United Overseas Bank Limited

Welcome to our third quarter 25 results media briefing. Today we have with us our Deputy Chairman and Group CEO, Mr. Wee Cheong, and our Group CFO, Mr. Leong Yong Chee. As usual, Mr. Wee will begin by giving a broad overview of how our franchise has done and the operating landscape we are operating in. And Mr. Leong will then go into more details on the financials and business performance. After both presentations, we will be taking questions from the media. So I'd like to invite our CEO to get us going. Mr. Wee, please. Good morning.

Thank you again for joining us today. As all of you know, geopolitical developments are impacting business outlook, but we always see encouraging signs. ASEAN continues to attract investments. Amid evolving tariff changes, we continue to see healthy intra-regional trade flows. While a softening rate environment is putting pressure on asset use, we see healthy loan growth and fee income. Now, for the third quarter, we have reported a strong operating profit of $1.9 billion. And we are happy with our performance for the first nine months with healthy growth in loans, deposits, including CASA, Wealth AUM and Fees From this position of strength, we have proactively set aside additional pre-emptive general allowances. This substantially strengthens our provision coverage ratios, reinforcing resilience and flexibility to navigate headwinds and sustain long-term growth. And after building our coverage ratios, we retain a healthy capital position. By prioritizing balance sheet strength, we stand ready to act, support customers, and see strategic growth opportunities across the region. Now, for our shareholders, we remain committed to have 2 billion share buyback with almost one quarter of the programme completed as of September 2025. There is no change to our policy of 50% dividend payout and our 2025 final dividend will not, let me emphasise, will not be impacted by this pre-emptive General Allowance. Our core franchise performance remains sound with strong fundamentals and positive momentum quarter-on-quarter. If we look at the loan growth, it was robust. 2% quarter-on-quarter, 5% year-on-year. And they are very broad-based. Casa, this is something that we have been always emphasizing for both retail and wholesale banking, registered healthy growth. for the first nine months, up 19% year-on-year. Our wealth management AUM grew strongly during the quarter. Quarter-on-quarter AUM up $8 billion, or 4% new money. And the invested AUM portions continue its upward trend. In terms of P&L, Net interest income down 3% quarter-on-quarter. It was impacted by margin compression in a declining rate environment, but this was partially offset by healthy loan growth. Gross fee income saw robust crop-based growth across loan-related cards and wealth management businesses, up 8% quarter-on-quarter, 10% year-on-year. Customer related trade and investment income grew strongly. We maintain cost discipline, keep expenses flat while investing in growth initiative. On the asset quality front, MPA formation and specific allowances were higher this quarter due to a few accounts in the US and Greater China commercial real estate sector. We conducted a thorough review of our portfolio. As a proactive move to further strengthen our balance sheets, we took the opportunity to ramp up our provision buffers to cushion against any further headwinds. By setting aside general allowance of $0.6 billion and raising our GP to performance ratio to 1%, which is higher than the 0.9% objective that we articulated previously. With this, our total MPA coverage improved to 100% or 240%, including collateral. Now, following this exercise, we expect our total credit costs to normalize with asset quality risks contained, barring any unexpected global volatility. Our balance sheet remains strong with CET1 ratio of 14.6% and robust liquidity ratios. And we are very confident of delivering sustainable value for the long term. Looking ahead, while no market is spared from external shocks, we believe ASEAN offers strong structural growth opportunities and we are well positioned to capture them. We are staying focused on growing our franchise and supporting businesses through our connectivity strategy. We are deepening relationships with our expanded retail base through wealth and lifestyle offerings, investing in innovations to uplift productivity. We are confident of executing our strategy and achieving sustainable growth as we invest for the future. We are in a strong position moving into next year with the following guidance. Low single-digit loan growth, full-year NIM of 1.75% to 1.8%. High single- to double-digit fee growth driven by growth engine in wealth, cuts and trade. Low single-digit operating costs, Total credit costs of 25 to 30 basis points. Now, I will hand over to Yongqi to share more. Thank you.

Thank you, CEO. Good morning, everyone. I'll take you through the financials. I will have 17 slides to walk through. What I'll do is I'll spend a little bit more time on the summary slide and the highlights, and then I'll move a little bit faster through the rest of the slides.