DBS Group Holdings Ltd

Hi everyone, welcome to the analyst briefing. You've heard the presentation during the media briefing, so as usual, we'll go straight to Q&A. The first question from Jayden from Macquarie. Jayden, go ahead and unmute yourself and ask your question. Jayden?

Hey, can you hear me okay Nick? Okay, great. Yeah, thanks a lot for the opportunity. I just wanted to ask a little bit around the guidance. So I think first of all, you've got sort of mid-single digit growth, which seems to be implied from the outlook for rates and loans, etc. Just wanted to sort of check if you had any thoughts specifically around sort of fees, because it sort of implies that the fee trajectory is going to slow a little bit. And if I look at the growth in the net new money and the wealth performance this year, I'm just wondering if there's something you're seeing that's giving you some pause and The reason why, you know, it's sort of implying a bit softer guidance. That was the first question. And the second thing is if you could comment at all around sort of deposit competition because, you know, some of your peers have sort of said that's heated up. But if you look at your performance, obviously your margins have been really strong. So just wondering if you're seeing any sort of pickup on the deposit competition side of anything we should be aware of. Those are the two questions I wanted to ask and thanks very much.

Okay. So on the fee and the non-NIIs, We said that if the markets are good, because a lot of it depends on both volatility and volumes, right? If you have good volatility and hopefully more upside than downside and good volumes, then, you know, this year we grew by double digits. So hopefully next year we'll continue to grow all being well by the low double digits. But if the markets melt down and, you know, sentiment turns negative and volumes dry up, then, you know, it's hard to go against the market, right? So then, you know, we're looking at sort of high single-digit growth. So that's just, I think, you know, being a little bit prudent. But you're right. I mean, look, underlying, the time growth is solid, the net new money is solid, and what is also solid is the fact that The franchise is now pivoting towards a stronger recurring income type of shape of the portfolio. So more discretionary, in-house discretionary, third-party discretionary, that percentage of AUM has been growing very nicely. And on the retail wealth side, as I've always said, It's the regular savings plan. It's just getting more and more consumers on board. And they save a little bit more every year. And they give us their CDP accounts, etc. So that's all snowballing quite nicely. And that's just, you know, it's a slow but gradual accumulation of fees at the lower retail end. Then the fees, For transaction banking is actually growing quite well and that speaks to us now winning a lot more mandates for transaction services and for trade. So it's cross-border cash payments, it's trade services, it's supply chain financing, it's custody growth. It's also the fact that we're one of the few banks that can tokenize deposits, that can tokenize gold. So that, again, it's the velocity of flow. If you win a lot more operating accounts, you naturally get more flow, you naturally get more flow, more casas, and more fees. So then that speaks to your other question around deposit growth and deposit composition. I will kick off and I'll let my colleagues chime in. There I think earlier in the year where we saw some of our peers reducing their loan rates, whether it's for mortgages or some large corporate loans, We actually, we lost, we deliberately lost our market share and we held our own and we actually increased some of our, we kept our deposit rates high, so we kept our front line rates high, we didn't cut our deposit rates and we won our market share in the last two quarters, especially in the last quarter because we were Hopefully, I guess quite prescient in predicting that rates were going to rise but also we wanted to increase our market share deliberately and so we did a lot of work, the team did a lot of work there to both gate deposits and win new mandates both for consumer and for wealth and for corporate. So I think that's worked out well. Going forward, a lot of work being done So, on that, I'll open up to my colleagues with