investment banking, et cetera, we also have 100% owned leasing company in Malaysia. And it is also part and parcel within the one group. So there has been a lot of business collaboration of referrals between the commercial bank and this company called Pak Lease. And Bank of Singapore also have an entity in Malaysia. So in a way, in Malaysia, we have full scale and full capability that would be able to work very closely As we said, we have a team looking at this together to capture this exciting opportunity.

Okay, I'll move Nick and then Akesh.

Thanks very much and thanks for the opportunity to ask a question. Can I just come back to capital? And I'm just trying to sort of picture your capital plan, if you like, and everything you've said. So we've got effectively an increase in payout ratio to 60%, but there's a layer above 50. And at the moment, you're making a high return and risk-weighted asset growth is quite low. So you're in a position to distribute that to effectively stop capital retentions. When we go two years out of a road, I accept that you don't know and I don't know what's going to happen. is that what you're trying to say to us? And then we'll keep the 50 as core and it depends what the situation's like in 27, 28 as to whether we keep that 10% top up. And then the share buyback I should think of as a distribution of the Capital that gets you down to 14% and just link to that if you could just talk a little bit about how you're thinking about share buyback in terms of is it something to support the share price? Is it a way of distributing capital? I mean, just intellectually, how are you sort of conceptualizing the share buyback? and then linked to that, two other questions linked to that. First of all, just could you talk about how you think about the risk-weighted asset density growth of your business going forward? So how much risk-weighted assets you need to generate returns given that, you know, obviously a lot of your growth areas are less risk-weighted asset intense, so wealth and markets and things like that. And then just finally on Great Eastern, I mean, you gave a pretty passionate defense as to why you should own all of Great Eastern. If you were to buy out the remaining minorities in Great Eastern, would you have to offer the same share price to the people who accepted your offer last year?

Okay, so one at a time. Capital plan. Would you say we look at our capital and both returning through special dividend and through share buyback? I think it's not very difficult to just to calculate how much is special dividend and how much is share buyback, right? In a two-year time frame out of a 2.5 billion number. okay so we like that flexibility and to an extent if you saying that in two years time if you continue to grow as we wish and if we if because we grow a lot of as you said not out of a heavy income then we accumulate capital faster in in that sense right and and so Can we continue to consider a higher dividend? Yes.

Yes.

Because this has happened in the last few years. Since we actually changed our dividend policy to a target of 50% of our net profit, so that was actually announced for the 2022 numbers, if you remember, right? So 2022, 2023, we paid 53%. But because this year we're paying a higher amount, and would we be able to continue to pay a higher amount? Yes, we may be able to, but depends on how fast we grow, as you said. And whether some of the investments we made earlier actually bear more fruits. than we expected. So I can't say that history will tell about the future, but we just have to make sure that we realize the biggest benefit of one group. That's why I say I spent a bit of time to talk about the earlier three-year plan, where we deliver actually ahead of what we have targeted for. yeah so hopefully we'll be able to do so and we're not stopping thinking about strategy and what are the other opportunities going to into the future yeah so when I have more to share I will definitely talk about it so that is capital plan and we're getting to whether we can pay higher dividend yes we we can if we if we think that that match our future plan and that we have accumulated more profits than we need So you talk about growth assets. I think it's related to the capital plan. So in a way, yes, we do have, of course, we always have a rolling three-year plan on how we grow our RWA and whether we have still other ways to rationalize the RWA. And I think Basel III Plus kicks in. We also work on it. We do know that there's only a short term benefit to the CEC1, right? So we take all this into account. And do we want to grow more revenue that is less so out of Bureau 8 base? Yes. And that is why we said wealth is such a big piece that we're focusing on. And I think the report card for 2024 for our wealth AUM and for the revenue growth and also for the net new money coming in, I think we are and we are doing quite well. I did say earlier I quite like it, but shouldn't be saying it so openly in front of my team in that sense. But yes, this is what we are focusing on. So again, if we do better than we expected, yes, then it will ultimately lead to better capital and then better programs for us to continue to make better returns to our shareholders. GE, you mentioned that as a defense. I actually don't want to describe it as a defense. I truly just say that I'm passionate about it. It is indeed how GE has contributed to us all these years. And in my position, I do know what sort of synergy we can realize going forward. And he's not here today, but it's like putting Greg Hinton on under everybody's scrutiny. But Greg Hinston is our new CEO of Great Eastern, and he joined in November. And Greg has an experience of knowing exactly how to bring an insurance business forward in a banking environment. We already have a lot of discussion on how we can realize better synergy, so I'm quite positive about that as well.

Sorry, Nick was asking about do we pay the price, offer price to the remaining, to those who accepted?

I cannot comment on that. Anything that the next phase or whatever you say, I mean, I cannot comment on that. When we're ready to announce, we can tell you, but I cannot say it now. Huh? Oh, the legality requirements.

You obviously bought shares off people at one price last year.

The ones this year has closed. And even the part regarding the company ordinance allowing us to continue to buy at the same price, that one has closed. That's all closed.

Okay. Maybe we move to someone from the media, Ching-Chi.

Thank you. Just two questions here. So I know OCBC's 1% higher headcount last year. And I think building on Bernadette's question, could you provide an update on your investments into tech? OCBC pledged HK$1.5 billion last year to upgrade tech and facilities by 2026. And you also mentioned plans to hire some 300 software engineers in China over the next three years. So do you have an update on that? and also second question, Helen, just to confirm, you don't see this investment into tech and AI impacting your headcount overall for this year and the next. What about your company's temporary or contract staff? Thanks.

Thank you. I know why that last question come about. But let me address every point you mentioned, right? The 1% higher headcount is actually based on the taking of people from . If you really take away that, actually we have a reduction in headcount. But it is through natural attrition. The second thing is we're investing in tech, definitely. You mentioned we announced for Hong Kong, right? We are upgrading our whole system in Hong Kong, and we are hiring more engineers to invest into Hong Kong. But in a way, those engineers does not need to sit in Hong Kong. That's why we talk about hiring more engineers in China. I think the past one year we grow about 150 in China. And we started to hire Indonesia as we said. And our hub in Malaysia is already quite big. So we're quite happy we continue to be able to find the talents and good engineers to join us in that sense. Then why are we hiring rather rapidly in tech but we don't build headcount because As we said, we have done pretty well in our processes. So when you continue to do well in your processes, you save headcount in operations. And you also generate more productivity. Whatever headcount you save, those people can actually put into generating higher productivity as well. So I think we have been managing this very much through natural attrition. And very importantly, I really want to emphasize that it's an early plan to how we upskill our people so that they can be put in different jobs as they grow with the organization. Regarding the last one about contract staff, we don't have a very high amount of contract staff or temp staff. But in a way, as we said, we have not been saying that we need to make anyone leave the job in any plan in particular, but we have been managing our headcount, as we say, by putting people into different roles and also through natural attrition.

Akash from UBS.

Thank you, morning. This is Akash from UBS. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one I have is just on Hong Kong CRE. I think last year, several briefings, you know, similar briefings, the view that was discussed was that as rates come down, we should expect the worst for Hong Kong CRE to be behind us. Now, obviously, as that has not played out, you know, market and investors are a lot more worried about the Hong Kong CRE space, understandably. So I think the disclosures that you shared earlier were very helpful. Two-thirds of Hong Kong CRE is to large developers. Two-thirds of the portfolio is secured. But I think there is probably more information that the market would love to have. So along those lines, what I wanted to ask you, if you could describe in a bit more detail what led to the downgrade of this particular account. And of the CRE book that you have in Hong Kong, how much is what you would call is watch list or special mention? How much of it is impaired? and if you could also share what is the coverage on that book, the Hong Kong CRA book as it stands today.

Okay, I'll address the first part first. If you ask about all the information about watch lists, and coverage and all that, I need some help from Collins and team, but you know there are always some figures that we would not disclose or we do not disclose in the past and we do not intend to suddenly disclose from this day onwards. But if you look at the Hong Kong CRE book, as we said, we hope that interest rate come down would help some of the customers, right? So that the interest rate burden, interest burden is not so high. If you look at this one customer we talk about, it's not deleveraging fast enough. So the sector is under pressure, as we all know, right? So to an extent, we say that means the cash flow is impacted. If you do not leverage fast enough, deleverage fast enough, you continue to have to pay high interest. And it also depends on the rental market of CRE as well. So as I said, there is one customer that we decided to put into MPL for that last quarter. But the whole thing is more or less about how you manage the overall portfolio. As we said, we started to have customers to deliver. And also, some of them actually put up with more security. And some of them, some of the mid-caps, they continue to want business to fall. They have had their own family wealth. Some of them would say that I actually buy the property from my family wealth. so that my company continue to be able to repay its debt. So there are many ways that we talk to our customers, and we also see the efforts of some of them. But given a market like that, it won't be a surprise that we will be registering some NBLs. And we put our customer on watch lists or special mention as we need to. but I think our coverage is quite healthy in that sense. But as again, looking at one part of our book, it's not all, it's not all. The whole thing you have to think about is that this part of the MPL contributes to our overall MPL. So that means you don't just look after one particular sector. What we want to do is to be able, Noel is here, to be able to working with Thich Long, to able to look at our overall portfolio, right? And some two years back, people were all asking about China CRE. And we did say that we were never very highly involved in China CRE. We cannot say we are not involved in Hong Kong CLE because we have a local entity there, which is a very old bank in Hong Kong. But what we're trying to do is we see the issue, we try to overcome that. Actually it all ends up that our overall NPL and coverage is actually still very well managed. So I have to say that that is part and parcel of the overall risk management that we are actively doing.

Is it possible to give us a rough indication of what the NPL is on that part of the book, Hong Kong CRA?

Yes, Akesh. Perhaps I can give broad numbers. So in terms of the Hong Kong CRA book, the bulk of it, as what Helen mentioned, will be in the Large cap kind of a range. So within the mid-year cap, I think it's roughly about a quarter of the book, right? The bulk of it is still performing. Of course, we do, for our own internal purposes, we grade this as watch list or special mention, but in terms of MPLs, Broad range, just give you a broad range. Perhaps maybe about less than 20%, perhaps it's in MPL. But again, this will probably correspond to what you see in our results where we downgraded that one loan. Is that okay?

20% of the mid-cap? Yeah, roughly.

But that roughly is attributable to that one CRE that we downgraded this quarter.

So the CRE that you downgraded this morning is a mid-cap, not a large cap?

Yeah, correct. I mean, having said that, We are still paying very close watch. That's why within the book, we also do segregate this from our own internal purpose as those under watch list, special mention that we're paying close attention to. Is that all right? Thanks.

Thank you. I just have a few follow-up quick questions. The first one is, I think, a repeat question from earlier from Nick. So the $1 billion share buyback that you've announced for 2025, what is the criteria for this? If the share price continues to remain this high, are you still going to force and buy those shares at this price? Or what's your thinking on that?

Okay, for the share buyback, I think Nick also asked the question about mechanism, right? So for what we have announced is for cancellation, so we'll be buying back from open markets and cancel the shares. There is some internal sort of parameters to guide us in terms of, you know, at which level do we stop buying, for example. Once we have accumulated some of these treasury shares, we will be cancelling them under this program within the threshold that we have set internally and approved by the board as well.

Right now I understand the cancellation but I'm just seeing the share price like I think what other banks have said is they're going to be opportunistic about it which means they're likely not going to buy at this kind of level is that similar for yours?

Yes similar that's what I meant by the internal parameters that we have set yeah above a certain share price when it doesn't make sense you know to pay high to buy back and cancel we will not do so

In which case, this buyback can actually spill over into 2026 as well, right? It's possible that it might not finish this year.

It's possible. In fact, for two years means it's 25 and 26. Two years doesn't mean finish everything in 25.

I see. I thought two years meant 24 and 25.

No, that's for the dividend because we are paying out the special dividend in May this year. So that's counted as part of the $2.5 billion.

on the net new money, so 21 billion for F524, pretty solid, and I think we've seen 20 billion plus numbers for a few years now. I just wanted to get a sense, do you think there will be some normalization this year? Was there something in these trends that tells you that maybe you might not hit 20 billion this year, it's 18 billion, or do you think that will continue at the same pace?

I think I will invite Jason to comment a bit and maybe Sunny as well to talk about this net new money and the trend.

So net new money last year, I'll talk a little bit about the combined value. So last year, net new money for the group wealth was roughly $21 billion, and in the last quarter itself was about $8.5 billion. And the momentum for the start of the year has been very strong, and a lot of it is at least on the BOS side. on the CFS side has been going to fee-paying and assets, so it's been deployed into investments more so than deposits. So it's been very active, net new money and actively used net new money. So we're quite hopeful for the momentum to carry on through the course of the year. With volatility, the markets continue to create trading opportunities for clients.

and the consumer banks have received very good traction from our Hong Kong Singapore Twin Hub and I think that is working very well for us.

Just a very last question on the NIM. And I think, even if you take free rate cut view that you have into account for this year, I think it doesn't really explain the 15 basis point decline in NIMS that is being forecasted by you, right? So I'm just thinking, maybe there is an expectation that you do see a very intense loan pricing competition, or you're expecting to be purchasing a lot more of low yielding assets, which is resulting in a 2% circa NIM. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that. Is one of those what you're thinking? Because three rate cuts only explains like five to seven basis points decline. It doesn't explain.

yeah let me take that yeah so I did mention that besides the house view of three rate cards we also are prioritizing net interest income you know through you know deploying liquidity into the lower yielding but high quality assets which are income accretive but name would compress you know with the addition of such but as as we are prioritizing NII is a byproduct of our balance sheet strategy in that sense.

Thank you.

Thank you, Akash. Jayden from Macquarie, you've got a question?

Yeah, thank you. Just some more questions on GE, Helen. I think we've spoken a lot about it today. Hi, good to see you. So first of all, if you look at the performance last year, pretty much all the growth was in agency. The bank assurance total weighted net sales actually fell. So I was just curious why we were so confident we were seeing the integration playing out, because if that was true, we should have seen the banker channel doing so much better. and then the second question is you obviously have the extension I think until May in terms of you know I guess they're expecting a refloat or you're looking to delist it we also have this ongoing stock market review and they really want to push more liquidity and more listings so you know how does that sort of play into the the overall Singapore view of a more vibrant stock market And then my final question is, you had sort of a rethink around the redevelopment of OCBC Centre. Just curious, was there any sort of overlay from a historic point of view or any reasons that was impeding you from redeveloping that sort of have come up that we should be aware of? Sorry if that's a bit off tangent, but thank you.

Very diversified questions. Okay, the first one on GE, why we are confident. I think banker is part of it when we talk about synergy banker also subject to what sort of strategy we have and how we work together and whether this is what is being pushed and GE has been having a very big agency force we know right so if you think about it if the agency all use us as the banker in handling themselves, the personal use of the bank. That is another way of we talk about synergy, right? So I think banker is a part of it, but I can ask Sunny to, talk a bit about the banker cooperation. But as I said, the synergy is more than just they using us as a channel. It's whether we can also tap into their client base or their agency base. And likewise, how do we, if they are not, if they are entirely part of us, how do we manage our capital together? How do we manage our investments together? How do we actually share expertise together? So they are long-term investors, whereas we can have longer-term lending, and they are investors. I mean, these are just examples. I'm not saying that I'm not ready to tell you what exactly are we working on, but that is the reason why we thought there are still many more things that we can do together, and that's why we want to be able to to have that ownership and control in that sense. So you talk about the second one, extension into May. So how is it going on? And what about the stock exchange program, the plan, right? I think when we look at GE, you know that actually over 20 years, we have always been trying to acquire more of the shares. And it's actually accumulated, before we launched the VGO, it was already 88.44%. And we never change that stance of us. We want to and we think last year was the right time as we look at our capital, as we look at all our corporate strategy, it is the right time that we launched that VGO last year. So the stock exchange program, the new plan is welcome. because I think it's good for the market, it's also good for the liquidity, and what is good to the market should ultimately benefit wealth business as well. So I like that in that sense, it is totally welcome. But our decision on how we want to pull GE tighter and integrate into the whole group, that's not changed in that sense. So your last question is about our redevelopment. Yes, we explore because there are chances to explore as we look at some of how the city area, how some of the new buildings has been developed and all that. And you do know even when we explore it, you know we always say we want to preserve OCBC Centre. and this is a heritage trade site. So all this is put into our consideration as we think about redevelopment. Meaning even if we redevelop, we're still keeping the center. So this also comes into consideration when we look at the plan. and can we actually consider more as we go into the future and you also know that we are also talking about and we have announced last year that we are purchasing a building in Pangu District, where we are teaming up with SIT. Also, it is one of the things that we continue want to invest in technology, right? So we have yet another new building coming up. So we think we have time to think deeper into how we want to look at We're just going to take two last questions, one from Zhao Bao and then one from the analyst.

Thomas, go ahead. Actually, my question is also about the redevelopment. Do you have an updated timetable for this?

That's a simple answer. Yes, we don't.

Well done from HSBC.

Hi, I have two questions. So one is on asset quality. I think if I look at the NPLs by building and construction, the NPLs increased by 700 million. So besides Hong Kong, do you have any other CRE that may be at risk, like the US? And what is your LTV for any US exposure that you have? So that's the first question. And the second question is, you talked a bit about the GE and you said there's some capital synergies there. So I'm wondering, what is this synergy exactly? Is it just upstreaming the capital from GE to the group? And is this required for your comprehensive dividend plan?

Helen, do you want me to take the first question? So Weldon, in terms of the MPL for the building construction sector is largely due to the downgrade of the Hong Kong CRE. I guess in terms of other locations, I think those have already been affected in the past. In terms of the overall LTV for the CRE portfolio, on average, it's about 50% to 60% for the book.

You want to follow up on this question?

Because the average is 50-60, but it could be specific locations in which the LTV might be. Is there any areas that you would flag that we should be aware of?

None that you would need to flag now. Okay, on GE, I talk about capital, right? But I also would not be able to comment on exactly how we do it. Because at this stage, you know that GE is still a separate listed company with its independence board, and there's a lot of independent directors that is not. I mean, they're independent directors. So to that extent, I cannot comment even more about if we are successful, what are we going to do? So if we are successful, then of course, we'll be able to talk a bit more about plans and how we actually bring GE in and how we realize the synergy a bit more. So there are many examples I was just talking about business opportunity right and in particular I said Malaysia actually actually give us even more potential than Singapore but indeed only that on the capital part we can't comment but this is our plan going forward and in a way as we said if we if we if we are able to come up with a plan of 2.5 billion that means we also have a deeper look into the future that we can we can actually distribute this out now instead of waiting until later on okay so with that I shall call the meeting to an end and thank you for joining us this morning thank you