Good morning, everybody. Great to see you, and welcome to Copenhagen, and welcome also to those of you on the live stream. It's great to see you. It's our first investor conference in quite a while. We're really happy to host you here. My name is Carsten Egeriis. I'm the CEO of Danske Bank. I'm also joined by my team. You'll get to hear from quite a few of them this morning. I've been in Danske Bank for just about six years, and I've been CEO for just over two years. When I think about the last couple of years, the last couple of years in Danske Bank has really been about fixing some of the issues and challenges of the past.
It's been about creating commercial momentum, and it's been around building an organization, a leadership, an organization that's really set up to take Danske Bank forward. We believe that we have significant potential in Danske Bank, well beyond what we're delivering today, that's what we're gonna talk to you about today. We're gonna commit to delivering a 13% return on equity by 2026. We're gonna do that through a focused growth strategy that's focused on how we allocate capital, how we deliver returns, how we increase productivity in the business, how we get costs out, and how we generate capital for investments and for distribution. We look forward to talk to you about that for the next three and a half or so hours. I'm just gonna hand it over to Claus Ingar, who's gonna take you through the agenda, and then we'll get into the presentations. Thanks again.
Thank you, Carsten. Also a warm welcome from my side. It's good to see that so many of you have made it here today. I think we are approximately 60 people here in the room. We have approximately 200 people virtually participating. We have an exciting morning ahead of us. I have been looking forward to present today's agenda for you. As you can see, Carsten Egeriis will kick off. He will start by setting the direction for the day and for the future. After Carsten's presentation, our CFO, Stephan Engels, will continue with our financial targets for 2026. We will have the first round of Q&A for 15 minutes, followed by a short break, where you will have an opportunity to grab coffee or water outside.
After the break, we will focus on the strategic plan and priorities in each of our business units, where Berit Behring, our Head of Large Corporates & Institutions, will kick off, followed by Johanna Norberg, Head of Business Customers, and Christian Bornfeld, Head of our Personal Customers. Finally, our COO, Frans Woelders, will provide you with an update on our digital and tech priorities that are a key enabler for our commercial agenda. We will end the day with a 50-minute Q&A with the members of the Executive Leadership Team, where you will have plenty of time and opportunity to ask questions. Before each of the Q&A sessions, I will be back on how you will be able to ask your questions. That's it. I wish you a very nice morning with us, and back to Carsten for the CEO presentation.
Thank you, Claus. Let me start by talking a little bit about who we are. Gonna talk about where we've come from, and then talk about where we're going. We are essentially a Nordic bank. 95% of our business comes from the Nordic, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland. We are a top two corporate bank in the Nordics. If you look at market share, we're a leading retail bank in Denmark, and we're a solid third retail bank in Finland. We believe we're positioned in very attractive markets and attractive customer segments. I'm gonna talk to you more about that, but also that we have a legacy of having a customer-first approach, of having a legacy of digital innovation. We are placed in some of the most exciting markets, perhaps in the world, when you think about banking.
Just to mention a few examples from a macro perspective, the Nordic economies have grown nicely over the last few years, also versus the rest of the Euro area. We have a set of markets with low unemployment, with low levels of public debt. We have digital leadership in the Nordics, so strong digital infrastructure. That is really helpful when you do banking, when you engage with your clients, and we're gonna be able to invest even more in digital. We're gonna talk much more about that throughout the day. Sustainability, we have absolute sustainability leadership in the Nordics. A lot of interesting companies, lot of interesting clusters, focused on green technology, on renewable energy. We, as Danske Bank, we're gonna take a leadership role in helping our customers and clients in the green transition. Again, something I'll come back to.
We operate in some very attractive markets. We operate with some very attractive, interesting customers. Let me just take you through each of the business units briefly. Large Corporates & Institutions, we have been ranked number one in Prospera customer satisfaction for seven years in a row in Large Corporates & Institutions. We bank some key Tier 1 customers in both institutional banking and large Nordic corporates. Tier 1 here means that we are these clients' and customers' core bank, that also means we have an ability to deepen relationships, to do business with these clients. In business customers, we bank a little bit more than 200,000 customers throughout the Nordics. A very large proportion of these customers are mid-corporates that are large, that have more advanced needs, that have international needs.
When you look at corporate business and institutional customers, we believe that we have strong advisory capabilities, strong product capabilities to service exactly these segments. We are number one on transactional banking, on cash management, FX. We have lead positions in the lead tables on advisory, on sustainability. That also shows when you look at our general banking income in these two segments, they're at all-time highs, and that's a testament to being able to do more business with these clients through the cycle. In personal customers, we have a little bit more than 3 million customers across the Nordics. Again, a large part of these clients are clients with more advanced needs and also private banking customers.
Here, again, we pride ourselves in the advisory capabilities we have for these segments, the product specialists that we have that support these customers, Realkredit Danmark in mortgages, life and insurance, pension in Danica, and also our asset management business that provides both investments to the institutional segment and to the personal segment. If we look at our business profile, we have a good mix when it comes to our income mix between net interest income and fee. A little bit more than half is from net interest income, but we've also been able to grow our fee income over the last many years. Again, a testament to the ability to do more business with our customers, as I just laid out before.
The income mix is also pretty evenly split when you look across our personal customers, our business customers, and our Large Corporates & Institutions. The country mix, although, of course, it's heavily focused on Denmark, is also well diversified across the Nordics, with roughly half of the income coming from the other three Nordic markets. We have a strong financial profile. We have a strong capital position. We have a strong liquidity position. We have low loan loss rates. We have high Post-Model Adjustments, which puts us in a good position in case the macro environment should deteriorate. When I became CEO, my main task was to focus on building a stronger and a more resilient bank, and we've made some pretty fundamental changes in the bank over the last few years. Let me take the control environment first.
We have, last year, made a resolution with the US and Danish authorities on the Estonia AML case. We have found a solution to our debt collections case that's in full execution mode now. We've invested substantially in our financial crime capabilities. We're more than 80% of the way done with the financial crime execution plan that we also deliver regular updates to the regulators on. We have invested substantially in compliance, in risk management, in cybersecurity over the last few years, a stable, a resilient, a strong bank. We've also taken quite a lot of defocus and refocusing and de-risking actions. We've taken quite a lot of participation choices over the last few years. We have sold our insurance businesses in Norway and in Sweden.
We have exited our Baltic retail and commercial businesses, our Russia retail and commercial banking business. We've sold our Luxembourg private banking business. We've done a joint venture on the MobilePay business. Quite a lot of participation choices, again, to refocus as a Nordic bank. We've also taken action on the credit side. If you look, for example, at our commercial real estate exposure, we have not grown our commercial real estate exposure over the last five years. We've kept it broadly flat. We've done that on purpose not to grow into the cycle. We've, in fact, reduced our commercial real estate exposure in Sweden, if you look at the last few years. We've also refocused our market operations business, our fixed income business.
Post last summer, with the big moves in rates, we decided to take less overnight risk, and have a fixed income business that's more focused on helping facilitate flow with our corporate and our institutional customers. We see that as showing strong results, both in Q4 last year as well as Q1 this year and into Q2. What you'll also see in each of the business unit presentations later on today is we've also refocused the way we think about our customer segments and how we service those customer segments, so that we really invest and differentiate ourselves in the segments where we believe we can really make a difference. Again, the business unit heads will take you through that in much more detail, later in the day. We strengthened the organization.
Just last year, we changed our organization from two business units to three business units to be focused on business customers, personal customers, and Large Corporates & Institutions, to get more commercial focus into our executive leadership team and to have even more focus on these distinct three segments. We've also changed a substantial part of the leadership. Just in the last couple of years, we've changed five positions in the ELT. Most of the ELT is, in fact, quite new, but with substantial experience within financial services, both in the Nordics as well as in Europe. We've also focused a lot on our culture and on how we engage our organization, and increasing the engagement in our organization.
You see here, we use the Ennova survey, employee engagement motivation has increased substantially over the last couple of years, we really believe, I truly believe, that with engaged employees, you will also have engaged and happy customers. If I look at how it's going from a commercial perspective, we believe that we do have more engaged and happier customers. We believe that we do see stronger commercial momentum in Danske Bank, this is not just from increases in interest rates and the tailwinds we have from that. It is also relative performance. If you look at Large Corporates & Institutions, we have grown our lending and our market shares in our LC&I business at lower capital consumption. We are a leader in many of the league tables, including also within sustainable finance.
Business customers, here you see the fee income line. The fee income line has grown quite substantially over the last period. Again, a testament to doing more business with our customers, getting closer to our customers, and doing more business with our mid-corporate customers that have more advanced, complex needs. Johanna will talk to you more about that later. The personal customer business, perhaps the business that has been most challenged over the last couple of years. We see many pockets of where the business is showing momentum. We are taking market share on bank lending in Denmark. Now, we also see nominal good growth there. In terms of customer flows within the Danish business, we have now stabilized customer flows, but we also see segments within our personal customer business in Denmark, where we're gaining customers.
If you look at both the changes we've made from a control environment, from a culture perspective, from a de-risking perspective, and then the commercial momentum that we're seeing, you also see that coming through in our financials, and we are well on track to exceed our financial targets set for 2023. The cost-to-income ratio has come down nicely. We have more to go. I'll talk to you about that in a little while, and the return on equity has also gone in the right direction. Let me talk to you now about where we're going. We commit to delivering 13% return on equity. If you look here at the right-hand side, 13% return on equity by 2026, underpinned by a CET1 ratio above 16%, and with a cost-to-income ratio around 45%.
We also commit to generate substantial capital over the plan period. We believe that we have the potential to pay dividends in excess of DKK 50 billion over this plan period. We also, therefore, today announce that we will do an accelerated dividend on our first half 2023 earnings at the higher end of our 40%-60% dividend policy. We'll do that as part of our Q2 results, subject to board approval. We continue to have the ambition to further distribute capital, of course, subject to market conditions and our capital position. What will underpin these targets? Three main things. One is growing in the segments where we can really differentiate ourselves.
Being a Nordic leader in business banking and wholesale banking, being a leading retail bank in Denmark, and being one of the leading retail banks in Finland. We're also gonna have much more focus on how we allocate capital and how we look at returns in the business areas that we want to invest in. I'm gonna talk to you about that in a minute. We'll continue to have a focus on bringing down costs and increasing productivity, not only in financial crime and compliance, but across the whole business. As I mentioned, we believe that we have a business that will generate strong capital, and it's a business with a low-risk profile, a stable risk profile through the cycle. Let me take you through the businesses and how we think about the businesses that we want to play in.
When we started our strategy work, six months or so ago, a key important thing for us was how we prioritize our investments, our focus, where we really believe that we have strong markets, where we're well-positioned, where there is good growth and good profitability. We also, as part of that exercise, looked at which businesses do we need to refocus, which businesses do we need to do things differently in. Asset management and PC Sweden are businesses that we believe are attractive, but where we will refocus in terms of our business, and Christian and Berit will touch on that. We also have a business where we don't believe we can scale the business profitably, and that is why we also announced today that we will exit our personal customers business in Norway.
I wanna just underscore that Norway is a very important market for us when it comes to business and Large Corporate and Institutional business, where we'll continue to focus. Personal Customers will be a business that we will exit, and we are in advanced strategic process and options in terms of what we're gonna do with our PC Norway business. When you look at what will differentiate ourselves within each of these business areas that we've decided to focus and invest on, it's gonna be around advisory, it's gonna be around how we really differentiate ourselves on digital solutions, digital services. It's gonna be around sustainability and our leading role as a bank on sustainability, and then it's gonna be around focusing on continuing to be as simple and efficient, as secure a bank.
I'll take you through a few examples here. Advisory for us is really at the hallmark of what we do. It really defines Danske Bank. We have, again, a unique breadth and depth of local expertise. I took you through that at the beginning of the presentation. For us, it's really about how do we free up more time for these advisors to spend more time with our customers, to get more customer meetings, to help them where it really matters? An example here from personal customers, is how we've been able to decrease the share of meetings per advisor on everyday banking by helping them self-service on digital solutions, and then increasing the number of meetings that each advisor has.
We have a goal to do this in each of our business segments, and this is just an example of the traction that we're seeing in personal customers. The digital side, we believe we have an award-winning mobile app for our personal customers here in Denmark. We have a leading District platform and leading cash management platform across the Nordics to support our customers. We've been focused on how we can deliver digital solutions to our customers' self-service. The bottom left here, you see another example of how our customers today, more than 50% open their bank account on the mobile app. That frees up time for our advisors to do other things. We've also looked at all our customer journeys, and the goal is, how do we automate?
How do we digitize all our customer journeys? Lending, of course, is a good example of that. Here you see an example of business lending, where we want to increase the amount of lending that goes through digitally. As you can also see, although we've made progress, there is significant opportunity to do more. Sustainability. We believe this is one of the big challenges for our generation. We believe, as Denmark's biggest bank and one of the leading banks in the Nordics, that we play a very significant role in helping society and helping our customers with the transition. We have set ambitious plans on this. We believe we have one of the most ambitious Climate Action Plans in financial services. We announced our Climate Action Plan in January. We've set very clear targets.
We've mapped our whole lending book. We've signed up for SBTI targets. We've set 2030 targets on how we will, together with our customers, reduce CO2. Importantly, this is about how do we make a difference for our customers? How do we look at this commercially as a bank? That's again, back to how do we make sure we have the best, most competent advisory when it comes to sustainability? How do we ensure we have relevant products? Here you see in the bottom right, that we are leading when it comes to both sustainable investments and sustainable finance. We're gonna continue to invest in these capabilities. We think that this will make a difference for our customers. Simple, efficient, secure. It'd be reminiscent of me not to say, we understand our cost-to-income ratio is too high.
It's not where it needs to be. We need to get our cost-to-income ratio down. We have a strong starting point. We have one IT platform. We will make investments in digitalization and automation, and what we present today as part of our plan, is we will invest incrementally, DKK 1 billion a year on digitalization and automation. This is an investment and growth plan, but those investments come from savings. Those savings, we will see through operational efficiencies as well as seeing a normalized cost on financial crime on remediation. Frans will talk to you more about how we think about our investments in digitalization, and in our technology setup, and talk to you more about how we look at the operational efficiencies, where we're committing to take out in operational efficiencies over the plan period.
We see very much as what we've already shown that we can do over the last couple of years. When you look at underlying costs in the business, we have been able to reduce underlying costs. Again, through some of the examples I gave you before, digitizing, automating, improving end-to-end journeys in the bank. With that, let me just sum up. We commit to a 13% return on equity by 2026. We believe we have substantial opportunity to generate capital, to invest in the business, to distribute capital to our owners. We're gonna do that through a much more focused strategy, where we're focused on capital, on returns, on increasing productivity in the business. Thanks very much, and then I will hand it over to our CFO, Stephan Engels.
Good morning, a very warm welcome from my side in sunny Copenhagen. My name is Stephan Engels. I'm the CFO. I'm with the bank now for three years, it has been interesting years, to say the least. Before we go into some detail, I want to make some personal remarks. One, I think you have seen the ambition, the energy, the commitment that we have mobilized across the bank, which will be important to get us where we want to be. Let me also add, after a couple of decades as a CFO, I'm convinced that we can unleash the potential of this group over the coming years. Carsten touched upon the financial targets already.
For 2026, we want to go for 13% ROE and a cost-to-income ratio of 45%. I will provide you now some further detail on how we aim to divide you on where we are financially right now, followed by a walkthrough of our main assumptions, as well as the building blocks. As a result of our dedicated work, to meet our financial ambition of the ROE, we made good progress in many areas since 2019, sorry. Let me start mentioning three main takeaways. We have a trackable, clear commercial momentum on income generation in all business units. We have had a clear focus on cost, with tangible results, not at least in FTE reduction.
Finally, we have been building momentum in profit and capital generation, at the same time as we have maintained a strong credit quality, providing a solid background for future growth and distribution to our shareholders. We are on track to meet our ROE and cost income targets for 2023, set in 2019 as part of our previous plan. What you see here is adjusted numbers in order to exclude the effect from the Estonia settlement and the goodwill impairments. Normalization of interest rates have provided tailwind for our net interest income, most notably in Denmark and Finland, which have been more severely impacted by the negative rates than Sweden and Norway. Of course, higher central bank rates have had a sizable impact.
I think it's important to note that NII has also been supported by own initiatives, optimizing pricing primarily during the period with negative interest rates. Alongside our improved income, our disciplined approach to cost also contributed to financial performance. The headwind in the period came from capital, in particular, as we have continued to add to our capital position, despite the impact from the resolution with the authorities, which took effect last year. Despite all the challenges we had to master over the last couple of years, we are increasingly delivering performance, as solving legacy issues also frees up capacity to focus on our income and cost challenges, and start turning those into momentum. What is the plan? It's all about keeping trajectory and accelerate both on income, let me be absolutely clear, also on cost.
Now, how are we going to accelerate our commercial momentum and profitability in the next period? Firstly, we will strengthen our focus on growth. We are further increasing our income by acquiring new and growing shares of wallet with our most attractive segments, where we believe we can win. We are continuing our momentum of streamlining the bank, pushing down cost to serve, focusing on areas such as digital self-service and advisory productivity. A normalization of cost for our ongoing efforts to fight financial crime, and a significant reduction in costs of solving legacy issues, will also enable us to free up resources, which instead can be partly invested in growth and accelerated tech renewal. Secondly, while growth is at the top of the agenda, we are ensuring this growth is both profitable and sustainable.
We are becoming more stringent and dynamic in allocating capital towards hurdle rate areas, supported by the introduction of a new resource allocation model, including allocation of buffers currently held at group level. Our Nordic retail business will be refocused in our business with personal customers in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. We will not allocate new investments to our personal customer business in Norway as a consequence of today's announcement. We will provide you with an update on this specific process in connection with our release of the interim report for the first half of 2023. Thirdly, we will maintain a strong capital position, with the ability to distribute consistently over time. Following a period of de-risking and simplification of the bank, we are now bringing back shareholder distributions.
Our capital distribution policy remains unchanged. We see potential to distribute dividends above DKK 50 billion on earnings from 2023 to 2026, equivalent to 60% of net profit on an aggregate level, which I will comment on more detail in a few minutes. While macroeconomic assumptions behind our plans are important for sure, I will not dwell on these for too long. Instead, let me talk you through the interest rate dynamics we see in the planning period. We expect short-term rates to peak towards the second half of this year, and by the end of 2024, we expect to have rates returned to around 3%, and longer term, between 2% and 2.5%.
We continue to see an interest rate sensitivity of around DKK 700 million after 12 months in a 25 parallel shift scenario. We also expect tailwind after 12 months as assets and bond portfolios reprice. This means that after 24 months, we expect the annualized NII impact to be around DKK 1 billion. This is important, especially when considering our NII beyond one year. Despite headwinds from deposit margin compression following the interest rate development, NII will benefit from repricing of these balance sheet items. Finally, in terms of wage inflation, we expect an elevated level of around 3% on average in the Nordics, and a somewhat higher level for operations in Lithuania and India. We do, however, expect wage inflation to scale back somewhat towards the end of the period. What does all this mean for our financial targets?
As already highlighted by Carsten, we have set ambitious, yet realistic targets, which we will closely evaluate our performance against during the coming years. For sure, we have an aspiration to exceed. In terms of cost efficiency, we target a cost-to-income ratio of around 45%. Our previous CET1 target of above 16% in the short term and above 20% on our total capital target remains unchanged. We expect to operate with a shareholders' equity of around DKK 170 billion at the end of 2026. In respect of capital distribution, we have a potential for dividend payments for more than DKK 50 billion, equivalent to approximately 40% of our current market cap, based on the earnings from 2023 to 2026.
In this context, as said before, we are pleased to announce that subject to BOD approval, we intend to restart dividend payments in connection with the result for the first half of this year. We are targeting the higher end of the 40%-60% dividend policy range based on the net profit for the first six months in 2023. On top, we have a clear ambition for further distribution, which will be subject to our capital position and market condition. In this context, we expect to revisit our capital target once we have reached the final solution for discontinuing our Norwegian retail business. Until then, this exposure will be reclassified as assets for sale. Let us look on how we arrive at our ROE target.
Based on the progress in commercial momentum and profitability we have seen, we assume a starting point in line with our current guidance of a net profit between DKK 16.5 billion and DKK 18.5 billion for this year, corresponding roughly to a 10%-11% ROE. We've broken down the development, no surprise, and basically four main drivers: income, cost, risk, and capital. For all main drivers, I will elaborate in more details over the next couple of slides. However, it should be clear that further progress on income generation is a key element in how we will meet our target. We expect an uplift in income from all major income lines, benefiting from continued growth and from focused, dedicated business initiatives, and again, based on prudent macroeconomic assumptions.
For the cost component, firstly, we expect substantially lower remediation costs, and secondly, according to plan, normalized level for expenses related to financial crime prevention. Thirdly, improved operational efficiency, mainly within PC and TNS, will ensure that we will become a more efficient bank. These effects together will then more than mitigate the inflation level and allow for increased investments, both digital as well as non-digital, that will play also an important role in driving productivity. Finally, we expect lower cost of risk to add positively to the enhanced profitability, whereas higher level of equity and gradual implementation of the new Danish banking tax will be a drag. While our business areas will further develop on the key growth and profitability levers contributing to our group return on equity, I want to highlight a couple of key messages.
We are deepening our relationships with existing clients and better addressing their financial needs to grow share of wallet and income levels. Discussion, as Carsten mentioned, we will do this by freeing up advisory capacity, being more proactive in reach outs, supported by data and analytics, and focused product offering. We want to capture more Nordic business outside of Denmark. While Denmark is our home market and an important battleground, we see significant potential in growing both our retail and corporate businesses in neighboring countries, for example, in Sweden. We want to become more efficient in our relationships, increasing our customers' use of self-service tools to reduce manual work, and to a greater extent, use virtual meetings and centralized teams paired with the most streamlined core tech platform.
We have seen improved profitability in all business units since 2022, and we expect a higher and sustainable level by 2026, contributing to our ability to meet the group target return on shareholders' equity. From an income line perspective, the contribution from net interest income will continue to grow along our macro assumptions, and in addition, business initiatives facilitated by our targeted investments will further add positively to volume growth. As I just explained, when I elaborated the underlying assumptions, we expect short-term rates to come down during the period, driven by an expectation for lower inflation compared to current levels. While we expect the repricing of the balance sheet items to mitigate pressure on deposit margins from lower short-term rates. We also expect higher fee income to contribute to profitability by 2026.
The underlying drivers will be normalized income from the housing market activities, and as well as a recovery in capital markets related fees and generally higher activity. Related, we will also work on issues like new pricing structures, and as I've said before, the initiatives for commercial momentum in the business units. Finally, we expect a positive contribution from our trading and insurance activities, driven by further normalization of market conditions. When we look at the cost development, we expect to arrive at a cost in 2026, slightly below the level from last year. Before I comment on the moving parts, let me be totally clear that meeting our cost target is absolutely essential for this plan, and thereby is a key priority for me and the full management team.
In our plan towards 2026, we expect an overall inflation of 3% for our cost base. We expect inflation and wage inflation in particular, to be a clear headwind, more than previously, due to higher run rate for wages, as exemplified by the new wage agreements in Denmark that will take effect this year and next year. As mentioned, we expect to significantly reduce the still elevated cost for remediation and legacy, of legacy cases, and in addition to that, we will be able to reduce costs related to the financial crime remediation plan to a normalized level, obviously, subject to the finalization of this plan, roughly by the end of this year. Cost efficiency initiatives will continue and mainly be driven by benefits from strategic investments, primarily efficiencies in TNS and PC, that I'm sure Christian and Frans will comment on later.
It's important for me to emphasize that a prerequisite for our investment spend clearly is that we can deliver on the light blue boxes that you can see on this slide. While we remain focused in keeping our costs in check through structural efficiencies, we remain convinced that targeted investments are crucial for the long-term value of this bank. We will increase our total investment envelope by a third, equivalent to DKK 1 billion, through a combination of reinvested savings and additional investments. As we increase our total investment envelope, it is important to note that we are increasing the share towards strategic change from roughly 35 to above 60%. These investments will be focused on developing new systems, platforms, products, and further strengthening our long-term competitive edge, exemplified by the new segmentation model, digitalization of customer journeys, automation, as well as partner integration.
Now, let me, in three key takeaways, combine what we have seen so far in terms of development for the cost-income ratio. Starting already this year, we expect a drop in cost-income ratio despite higher inflation. We believe that we can continue to improve these ratios towards 2026, and the main drivers for this will be cost efficiencies and higher income that will enable us to more than mitigate inflation, increased investments, and cost of growth. Before we go to capital, let me spend some words on how cost of risk will impact the path towards 2026. We have included an assumption for around 8 basis points on average for the period until 2026.
This level is identical with the average observed loan losses back to 2016, which to a high degree, was impacted by 2020 due to PMAs related to the pandemic, as well as a significant reduction in our exposure towards oil and gas in that period. The guidance we have for this year, is obviously higher than what we have included in our plan, and is still based on the risk for further model-driven changes which have yet to materialize. We have overall de-risked our credit exposure to different industries, including commercial real estate, and we have a further ambition to adjust in high-risk sectors. Finally, we believe we are well-provisioned with PMAs of DKK 7 billion. Finally, the impact on capital on the 2026 plan and how we plan to approach our unchanged target level of above 16%.
It's clear from what we show on this slide that we remain committed to two important things: dividend distribution to the higher end of our range, and an ambition to further distribute capital, subject obviously to capital position and market conditions. This is based on the assumptions that we only expect a minor increase in RWA, in line with growing our business, and only a small impact from regulatory changes. Let me summarize. As shown previously, we have a dividend payout potential of more than DKK 50 billion, based on earnings from 2023 to 2026. Let me summarize how we see the financial performance over the next three years.
There's no doubt that we have a good starting point coming from an improved commercial momentum, and very importantly, from structural changes to our income and generation, we see as a result of the return to more normalized interest rate environment. Adding to this is a positive cost story, without impact from our recent different legacy cases that are now allows us to invest to more drive commercial momentum even further. This will enable us to reach a return on shareholders' equity of 13% on prudent assumptions, and in parallel, improve our operational efficiency significantly compared to recent years. Coupled with a clear ambition for capital distribution and our plan for dividend payments in July, based on the earnings for the first six months, we have a solid plan, and I'm fully confident in our ability to execute. Thank you. I will be joined by Carsten and Claus for Q&A.
Well, we will now have the first part of the Q&A, and we will just do a little bit of add-ons to the tables here on the stage before we before we kick off. For those of you in the room, if you have a question, please raise your hand, and then a microphone will be brought to your table. For those of you who would ask questions virtually, then please write your name and your company name using the chat function, and then I will ask to you to state your question once the line is open. Just for the sake of good order, please remember to unmute when you are online. By those instructions, we are ready to go. I think we have a question from Jakob Brink from Nordea. Please go ahead, Jakob.
Thank you. On the dividend or interim dividend you're announcing today, we have asked you previously if there was any chance of a share buyback in 2023, I think the answer has been consistently no. Has that also changed now?
No, I think as we have called out, what we are doing for the first six months of this year is basically paying, call it, an accelerated dividend. You also know that we have just solved our case with the DOJ. We are still protecting very much our capital base, and as I called out, following the closure, obviously, hopefully, of the exit of Norway towards, call it, the mid of next year, I think that is a more prudent point to revisit both the capital target as possibly any forms and models of distribution of capital.
Thank you. I think the next question came from Johannes, from HSBC.
Good morning, everybody. Johannes from HSBC. One question on your Swedish and Norwegian businesses and private clients. I was a bit puzzled that you want to exit Norwegian business, where probably the market situation is completely different to Sweden in some respects, by one large competitor, where you can probably gain from antitrust things. In Sweden, you have an even smaller market share, and you state or said, you wanna keep that business. Why did you make that decision? Probably the last question is in terms of partnerships. .. Why did you decide to keep all your insurance business as part of the group, while it adds complexity and volatility to reporting and everything else? Thank you.
Thanks for that. On Sweden, I'm gonna come back at the end today, I'd like you to hear from Christian Bornfeld. He's gonna talk a little bit about the positioning in the different markets. The high level answer on Sweden is we believe that personal customer Sweden is a very attractive market. It's a much bigger market, we believe that we have a more focused business model that will allow us to grow in that market. Therefore, we would like to invest in it. I'm gonna let Christian speak to it in the presentation, you can come back if there are further questions on it. On our insurance businesses, I mean, we have sold our insurance businesses in Norway and Sweden, where we are subscale.
We like our Danica Pension business. Danica is a very important part of the group. It's an important product, both for our corporate clients, but also for our retail clients. In fact, we believe that we can do even more to unleash more potential both ways between Danske Bank and Danica.
I think there was a question from the table in the corner. Thank you.
Hello, from ABG Sundal Collier. When it comes to your income and cost assumption, you are very firm on the cost side that you will reach that levels. What about the income side? What is sort of the potential for not being able to actually get to the 3% growth here? What should we then think about your targets in 2026?
I mean, from the income side, I mean, we believe that these are prudent assumptions around growth, so roughly a 3% lending growth and just below 1% on deposits. Starting point, of course, being 2023, where you see somewhat subdued growth. We feel good about those assumptions. The other drivers of income, are of course, that we believe that we will be able to increase the fee line. Again, 2023 being somewhat subdued, then some normalization of fixed income and insurance.
Of course, there's the puts and takes on the NII sensitivities, where although, of course, there are headwinds on rates decreasing, and we had an assumption they'll decrease to a sort of structural interest rate of around 2% in this plan. There is offsetting to those headwinds from, for example, fixed loans that aren't hedged today, rolling off and being replenished by higher margins, and also our structural hedge, where you have low-yielding assets running off, being replenished by higher-yielding assets. That would be how I would see the different moving parts.
Okay, thank you. Then I think we have a question coming in virtually from Madhav from JP Morgan. Can we have the line open? Can you see us? Can you hear us? Please unmute. Please state your question. Okay, I think we have a little technical issue here. Maybe we will continue if there is any further questions. Johan Ekblom? He's sitting here.
Yeah.
Thank you. Just to come back on the, on the capital, I mean, you kind of said what equity base you assume, but.
Oh, hi, can you hear me?
For us, that haven't brought out our calculators yet, what's the assumption in terms of RWA growth and potential regulatory impacts with Basel III finalization? Then I guess, related to that, what capital optimization measures are available? I remember years ago, we talked about potential of kind of making the Danica impact more efficient. Is that still on the table?
Let me quickly start with what you asked about regulatory. You know that we are holding a pretty sizable RWA buffer on group level, which we believe will basically solve our transition into the Basel III finalization or Basel IV, whatever you want to call it. I don't expect a headwind from that really at group level compared to where we are right now. We will start allocating these buffers on group level towards our segments, and you will see some of that later, to make sure that we have efficient and proper steering, and also proper pricing. That's one. The second part, I think in general, our focus really is on getting our structural profitability solved. We are addressing the capital distribution issue.
Whether there is further potential to optimize one or the other thing remains to be seen, and again, is also subject to discussion with the regulators, which currently is more focused on how do we set our capital target and stuff like that. I wouldn't say it's completely off the agenda, but I wouldn't pencil too much in.
Okay, thank you so much, Stephan. I think we have Madhav from JP Morgan back here. He wrote his question to us. I'll just read it out. Can you please elaborate where the 3% loan growth comes from, considering the weak loan growth outlook? The second question is also, where does the NII growth come from, considering NII is falling?
Loan growth, you should assume between 2%-3% loan growth in our corporate businesses, at the higher end, 3.5%-4% loan growth in personal customers business. That's roughly how we see it. Again, we believe that 2023 is relatively subdued, but that the initiatives that we have, both from digital, from advisory, and marketing, and other initiatives, will support those loan rates, and we don't believe that those are out of line with what we have been able to deliver historically. I think on the NII, maybe you wanna talk about.
Yeah, maybe.
Where the NII growth comes from, considering NII is falling, this is maybe the NII sensitivities, if you want to touch on that.
There's obviously different components in the NII part. One is obviously from lending growth that Carsten just talked to, which is, in a simple way, the 2% macro that we believe is the growth rate going forward, plus an additional % with targeted initiatives where we believe that we can grab market share and customer share of wallet without being aggressive on pricing. That's one part of the NII. The other one is the more dynamic view on what happens to a complex bank balance sheet as it rolls over time. There, the very simple math is, if you take what Carsten also talked to, fixed assets that will reprice and the bond portfolio, that will reprice. In a way, you need to look at this like there have been many years of zero, zero interest rate.
We have a huge spike, which definitely drives deposit margins very quickly, and then that spike goes back to two. While all that happens, also these assets and bond portfolios start to reprice. Obviously, not to the peak, but to the long-term rate, which we expect to be between 2% and 2.5%. That dynamic provides quite some uplift in the, call it, post 12-month sensitivity that we normally talk about, for net income, for net interest income, sorry.
Thank you, Stephan. Asbjørn over here has the next question.
Yes, thank you. Two questions, if I may. First one, Stephan, you mentioned the DKK 170 billion of equity in 2026. I guess that means something like 90% payout ratio towards 2026, which was also what you showed in one of the slides. What are you building that on? Is that how to get to 16%, or is there a reason for the optimism? Secondly, on your NII, maybe if you can touch upon your deposit beta assumptions going forward, competition, I guess, especially in the Danish market for deposits.
Yeah, let me start with the beta assumption. That is a bit of commercially sensitive information, so I'm not gonna give you too much detail, but let me say that much. The modeling that we are driving obviously has a beta assumption that also from our point of view, will rather creep up a bit over time as customers get used to more higher rates and will start going into, by the way, some of the very attractive products that we have on offer and that you can even digitally move your money into. I think the deposit beta, in general, should be going up. I would also agree I would also be willing to say that so far, our assumptions have been proven prudent. So that's the part.
The second part on capital, again, the 170 billion capital assumptions for 2026 is obviously driven by RWA, and obviously, this RWA model does not include Norway anymore, so that will help us getting to a lower nominal capital base to begin with. Then it remains to be seen, and I have to be a bit vague on this, how we make use of these capitals, but it's also very clear there is an ambition to distribute, and we need to. Let's give it a year until we can really get to more detail on that one.
Okay, thank you so much, Stephan. I think we have the next question coming in online. Martin Birk from SEB has a question. Please wait until the line is open, Martin, and please unmute. I think, we are ready now, so please state your question.
Okay, excellent. Just a quick question on capital. I guess, Stephan, you also alluded to the settlement with the US authorities. What does it mean for excess capital distributions that Danske Bank has been placed under probation? That would be my first question. The second question also goes on capital, that is regarding the DKK 12.8 billion contingent liabilities that you guys have in your Q1 report. How should we think about that in relation to the capital distribution? Finally, did I hear correctly that you said that you would revisit the 16% CET1 target post in region retail bank investments?
So many questions. Let me confirm that we believe, and we are in a very good dialogue with our regulator, that we believe that delivering the financial crime plan at the end of 2023, exiting or completing the Norway process, will give a very natural and very good starting point for us to discuss the capital target. 12.8, contingent liabilities, you are referring to the civil claims, I assume. So far, we have no indication whatsoever that we will need to do any provisioning of any kind, and that's what we've also consistently said since the beginning of this, and we keep on vigorously defending us against these claims. I wouldn't think that is a link to capital. The third question was, what was the first one? Sorry.
You said, I think that Jakob's question, you said that you would revisit the 16% CET1 target post a Norwegian retail bank divestments.
I think what the capital target will be, post or with the finalization of the discussions with the regulator. I haven't given a hint to that. Sorry if I was not precise.
No, I think, I mean, just to add, I think what you were saying, Stephan, is that it's likely that we'll be in a good position to understand, you know, the outcome of our Norway exit by mid-next year and the associated release of capital. Then I think you just mentioned... By the way, in a year's time, I think we'll also have much more clarity on the capital targets, given the ongoing discussions. I think, Martin, that was it, that it's reasonable to think that in a year's time, we'll be able to have much more clarity on the capital ratio, and therefore, also on potential excess capital distribution. It so happens that it's not unlikely that timing will also work around Norway, but you shouldn't necessarily see those things as together. Could happen quicker on Norway.
Thank you.
I think we have another question coming in online. Riccardo Rovere from Mediobanca. Hello, Riccardo, can you hear us?
Yes. Can you hear me?
Yes, loud and clear. Please state your question.
Thanks, thanks. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two, if I may. The first one is, again, on NII. I was looking, Stephan, at your assumptions back in the plan, the macro assumptions back in the plan. You have roughly one third of the benefit of rates, which at some point in 25 is gonna disappear. Rates are assumed to peak at 3.5, something like that, and go back to kind of 2%, more or less. One third of the benefit should go away. Before you stated, and you stated that the deposit beta is gonna go up at some point, without quantifying, I understand that. You also stated that the bond portfolio repricing will somehow, will somehow contribute.
The size of the bond portfolio, it's literally a fraction of that, of the deposit base. I mean, the bond portfolio, from the numbers I have in front of me, is about DKK 500 billion or so. The deposit base is DKK 1.2 trillion-DKK 1.3 trillion. I find it a bit difficult to understand how something worth DKK 500 billion can compensate for the negative on DKK 1.2 trillion-DKK 1.3 trillion. Is there anything else on the asset side that is gonna reprice, that's not repriced yet? This is the first question. The second question I have on the capital, the 16% target, which was supposed to be a short term. I mean, this has been always your narrative. Now it's captain changed. When you say capital targets will be somehow revisited in mid-2024, does this apply to the 16%, too? Thanks.
Yeah. Just to confirm, we expect to get into a very constructive dialogue with our regulators. Outcome is always open. By mid-2024, we believe that we should have come to a shared view between us on what the long-term type of capital target should be. Until then, we'll keep the current target of above 16. That's one. On the NII sensitivity, I think the way you would need to look at this is basically there's, call it, DKK 150 billion of assets in the held-to-maturity book, which is used as an interest rate hedge book. There's another DKK 150 billion across Sweden and Finland on fixed rate loans that will reprice over the coming periods.
The average duration of both parts is, call it, roughly, three years, within slightly different underlying dynamics, but that is, that is the number to work with on, like, what does it give me from my previous example, getting from 0% to 2%, if you assume that as the, as the long-term, rate. Then again, we expect the rates on the short-term side to peak between now or to peak basically around year-end. Nobody knows exactly when it will be and how it will look like, but that's still an expectation. Then only gradually, come down towards the end of 2024, more to a three-ish level, then gradually go down to 2% to 2.5% in the long term. If you mix all that up together, then you should roughly arrive at our numbers.
Yeah, Riccardo, I do think you should be careful about taking the total deposit book, which you mentioned, versus, you know, the held-to-maturity book and the other assets, because I think the most relevant comparison is the more operational, the more operational assets in retail banking and business banking, which is, of course, substantially lower than the number you mentioned. I think we had quite explicit disclosures, and that is part of our Q1, if you want to see the details.
Thanks. Thank you.
Thank you so much. Is there any more questions from the room? I think we have one from Namita. Thank you.
Hi, Namita Samtani from Barclays. I just had a question on your compensation package, because clearly it's gonna be linked to the 2026 ROE target, but what about 24 and 25? What exactly is it linked to, and how will you be assessed?
This is probably a question for the chairman, but we have in the whole executive leadership team, we have two compensation packages. One is on short-term incentive, which is up to 30%, which is based on a sort of balance, a balanced scorecard of different goals, including financial, non-financial, et cetera. There is a long-term incentive, which is basically based on total shareholder return versus a basket of our peers. I would imagine, but the board hasn't set the 2026 targets, that we would probably continue and with some sort of mix like that.
I think, of course, the financial targets is one component, but the long-term incentives, at least in all the years I've been here, is fixed on versus a basket of our peers and total shareholder return, and therefore, is less specific on any one number.
Yeah. If I can add, because I felt that was the inherent question: Is this a hockey stick model? It is not.
I wouldn't even presume to think that that was the question.
No.
Okay.
Thank you so much. We have to cut off for the first Q&A session here. We will have a short break now, and be back in this room around 9:45 A.M. There will be a Q&A session afterwards of 50 minutes, so there will be plenty of time and opportunity to ask questions. Thank you. Enjoy your break.
Okay, welcome. Welcome back, everybody. I think we are still missing a few people in here, but kindly ask you to find your chair. Then we will kick off. Okay, welcome back from the break. I hope you have had a chance to refresh yourself a little bit. We will now kick off with the second part of today's agenda. This is where we will focus on our strategic plan and priorities in our business units. To start with, I will introduce Berit Behring, Head of our Large Corporates & Institutions. Please, Berit, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Claus. Good morning, everyone. I have really been looking forward to today. The leading Nordic wholesale bank, that is my ambition, and that is also my team's ambition. We have, in recent years, been on a journey to become a full-scale wholesale bank, built on strong customer relationships with local market expertise, and also full transaction banking and full investment banking capabilities. Now it's time to shift gear, and today I will take you through our plans. I have been in Danske since 2007, and I was part of the old CNI team that defined the LC&I as we are today. I would just like to start to spend a few minutes on that journey because I think it's important. It shows that my team can execute on ambitions, even in competitive areas and in challenging circumstances.
I do remember back then, the discussions we had in the team, where we started with, "Okay, so what is our strength? What is our DNA? What is our strongholds to build on for the next few years?" The first thing we identified was that we had a very strong customer-first mindset. We also, in the team, were convinced that relationships, trust, will be even more important for the future. For that reason, we decided to elevate our senior banker role, the relationship manager, gave them a stronger mandate. We made them totally product agnostic, and we gave them full customer profitability responsibility. Our customers feel today they have a strong senior coverage with fast and easy access to top management in the bank.
As Carsten already said, we have now been rated the Nordic number one by Prospera for seven consecutive years. The second stronghold we identified was we also knew we had the best cash management system, and we know it is lending money and good daily banking that makes relationships sticky. We have worked on this competitive advantage, and we are today the house bank to many more customers compared to just a few years back. We also have a leading profitable institutional franchise, built on very strong capabilities in secondary market products. Also here, with the elevation of the senior banker role, we have now built really strong senior relationships with our Nordic institutions. We also, back then, knew there were some areas where we did need to invest, and at the time, we were not a full-scale investment bank.
The first area we decided to invest was in our capital markets capabilities. This was both to capture the increased customer demand for diversified funding, but it was also to work with our own profitability. Capital was becoming more expensive with new capital regulation, and we wanted to be competitive. We were not the only bank going in this direction, and this also meant entering into a super competitive field with the large international investment banks, as well as the strong local boutique firms only focusing on capital market transactions. Therefore, it makes me so happy today when I actually see that we are supporting and helping so many of our customers with strategic advice in their important and transformative transactions. You can see us in top of the league tables in DCM, in ECM, and in M&A.
It has also worked on our capital efficiency. We have also, in these years, reduced our share of low returning capital from above 50% to now below 30%. We also identified that we wanted to grow. We wanted to grow because we wanted to diversify our credit risk in our portfolio, and we also wanted to utilize this good cash management system, build scale on that system. As a Swede, I'm a little bit extra proud over the development on the strong growth that we have seen in Sweden, but we have actually grown our core relationships in all four countries in the Nordics during these years. They have grown profitably and with balanced risks. Last but not least, sustainable finance. I think the most important capability to have for the future.
Also here, you see us in the top of the league tables when it comes to bonds, when it comes to loans, and as Carsten already said, we have the most ambitious Climate Action Plan in the Nordics. We did do what we set out to do, but I think most importantly, this is a very good starting point for the next five years. What will we do the next five years? If you should remember anything when you go home tonight about DSNI, it's three things. We will continue our growth journey with a focus outside Denmark. We will strengthen and leverage our One Corporate Bank platform, and we will deepen our relationships with our Nordic institutions. The continuation of the growth journey will mean that we will further diversify our credit book.
We will be even more focused on the large international corporates that have a very strong Nordic anchor, the kind of corporates where we can be the full service provider, financial service provider for our customers. Our One Corporate Bank platform, I seriously think that we have underplayed this asset for years. Danske Bank took years ago, when Danske Bank acquired foreign banks, the difficult decision to migrate those banks entirely into our system, one platform, and it is on that platform we have built our cash management system. For our corporate customers, that is a fantastic product. This strategy round, I have together with Johanna Norberg, Head of Business Customers, and our two respective management teams, have worked together to make sure that we maximize and leverage this asset. Thirdly, deepen our relationship with our Nordic institutions.
Now we will build on these strong secondary market capabilities that we have, and now also the strong senior relationships with our Nordic institutions. We will support them on their increasing demand for alternative with a focus on green investments and also their increased demand for liquidity. This will mean that we will diversify our income and increase our income coming from institution, going into more fee income and more NII. Also, as you can see on this slide, on the right-hand side, we do expect income growth from the corporate customer segments in all four Nordic countries, as well as improved ROAC. From our institutional customers, we see a more substantial income uplift and unchanged ROAC, thanks to very strong focus on capital efficiency.
Let me take you through these three growth levers in a bit more detail, and I will start with the growth journey. The growth journey focused outside Denmark, and where we see most potential in Sweden. We know how to grow. We have grown by 20% our customer base just since 2021. I think it's important to emphasize, it's not just about lending money. It's actually not just about lending money and doing the transaction banking. A few weeks back, Sobi, Swedish Orphan, announced their $17 billion acquisition. We did the full advisory, the full financing package together with Morgan Stanley. You should, going forward, expect to see more of that from us, especially in Sweden. We have actually also grown our customer base in Norway.
In all sectors, with a focus on renewable energy, except for, as Stephan already mentioned, oil and gas, where we have taken a deliberate decision to reduce our exposure. Going forward, we will support all our customers even more on their sustainable transition. That will also mean that we will reduce our financed carbon emissions intensity even further. We have also increased our capital light fee income from both capital markets and daily banking by 30% since 2020. Going forward, we will focus even more on customer profitability, and we do expect to see further growth from both capital markets as well as daily banking. I just want to remind you, with daily banking, it is the same product in all four countries.
If we do a cash pool for a Finnish corporate, it's actually exactly the same as a cash pool for a Norwegian corporate. You can see, we will grow by at least 40 new customers before 2026, and that corresponds to a growth rate of roughly 5% annually. The second focus are One Corporate Bank platform. We are the only bank that has a true Nordic platform, there are many proof points on this. As an example, we are the cash manager for Denmark, for Sweden, for Finland, and for Ireland. Even if these example represent mainly domestic cash management solutions, we have been able to scale those solutions between the different countries just because we have one platform. Now we will be able to invest to maintain this competitive advantage.
I will now focus on the middle of the slide, the three dark blue boxes, because that is where we will channel the main part of our investments. The first one is about improving efficiencies. That is basically taking our internal processes, digitize them, automate them, but it's also about increasing adoption rates. The second part is about integration. We want to make it easier for our customers to inter-integrate directly with our system, District, and this will make our customers' daily life easier, more efficient, and it will make our system more sticky. Thirdly, is about increasing our cross-sale and our ancillary business by being more proactive and relevant with data and information. We give our advisors and product specialists better information so they can bring in the right specialist at the right time. We do have the data.
We have a lot of transactional data, but we need to utilize it better. Going forward, you should expect to hear a lot more about how we in Danske Bank will utilize our data. As I said before, this work has been done together with business customer, and we'll come back later and show what this means for business customer segment. You can already here see that we will increase the annual daily banking fee and annual growth rate of 5% or more. This is a shared KPI between LC&I and BC , and that is just to make sure that we always do the right prioritization, what is right and best for the bank. I can guarantee you that we have our own target, below the 5%. Moving into the third part, deepening our relationships with Nordic institutions.
I have, and my team have, some of the strongest relationships there are with Nordic institutions. When Tryg decided to acquire RSA Insurance, that was a big transaction, DKK 37 billion. That transaction meant that our senior banker, he needed internally to coordinate with corporate finance, with equities, with equity capital markets, with debt capital markets, with loan capital markets, with FX, and with issuer services, as well as keeping me and the rest of ELT comfortable with a pretty large exposure. Why did they choose us? They choose Danske because we have the local market expertise for those transactions.
When Barbara, the CFO of Tryg, after the transaction, said, "It has been a pleasure to have Danske Bank on team Tryg for this extremely important and transformative transaction." I know we have what it takes to make the largest and most complex transactions in the Nordics. Now we want to use these strong relationships we have, because we have more, and we want to build on the strength we have in our secondary market capabilities. We are strong in fixed income, in equities, in FX, and in asset management. As you can see in the light blue box on the slide, we will now capture the growth opportunities coming from our institutional, Nordic institutional customers in their shift towards more illiquid and green assets. This mean that we will increase our exposure in project finance and in leverage finance.
We will also support our Nordic institutions in their increased demand for liquidity, and we will increase our exposure in collateralized lending, with less liquid assets. We will have high focus on cost and capital, so we will invest in streamlining our markets platform, but we will also invest further in our originate-to-distribute capabilities. I think it's important also to see the connection with our corporate strategy, because increasing our project finance with focus on renewable energy will also support the growth journey we have on our corporate customers. We will be at least top two in the league tables in the Nordics around capital markets. I will end where I started. We will be the leading wholesale bank in the Nordics.
We had a strong Q1, Stephan already mentioned that in the beginning, but this is a long-term plan, and this plan has normalized interest rates, normalized impairments. We have a strong business case, and we will improve our profitability. Our income uplift will mainly come from growing in Sweden, increasing ancillary business income from and improved corporate digital abilities, and the deepening of our relationship with Nordic institutions that will increase income and also divert income towards more fee income and more net interest income. We will invest in both digital and people. Parts of that will come from our own cost savings. When I look at the people side, we talk about competencies. That is originate-to-distribute competencies, project finance, sustainability, and advisory. The gray bar also shows you that it was also one of the questions.
We had some regulatory headwinds, we will see some increased capital requirements, it also illustrates, to some extent, our increased appetite for project finance and leverage finance, as well as collateralized lending. The three things to remember today about NCNI, they will continue on the growth journey. They will strengthen and leverage the One Corporate Bank platform to drive ancillary business, they will deepen the relationship with Nordic institutions and diversify income coming from those customers. It's not a revolution, it's rather an evolution. We have a proven track record, now we are really ready to do it again. Thank you very much for listening, now I'm very happy to introduce my dear colleague, Johanna Norberg, Head of Business Customers.
Thank you. Thank you, Berit, good morning, everyone. It's still morning, isn't it? I'm actually really excited to be here today to talk about business customers, but also to talk about, of course, our five-year strategy and how that is tied into what Berit already presented in the LC&I strategy when it comes to the large corporates. I've been in the business customer segment since the get-go, since this was formed just two years ago, and I came with over 20 years of experience from LC&I, both from the customer side and from the product side. As you might already know, business customers, we serve all small and mid-corp customers, all the way up to turnovers of around EUR 150 million. We, Danske Bank, have among the fastest growing profitability in this part of the market.
That is something that I'm really proud about that we have managed to produce just during these two years, and this is something that we're now also going to accelerate on. We will do that in a segment that is really important and really attractive in the Nordic. Why is that? Well, let me explain. This segment employs nearly half of the total working force in the private sector in the Nordic, and it stands for almost 60% of the income. Of course, this segment does not only attract our attention, but it really attracts attention also from competitors, but also newcomers knocking on the door. As you can hear, this is a really important segment when it comes to future growth and future job creation.
That is also why I'm also glad to be here to outline our five-year strategy. I would like to show you a bit where we are today. Compared to many of our competitors, we are one of the few truly Pan-Nordic banks in this segment, and we are a market leader in Denmark. We serve all these small and mid-corporate customers with success, and they are really attractive. As you can see on the 53% mark up here, the income per customer significantly increases when the needs becomes more advanced. This is something that you will notice being a red thread throughout this presentation today. As pointed out in the dark blue banner at the bottom, we serve all these customers, as Birthe pointed out, on one digital platform, namely District.
This, I will come back to a bit later in the presentation. How did then we, in Business Customer, address this highly competitive area? Well, I sat down with my management team a couple of years ago, we took some really important actions to put Business Customer in a much stronger positions. Now I would like to explain how. First of all, let us focus a bit on the upper side of this page, namely, our strongholds. We have some really good inherent strongholds that our customers can make use of. Just to give you a couple of example, if you, as a customer, in Business Customer, you want to trade in FX, or you want to issue a green bond, you partner up with Danske Bank because we have the top-class product suite.
Just as you can see on the top right corner of this page. This is just to mention a few. We are number one in FX. We are number one in DCM issuance. We combine this really strong product suite with top advisory capabilities. We are constantly improving in the way that customer sees us. We are top three in the in all our market area. We already currently, we're number one in Norway and Finland. If we then go to the bottom part of this page. What did we then decide two years ago? Building on these strongholds, we then did some improvements to bring costs down and income up. Let me just outline a few of them.
We segmented our customers a bit differently because one size simply didn't fit all. If you were a customer with quite advanced needs, you have the same coverage model as a customer with less advanced needs or even basic needs. We underserved the customers that really needed us the most. We decided to resegment our customers in three master segments: small corporates, mid corporates, and mid corporates with advanced needs. This was not easy. We went through 200,000 plus customers and made sure that they had the correct coverage model, and this was a really large achievement in just a couple of years. We tuned the service model to really fit our customers' needs. The second thing that we did, that was on the digital side.
We took some of the capabilities that our advisors and our staff function had on our platforms, then we turned them, and we gave them to our customers. Just to give you a couple of examples, in Sweden and Denmark today, you can open your account, you can order your products, and you can do simpler credit application, as Carsten pointed out, all by yourself on our digital platform, District. As you can see on the right-hand bottom side of this page, we then manage, with combination with the stronghold that I mentioned before, with not only these two actions, we managed to get profit income up and cost income down. As you can see, we have some really good momentum now, and it's that momentum that we're building the strategy for the coming five years.
We are doing that on three different levers, and I would like to show you them. Before I go into each and every one of them with a deep dive, I just want to briefly mention them, all of them. Firstly, we're going to focus on customers with advanced needs. The reason it's quite simple here, because their needs are broader, and then they're simply much more profitable, and they really match our stronghold. Now we'll go one step deeper, and we'll also focus on customer with international needs. The reason is simple as well. They also really fit our strongholds, and they are even more profitable. When it comes to small corporates, we will continue to grow by scaling our platform District.
The second one is then, together with LC&I, as Birthe mentioned, we'll continue to invest in our digital capabilities on our One Corporate Bank District. This is to bring down cost, but also to improve customer experience and grow income with digital-supported cross-sales capabilities. Thirdly, on the advisory side, both the human and the digital advisory side, we will continue to improve. On sustainability, that increasingly get more and more important for our customers, of course, this is a good opportunity for us to capture the green transition. This we will not only do with advisory, but also with further development of products, but also partnerships. Let's deep dive on the first one. Why do we want to go for customers with international needs?
Well, they do not only fit our strongholds, but they generate twice the income size, and we already have slightly elevated market share in this area throughout our markets. We have a bit of a small advantage. Also compared to more domestic-tilted customers, they use 10% more products, and they generate almost 15% more ancillary income. Mid-corporate with advanced needs, they are profitable, but mid-corporates with advanced needs, they are even more profitable, and this is regardless of size. As you can see on the value levers here in the middle, when it comes to customer acquisition and increased cross sales, it is in these two segment that we will focus. To add to this, our small corporate side, and this is really a new pocket of excitement for us, because just three years ago, this segment was not profitable.
With our new fee structure, on top of the elevated interest rate levels that we have right now, and our future ability to continue to scale District, this segment will also drive income up and cost to serve down. Small corporates, they are an important enabler and feeder to the upper segments. We are committed to our customers during their entire life cycle. When it comes to geographies, all four countries for business customer are profitable. Sweden is attractive just giving the market size, and therefore, also the larger pool of customers with international needs. Also back to Berit, where she and Elsie and I will also focus on Sweden, we see some good synergies to do this together in Sweden.
Finland, we see really good opportunities short term, and that is basically mainly due to the competitive situation that we have over there right now. I just want to sum up this segment quite quickly here. We want to focus on the most profitable customers, those with advanced needs and international needs. Small corporates, we will scale digitally. We will do it in all four countries with a special focus on Sweden and on Finland. As you can see on the right-hand side of this page, by doing this, we'll be able to lift our income with just north of DKK 1 billion. This was the segmentation. Let's take a look at the One Corporate Bank and how that will drive profitability and drive growth. This page, I think you recognize. You feel at home.
Berit also talked about One Corporate Bank, but I think this is really worth repeating because this is a joint offering for all corporates in the bank. I would like to zoom in also on the digital side in the middle. Before I do that, I just wanted to explain why One Corporate digital platform is so important for us in Danske Bank. Well, as a customer grow and expand, they do it on one platform, they do it on District. They don't change platform when they grow out of being a mid-sized corporate residing in a business customer into being a large corporate into LC&I. They do it on one platform, they do it on District. The same goes when you, as a customer, grow from being only a domestic home market customer, and you grow into one of the other Nordic countries.
You do it on one platform, you do it on District, everything very efficient and convenient. This is highly important when investing for increased efficiency and reducing cost to serve. As an example, if we are going to add one API to our system, or if we are going to add one self-service to our system, we do it once, we do it for all countries, and we do it for all customers. Extremely important to drive profitability and growth, but also customer satisfaction. Now let me continue and then deep dive on what will keep us having this winning platform, and it's these three areas that also Berit touched upon. I wanted to do a little bit more of deep dive on them.
Improved efficiency, and as Berit said, this is really to invest in further end-to-end processes or digitize our end-to-end processes. Meaning, when a customer set up this cash pool, she will do it with no delay, and she will do it all at once. Secondly, by investing in increased integration, when a customer want to access their bank, Danske Bank, they do it from their platform of choice, and that could be District, our platform, or it could be their own ERP system. Thirdly, we want to invest in enhanced cross-sales, meaning when a customer have elevated action on our platform when it comes to international flows, this will trigger a lead. This lead will trigger one of our experts to reach out and advise on international expansion.
This leads me to the left-hand side of this page, where we will continue to leverage together with the LC&I, further product development, but also for us in BC, to leverage on the experts residing in LC&I, both on the product side, but also other experts. This, together with investments on our digital platform, will give us an annual growth of 5% of daily banking fees. As you remember, this is a joint effort together with LC&I and a common goal. Now you know where we want to go, you also know what we want to do with our digital platform, what will then tie this together? Well, that's advisory. That is leading advisory and sustainability capabilities, that leads me to the last deep dive on differentiating advisory.
As mentioned before, we have strong advisory, and this is also that we will continue to focus on and continue to build upon. When a customer then grow and expand, or if a customer want to invest in a new, let's say, green production site, they need expert advice, and we will be there for them to give that expert advice. That is really the foundation of the DNA that we are building this strategy on. If you look at the middle of this page on what we're going to focus on in the future on the advisory side, well, that is to execute on this further segmented segmentation and really attach also a relevant value proposition to the segmentation. With our digital-enabled service model, we will reduce cost. This combination will not only drive profitability, but it will also drive customer satisfaction.
By 2026, we want an increase of 15% of customers that are highly satisfied with our advisors. Also a really important part of our advisory, this really occupies more and more of our customers' agendas, that is sustainability. Here we already have a head start with really strong products on top of many of the league tables, that is we are strong in green lending and green bonds. Also, we have been training our advisor and expert for quite some years now. Just in January, we launched our Climate Action Plan. For the future, we will continue to invest in products.
As an example, the sustainability-linked loans that we now use a lot in LC&I among LC customers, we also want to use it more broadly for BC, especially the commercial real estate side. Then we will continue, of course, upskilling our advisory and experts, and then we're also going to enter new partnership. As an example, if you, as a customer, you need to know your starting point when it comes to CO2 emissions, that we will help our customer with by partnering up. That will also give us the opportunity to advise our customer in their transition and also finance their transition. This is hugely important to protect business, but also to capture new business. That's what the walk through of what we're going to do the coming years, and I just wanted to remind you what we want to do.
First, we will lift income by going with customers that are the most profitable when it comes to customer acquisition and increased cross sales. We will focus on mid corporates with advanced needs and international needs, and we will go with smaller corporates where we can obtain scale. Secondly, we will reduce cost, this will be done by investing in our digital capabilities. Just as an example, we will reduce the onboarding cost with up to 25% by 2026. Thirdly, we will keep on differentiating us and keep our winning position by supplementing the all digital model with a continuous focus on advisory and sustainability.
All in all, with the normalized interest rates level, also taking into account the upcoming regulatory capital requirements also coming our way, this strategy will drive our profitability towards 21% and our cost income levels to below 40. Thank you for listening. Now, a warm welcome, Christian Bornfeld, for personal customers.
Thank you, Johanna. Are you ready for the next one? Okay. First of all, my name is Christian Bornfeld. I head our Personal Customers business. I joined the bank a year ago, coming from... Well, after having worked outside of the Nordics for a couple of years on technology and innovation and banking. This turned out to be a great time, actually, to join the bank, both to help the team turn the commercial momentum, as I think you've already heard, but also to deliver on some of the big initiatives that we have ongoing, and last but not least, to set our direction towards 2026 and beyond.
It's not that often, maybe every three, five years in a company like ours, that you actually get to the luxury of taking a big step back, doing analysis, and deciding where are we going and how will we get there for the coming years. It's been great to be part of that, and I look forward to sharing some of the key conclusions that we've made on these points with you during the coming 20 minutes. I think you will see that we really have utilized this opportunity to become a more focused and a more personal bank going forward, and also delivering solid returns through the cycle. Let's start by talking a little bit about our starting point. We are, as the other business units, a Pan-Nordic business unit.
We are present in all four countries in the Nordics. We have a solid base of attractive clients or clients in attractive segments. However, our position does differ quite a bit across the different countries. On the one hand, you have Denmark and Finland, where we have a very solid position in the market, being clearly the number one in both retail and private banking in Denmark, and the third largest in Finland within retail banking. A strong, solid position. Compared to that, we have smaller market shares in both Sweden and Norway. On the other hand, in those countries, we have proven acquisition models. We've managed to build customer portfolios of homeowners and academics, and especially in Sweden, we have close historical ties between personal customers and business customers.
Clearly, these different positions that we have in the markets call out for what sort of commercial positioning do you want in these markets, and I'll certainly come back to that in just a second. Before I do so, let's just talk a little bit about our strongholds. Our strongholds and personal customers are, I would almost say, universal. At least they have been with us for quite some time. The first one is advisory. We continue to be recognized by our clients as being very strong in advisory, which is reflected in the scores that we receive after every meeting, but also more and more through external sites and comments like what we now receive on Trustpilot. The second stronghold for us is actually the societies that we operate in.
We are lucky, we operate in very digital societies, and we have an even more digital customer base in Danske Bank, reinforced by our award-winning mobile banking app. A great place to compete and evolve the bank. The third one here is actually also really important. We have powerful subsidiaries, we have strong partners that we work with every day. This allows us both to diversify our income base, it allows us to innovate, not within a product, but across products, and it allows us to provide a broad offering to our clients, which again, supports our desire to provide holistic advice and be relevant for our clients. Again, three very important strongholds that will continue to be an ingredient for success for us going forward.
The last three years of the bank's history has been tough, to be honest, it has hit the personal customers business probably more than anyone else, because we are so much in contact with the everyday person and society, Carsten mentioned that earlier. We have spent quite some time on remediation activities, that has caused a shift of attention, sometimes from customers and commercial focus. Luckily, over the last 12 months, we've made significant progress, as Carsten mentioned, we're making good progress also on the financial crime plan, step by step, we will be able to focus even more on customers and be able to look forwards rather than backwards. During the last years, the team has not stood still there have been great achievements in this area.
We have managed to stabilize the customer base in Denmark after it's been going gradually down for quite some time, and now we've lately started to see a net growth in our key segments. That is a very positive development and shows momentum, and also that we're regaining trust from this important client group. The next thing we've done is that we have streamlined and evolved our service model over the last years, and you can see that coming through in the number of people that we have in Personal Customers. Through digitalization, and frankly, also good cost discipline, we've been able to reduce the number of people working in Personal Customers, while at the same time increasing the share of employees that actually work with clients on a daily basis through advice. Still some strong developments despite a hard period.
The starting point, I would say today, is actually a lot better than it was just two years ago. There is so much more we can do. There is so much more potential in this business. As I said earlier, we've had the luxury now of really taking a step back and doing analysis the last, well, I would say nine months, and we have used that time wisely. We have done a thorough review of the business model across both retail and private banking. We've done this from an outside-in perspective. We've been out talking to more than 20,000 individuals across the Nordics to understand what do they need from a bank in the future. We've spoken to numerous experts, real experts, and self-proclaimed ones as well, I think.
Many people who are wise in the direction banking is going and also in broader trends happening across society. We've worked closely with our subsidiaries and partners, of course, we've done lots of data analysis on the client base we have already. This has given us a great starting point for designing where to play and how to win. Again, that relates back to the choices that you will see we've made in regards to the geographies where we will be active, and the customer segments that we will focus on going forward. Let's start by the choices we've made on the geographical footprint. It's important to say that this analysis, as I said, has been done top-down. We first looked at the structural profitability of the individual market.
We've looked at our starting point, our strongholds, and also our ability to invest during the coming years to compete in that market. This is where these conclusions come from. Denmark, probably not a big surprise. We are big in Denmark. We like our position here. We have a well-established client base, and we want to cement that further during the coming years. We want to continue to be a broad bank for a broad set of society in Denmark. Now, that being said, we will do that in a more targeted way, and I'll come back to that in just a second when we talk about how we focus even more on clients. Finland is a profitable business. This has been helped by, of course, the developments in the interest rate environment just the last year or so, but already today, Finland is a profitable business for us.
In addition to that, we see various client expectations evolving, and we see various market dynamics in Finland that again, mean that we see more opportunities also for us going forward. We will continue to be committed to Finland with focus on both retail and private clients, private banking clients with more advanced needs. In the private banking segment, we will be a little bit more selective, but a clear focus still to win in Finland. Sweden. Sweden is by far the largest market that we have in the Nordics when it comes to retail banking, and not least private banking.
It's also the market where we see the lowest market concentration. Within the segments we want to focus on, it's also the place where most clients actually change banks every year, giving us some opportunity to maneuver and also find a specific sliver that we want to focus on. What we've decided is that we want to refocus our Swedish business. The last years, we have been working closely with partners and with sometimes aggressive pricing to win homeowners and academics in Sweden. We will now shift to have a more broad perspective, win broader relationships with specific clients, namely upper retail clients, private banking clients, and especially also those with links to the business customers of Johanna. Business owners that also have a relationship with us.
We feel this speaks well to the position that we can see in the market, but also to the DNA of the organization. This is where Sweden as an organization comes from, and it's a place where we can leverage the synergies across the different business units. To make us even more comfortable with that, we have actually piloted a number of these concepts during the last months, and the results are promising, which gives us even more confidence that we can win with this recipe in Sweden. Lastly, Norway. You've already heard about Norway a couple of times in the presentation today. Well, let me first of all say, we have built actually a quite strong client portfolio in Norway over the last years, and if you look at our numbers, we've managed to grow that portfolio quite steeply.
We've done that again, through focus on homeowners and with, again, strong pricing towards academics. That leaves us today with a good customer portfolio there and actually some quite skilled employees as well to serve them. When we've worked through the numbers and done the analysis on what it requires to win in Norway, also in the longer term, in a sustainable way, the investments are too big and the time frames are too long to establish that. Based on a broader review and assessment of the investment opportunities we have across the group, we've decided we will not invest in the Norwegian personal customers business going forward.
As a consequence of that, we've decided to exit Personal Customers Norway, and we are in process of finding a solution for that, and as has been mentioned before, we will update you further with the first half results in end of July on how we're doing there. We have a plan or a plan is emerging. Now, it's important for me to also say that, of course, this is a process. It's a decision we've taken, and it's a process that will happen over the coming quarters, and therefore, we remain as committed as ever to serve our clients every day, and we are as committed as we've been until now, also to our employees in the Norwegian organization, for which this is, of course, a hard decision that they have reached today.
If you take a step back and look at these geographical footprint decisions we've made, I think they show that we have been relatively decisive. It does give us a basis for more focus. We can now work with three countries instead of four. We have a lower level of investment required to evolve the PC business, which also means lower execution risk. Finally, we can release capital in Norway over time, as we've already mentioned. Important choices on the geographical footprint. Let me now switch to our focus on customers. Again, on the customer side, we've used the extensive research that I mentioned before, being out, talking to individuals, talking to all the experts, doing the analysis. Based on that, we see a couple of things.
One is that if you look across the Nordics, actually, all of us, because we are all personal customers in this room, we have the same basic needs for banking. There's not a lot of difference, not across age groups, not across nationalities. As soon as we sort of start looking at the broader needs of these segments or of the customers, we see actually distinct differences. What we've seen is that especially three parameters are determining for that. One is natural, which is the size, complexity of your balance sheet as a household. The two others are the life stage you're in and the family composition you have, and especially the last one on family composition surprised us a little bit, but it is a very important determining factor. Why is that?
It's because it guides what you also see on this slide, the key life events and the broader needs related to those customers. We've used this insight to, first of all, develop what we call a segmentation engine, which defines nine specific segments for personal customers going forward, and actually below that, 23 specific subsegments, so a quite detailed model. The advantage of having this now is that it allows us to design value propositions that target these specific segments and become a better bank for each of them, because it's a different bank that's the right bank for each of them. The other thing it allows us to do is to focus our growth by selecting which of these segments within which we want to grow. Again, let me be clear, we will be a bank for everyone.
There will be a value proposition for every customer, but we've made conscious choices on which of these segments we want to see the growth going forward, based on the potential we see, but also our strongholds. That means we've made a clear decision to say we want to focus on clients with more advanced needs, so you can think this way in the segmentation model, and also customers who have a preference for holistic advice. Not necessarily the people who want to do everything themselves, people who appreciate a strong partner through their life. From the other observations we've seen through the analysis, you can see some examples here on the right-hand side. We found some other insights that we know we need to incorporate in the way we serve our clients going forward in personal customers. There are five here.
I'll just touch briefly on two of them. One is actually bullet number two up here, is that the need for advice and assistance changes a lot over time. As you can probably appreciate, in Personal Customers, we have advanced private banking clients and family offices who we talk to several times a day, and we have clients that we probably need to talk to every three, five, or even 10 years in the future. There's a big variability in when we need to talk to clients. That needs to be incorporated in our model going forward. We need to be able to observe and predict when clients need us, and we need to be available as soon as the need arises, something that we need to ensure is there.
The other one I wanted to highlight is number four on this list, is that many of the needs, and you see the example here from on the slide on the needs here to address. Many of these cannot be addressed with just conventional banking products. We do need to look broader. This is both interesting from an income point of view, but it's also a necessity just to be relevant in the future within the personal customer space. Here you can think about traditional extensions like legal advice, insurance, which we already do, but we can do a lot more, but also emerging needs that we see coming out from our customers at the moment, especially in areas like health and well-being, where again, we have strong capabilities in Danica today that we can utilize to address this need much better.
How to develop such a personalized model without adding too much cost and complexity? We think we found a recipe for that. The recipe, in a very simple way, there is, of course, more detail behind this, comes in combining two complementary elements. On the one hand side, that's what you can see on the left hand side here, a proactive and adaptable engagement model. How to engage with clients. On the right hand side, a broad but configurable offering. Let me just add a couple words to each of them. On the engagement model side, we need to be proactive. It needs to be a proactive engagement model.
We need to, based on data, be able to see key life events, but also new financial opportunities emerging for the client and reach out to them proactively with an aim to give them the best service, but also actually to give them peace of mind, because many times there will not be anything they need to be concerned about, and they can go on and live a happy life with their families. Proactivity is a key element. The next thing we need to make sure is that we have an engagement model that reflects the preferences we see across the Nordics, and that means a very strong mobile offering. I said before, we have a good starting point here, but again, we can do so much more.
We have said that we want our mobile banking app going forward to be the digital front door to the bank. Of course, access to daily banking needs, but also to insights through holistic overviews and also instant access to assistance and advice when the clients need it. This digital front door will also be the access point for what we will continue to have as a differentiator, which is our expertise and our empathy, which at the end of the day, can only be delivered by humans. From that point of view, we will still have advisors standing by, ready to talk to people when they need it, and we will still have relationship managers for very specific segments.
This model will allow us to be more available to clients exactly when they need us, but also to give us more interactions with clients than what we've had until now. All of this while also being more efficient. This model will, of course, use more chatbots and AI, but it will also drive much more efficiency into meetings. You saw the trend that we're on, but we already have quite mature ideas on how to provide better tools to our clients, but also to our advisors to make sure that we can prepare, conduct, and follow up on meetings in a completely different way going forward. That's the engagement model. On the other side, we had this offering.
As I mentioned before, we've done the segmentation, we've developed value propositions for each of the segments, including what product needs that we'll have in the future. There are a couple of our insights come out of that. One is, we have way too many banking products already, or we have clearly enough. That is not where we need to develop a lot more. Actually, where we have the biggest gaps in this, are in areas where our subsidiaries and our partners can help us to provide these broader offerings to be relevant in areas like homeownership, which is also our key play when it comes to things like sustainability, but also in areas like health and safety, as I mentioned before.
Overall, a good sort of combination of these two, we believe, is sort of the magic for the future. Maybe just worth saying as well on the configurable offering side, that, of course, just providing a lot of products, we tried that as well. That's like stepping into a supermarket and just looking at shelves. That is not a personal bank, in our belief. Therefore, we have also worked on defining base offerings and add-ons for every segment to make it easy for the customer to choose the right thing, and probably also build a slightly broader relationship with us for the future. All of this, of course, sounds logical, I hope, but sort of logical. Why are we not already doing this, and why are other banks not already doing this today?
Now, I can say from my own experience, also working with other banks, it's not that easy. This is not how most banks were set up. Many of them were set up by products or hard-coded the way that they want to serve clients, typically with a relationship manager and advisor sitting at the center of the universe. This is recalibrating, rewiring a bank, which can be hard, especially if you have complexity that has built up over time. Now, the other thing that this requires is strong digital and data capabilities, which Frans will talk more about in just a second. Fortunately, we actually have quite a lot of those elements already in the bank, and we are actually doing pretty well there. We need to do more. Actually, you've heard me say that a couple of times now.
We have identified about 200 specific areas where we believe we need to evolve and improve in order to deliver this sort of experience to our customers in the future. Let me just talk about how we will make that happen. Of course, developing this personal bank, this vision that we've created, requires investments. We also need to deliver this across three countries with slightly different commercial focus and with local integrations, adaptations to do that. At the same time, the needs are quite similar across the Nordics.
One of the things we've seen also working with our own teams, is that when you start putting people into a room, they actually say, "This is exactly what I need in Finland," or, "This is exactly what I also need in Sweden." The commonality is actually bigger than you think, and therefore, the reuse across is still quite strong. It requires very strong execution discipline, and that's also why most banks have not been able to do this. We have a secret weapon, or an important point here is our common platform. This is something that most other banks don't have. It allows us to develop once and to deploy into all the countries with a marginal additional investments of 10%-20%.
This is one of the key assumptions and basis for how we can invest and get impact in the way I will show you later on. It also allows us to, from a personal customer point of view, get quick access to the investments that we're doing sharedly in our data platform, AI, cloud capabilities. Again, something that Frans will talk about. To make this happen, we've built a comprehensive plan, which this is highlighted at a very high level here on the left-hand side of your slide, which covers two types of investments. One is digital investments. Of course, a lot of this is digital and needs to be powered by digital and data, but also commercial investments. We will also invest in our people, in the expertise that we need to have.
We'll invest in marketing, we'll invest in our partnerships going forward to make this model work. On the digital side, I want to emphasize we're sequencing our investments, and we're doing that for two reasons. One, is to make sure we get the optimal value out of our investments, and that, for us, means investing first in Denmark, then rolling into Finland, and then into Sweden. The other advantage of sequencing is that it keeps us disciplined and loyal towards our common platform. We avoid creating fragmentation or divergence from the common solution by having a forceful sequencing. Overall, a strong plan to evolve PC going forward. Let's quickly look at the financials coming out of this.
We have defined a number of strategic initiatives, which I've sort of summarized during the last couple of slides. They financially come back to our numbers along these three key value drivers. One is being more efficient in our relationships, so being even more efficient in the way we serve clients, even though we'll be more relevant and be more in contact with them. The second one is to broaden our relationships with them based on the new value propositions. The third one is to develop new client relationships. What you should take away from this is also the percentages here. You will see that 80% of the value we create from the strategic initiatives comes from our existing customer base, so doing more with them and being more efficient.
Only 20% of our value drivers are related to developing new client relationships. That should give you, at least it gives me, more comfort in our ability to execute this plan. Finally, when we turn this into financials, obviously, during the coming years, we will see a good development in our cost-to-income ratio in Personal Customers. This is driven by, of course, higher income from the normalized interest rate environment, which we've already touched on. Its impact from the strategic investments I just talked about as well. From that point of view, the cost-to-income ratio of below 50 is a clear commitment. On this side, it will also drive a increased ROAC for the PC business, which will make PC a strong contributor to group ROE in the future. Overall, a solid plan with strong implications for our profitability going forward.
Let me here at the end, just summarize very quickly. We've done a very thorough review of the PC business. That means both retail and private banking, to set ourselves up for success for the future. We've done that based on five, and we've taken out five key elements of that. One is we'll be a lot more focused personal customers business unit going forward. You've seen that from the choices we've made on the geographical footprint. You'll also see that from how we focus on clients going forward. We'll be a much more personal bank. People, our customers, will feel us a lot more in the right way in the future, based on the analysis and the segmentation and the value propositions I mentioned before. We'll be a lot more proactive bank.
We will be there when our clients need us. This will be essential to be competitive in the future. We'll be much more digital. We will have your front door in your pocket going forward when you think about personal customers. Finally, we will be more holistic. We will provide holistic advice based on a broad offering, developed and delivered together with partners and subsidiaries. All of this on a common platform, delivered with very clearly disciplined, sequenced evolution plans, investment plans, funded by the efficiency gains we give, that we also deliver through this plan. Overall, future-proofing personal customers while delivering solid financial returns. Thank you all for your attention, and I will now hand it over to my good friend, Frans.
Thank you so much, Christian. Good morning, everyone here in Copenhagen, and good morning also on the live stream. My name is Frans Woelders. Let me introduce myself a little bit and give you my background. I have a technology background, and I have started my career in technology. 25 years ago, I moved into banking, and I covered in all of my positions the whole value chain in banking. I've been running large-scale operations, I've been heading IT as a CIO. I've been running a retail business as a CEO, being Chief Digital Officer, before I moved to Danske Bank in 2020 now, a bit more than three years ago as a COO.
In this role, I'm responsible for technology, for our business operations, for procurement, and for premises. Now, you've heard all of my colleagues talked about the really importance of digital and the role digital plays in their subsequent business strategies. Let me bring you to life and consolidate what we're going to do in digital and what we're going to do in technology and how we are driving business outcomes. As one thing is key is, we're not doing technology for technology, we're doing technology to drive business outcomes and for the benefit of our customers. Before I go there, let me share with you the great starting point, the great position we're starting from. You also heard my colleagues talk about it as well.
This is truly a unique starting point. It's a unique asset that we have. We have a single platform, a single instance of a single platform across all the markets that we operate in and across all of our customer segments. That means from retail customers up to private banking customers, but also from sole traders up to large corporates. They're all being served from a single platform. That means seamless scaling up and potentially down, preferably up, throughout this platform without any further changes. We have an award-winning mobile app, the front door, as you heard Christian say, to all of our services. In business customers, we have another very big stronghold, which is our District platform, that is award-winning, when it comes down to cash management solutions, across the Nordic markets.
It's a great position to start from, also from how our customers are rewarding us here. We're able to service customers at scale. We're processing over 1 billion card transactions, more than 37 million logins for our customers every month. We're really able to run this operation at scale. It's trusted, it's reliable, and now we've also largely API-enabled this platform as well. This is all a good position to start from, but we've also worked on this over the last couple of years, and let me share with you the results that has given us and what we've done over the last couple of years.
On the left-hand side of this slide, you see that we have been able to bring our technology run cost, our infrastructure cost down with 6%. We've also increased our investments with 15% over the last couple of years, and we've been increasing our productivity in technology with 15%. Reduction in infrastructure, mainly by using making better use of the infrastructure that we already have on our private cloud, but also starting the journey onto public cloud and into SaaS, Software as a Service, solutions as well. I will be definitely coming back to that because that is something that we will embark on further going forward.
As these costs are driving down, basically you want to spend as little money on that and investments as possible, because what you want to do is invest and invest in the future. Again, we have been increasing our investments over the past couple of years and invest in digital solutions and in efficiency of the bank, of the bank overall. That has led to more releases into production. Basically, that is a measure, right? How you can, how you can measure how efficient you are as an organization. What is it actually that on solutions you are able to bring to customers with an up to as 32%.
An important thing here is, at the bottom of this slide, I'll come back to that, is that we have introduced agile at scale across the whole of the organization. Let me give you a couple of examples in those three areas of what we've done. An example of reducing our cost in infrastructure and in run the bank is from our finance in our internal finance processes, where we have moved applications from mainframe into private cloud, and subsequently, when public cloud providers are definitely on a journey and now reliable and safe and secure, also moved applications into public cloud.
It has allowed us, because it has lower maintenance costs, it has allowed us to move in more investments into strategic change in this area with up to 53%, and it also has reduced our costs in this area with 19%. An example of increasing investment, and that we're really focusing these investments towards what our customers are requiring. Johanna has already talked about District and the importance of business customers for our business. What we've recently opened up for our customers is what we call Marketplace. You could call that the Danske Bank App Store, where customers can pick and choose the products that they require, but also partner products.
As an example, we have a partnership with Axeptia, a fintech for credit solutions and liquidity improvement for our customers. Basically, it's a platform. It's a Marketplace where it's both our products on offering as well as our partners. That is a true screenshot, but difficult to read, I think, from this distance. A third example, and I already mentioned that, is the improvement in productivity. We now have almost 4,000 of our colleagues working in multifunctional team, both from business and from technology, in over 350 teams across the bank.
This is really about integrating business and technology, and I think that is a really important point because basically, this is our colleagues and my colleagues working all together to the right outcome. It's not what we had in the past is: "Well, Frans, here's what we want. Throw it over the fence, and please do something good with this." No, these are integrated plans and executed in multifunctional teams. This is a bit looking backward and showing you some of the proof points in the past. Now, what are we going to do next? What is our plan for the future?
I'm going through three different angles to this: digital, which I consider everything that touches customers, data and AI, and the third is technology. Basically, if you open up the hood, what do you see inside, and where are we investing in? In terms of digital engagement, and you heard my colleagues talk about this, we've already have a leading digital solution in mobile banking and District, but we want to continue to have one also towards 2026. That means continued investments in that area. What we're gonna build is a single, integrated channel across those different customer segments to make sure there's a consistent customer experience, but also that the underlying technology is the same, and it means lower maintenance costs.
I think that is most important for you to remember in this space. Of course, this is also serving the segmentation model that Christian was talking about and the digital engagement that we are building out for our customers. Obviously, this also means a further expansion of self-service capabilities, so that basically, we get the best out of our expert advisors, and they spend their time in the best possible and value-add way. Secondly, integrated finance, what we call integrated finance. We already offer open banking to our customers. I just mentioned to you examples of partnership offerings that we do as well.
The next phase in this is increasing the level of partnership offerings, making sure that we have the right offer in place for the life events, for personal customers or important events in the life of businesses, and that we are there for them at the right moment. That also, we think is really important, is that we are able to integrate our platform with our customers' platforms. One is, they will always have the option to access our products through, for instance, the District channel. If they do want that, and there is definitely a request for that, is integrate our platforms through premium and safe APIs directly into their ERP systems.
We have already have the basis for that with all of the APIs that we have developed so far. I'll come back to that a little bit more. Towards 2026, on the right-hand side of this slide, continuing leading digital solutions, that's one, and the second is extended partner offerings and integration with clients. What we need for that as well, really important, you've heard it my colleagues say as well a couple of times, is data, and we sit on a lot of data as a bank, but then it's also about utilization of that data. Where we want to use this data is to provide better advice to our customers, and that is either through advisors, and so making the data available to our advisors, but also straight to customers through our digital channels.
We also require that the data to do the proper segmentation, as you heard Christian talk about, right? It's really important that based on the data, we have a full understanding of our customers, so we can use it in order to segment. What we need for that, because every bank sits on a lot of data, but it is now making the data available. That's why an important piece of our investments will go to a new, newly developed, data platform based on public cloud. Why would you want to do that on a public cloud?
Why don't you want to do that yourself? It's. One of the key importance here is that if you look at what public cloud providers are providing these days, the billions of EUR, the hundreds of billions of EUR that they're able to invest in technology, even though we're a sizable bank, we can never, of course, afford to put that much that amount of money into our infrastructure. An advantage of that is if you think just what happened over the past couple of months in terms of the developments in AI, they have been massive, right?
We all think that generative AI and AI is going to change our lives, is going to change the world, and also we think it's going to change banking as well to the good, when it comes down to productivity, and to automation and further digitalization. Coming back to the public cloud point here, is that public cloud providers will provide AI capability as part of the package. It's not something that we need to develop, but we can use it once we have the right set up on public cloud. Targets for 26 is proactive, targeted, digital advice and faster time to insights because the data is readily available in the right way.
Digital data, next element is really kind of looking under the hood, and I've revealed a little bit of that already, but what are we going to do on technology? I said we have largely API'd, API-enabled our platform already. We have more than 240 APIs up and running, and we expect that we require about 300, which is what we expect to reach at the end of this year, to completely open up our core banking, our core banking platform. Next step is, and we've embarked on that already, but we created the foundation for that, is then start moving applications from our on-premise to public cloud and to software-as-a-service solutions. You could also call that the latter, you could also call buy over build.
Don't do everything ourselves, but look at what is the best of breed in the market and implement that. In that way, we will infuse this platform that we talked about, my colleagues talked about, and that is the great basis. We will infuse that platform with the latest with the latest technology. Second on this slide is, you know, one is, you could argue, a non-negotiable. We have doubled the investments in security over the past three years, and we will continue to increase our investments into this space to keep our customers and the bank safe. We will also introduce zero trust principles for that. Don't trust, but verify in every transaction, in every user, in every customer.
The last thing on this slide, really important, of course, this is about improvement of efficiency. You've heard Stephan talking about that as well. Technology and services, as the organization is called, that I'm leading, is really key to bringing those efficiencies to the bank and reducing. One is technology run costs and also increasing the productivity of our developers as well. 20% up in further productivity increase, where we actually think with the latest developments on AI, we're even on the low side here. A 15% reduction of technology run cost towards 2026.
We have already a competitive setup with near and offshoring locations, and we will also be, towards the future, be using more technology partnerships in order to also execute on our plans over the next couple of years. We have robots running, we've almost have 250 robots running in our operation space, and we will definitely continue on that road and make those robots even more intelligent at what they do. I'll probably leave it with this on this slide, and then I'll bring you to the next. One is summarize where we're going to invest and what we're going to invest. In summary, customer engagement platform, integrated customer channels, continue to do customer journey digitalization, and invest in a One Corporate Bank.
That is investments straight going into business strategies. In order to do so, we need to do a couple of things, the technology foundation that I just mentioned. We're gonna invest in public cloud, we're gonna reduce the legacy that we have, some of, like every bank of our age, size, and history. We continue to invest in security, as said, and we will significantly increase our investments in data and analytics. Looking at the investments here on the right-hand side of the slide, and it has been shown by Stephan already, but let me give you a little bit more flavor to this. We're currently investing about DKK 3 billion a year in technology into digital, which we will increase to DKK 4 billion.
We partly do that by the savings. I mentioned to you one of the savings that we are expecting in terms of cost reduction and reinvest that in further investments. What it also will bring is that currently, we have about 35% of all of our investments in technology available for strategic change, as we call it, because you also need to maintain systems, do compliance and all of that. We expect that 35% to then increase to 60%, becoming available by 2026 for strategic change.
Summarizing: I hope, I think, we've made clear what a great position we're starting from with the single platform, the single instance platform across all of our markets and all of our segments, which is a truly unique setup and a competitive advantage. The second is, we have already invested, we have continued to invest over the past couple of years in digital and technology, but now with the additional investments that we're going to do, we're going to accelerate even that. Last but not least, I also think, hope and think, that I made clear that we're investing in technology and digital for the benefit of our businesses, and driving truly business outcomes, business growth, but also profitability due to a higher efficiency. On that note, I'm gonna hand over to you, Carsten, and then after that, go into Q&A. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Frans. I think we're gonna go straight into to Q&As. We're running a little behind time, but we hope that this gave you a good feel from each of the business units, from technology and services, on how we will support the plan to get to our 13% return on equity for 2026. I'm really gonna invite the presenters up here, and then I think we'll just get some chairs up and stuff like that. Have a coffee, and we should start the Q&A in a minute or so.
While we are waiting for the last guests to be seated, let me just repeat the procedure around the questions. It is same procedure as last time, meaning that if you are sitting here in the, in the room and you have a question, please raise your hand, and we will bring a microphone. For those of you who participate online, please ask your question using the chat function. I think we can kick off. We had one question actually coming online from the last round of questions that we were not able to take. That is from Sofie Peterzens at JP Morgan. Sofie is asking whether there is any financial targets pre 2026. We see 2023 and 2026 targets. Nothing to bridge in between. Any color on revenues and cost development in 2024 and 2025 is much appreciated.
Yeah, I'll take that one quickly. As I mentioned before, I think on ROE, you can apply a somewhat more or less straight line trajectory. We need to keep a little bit in mind that 2024, given the interest rate expectation, might not be a strong improvement, but in general, more straight line and no hockey stick.
I think it's fair to say that 2024 guidance and outlook will come as part of our year-end results, as is always the case.
Okay, thank you very much. We have a question from Karsten Søndermølle.
Yes. One of the subjects that you haven't given much focus today is on compliance costs in the broader sense. That's a pity, I think, because we are at that time where the old plan were promising a big decrease. My question is, are you still committed to this decrease, and how is the status on automatization, et cetera?
Yep. Thanks, Carsten. You're right, we didn't spend that much time on it, but it's in the, in the bridges. That's there just to confirm that we're absolutely still committed to normalizing our financial crime costs. The biggest part of the financial crime and compliance costs sits within the first line compliance organization, where you may remember, some of you, that we committed to get the cost from DKK 2.3 billion at the top, down to DKK 1.5 billion by 2025. There may be some inflation headwinds to that, but the trajectory and the goal is to get the cost normalized at those levels. Again, notwithstanding slightly higher compliance inflation rates.
The costs are coming down in line with both fixing a lot of the legacy issues, but absolutely also by automating our KYC processes, our due diligence processes, how we look at transactional monitoring, improving false positive ratios and so forth. That's absolutely a commitment, and we feel good about the traction.
Thank you so much, Karsten. I have a couple of names here that have raised their hands. I think the first one is Jakob Brink.
Thank you. First question on Norway again. Could you maybe be a bit more specific about the profit and capital impacts from exiting or selling? Let's just say it's sold at book value. What's the risk-weighted assets that are tied up, and what's the profit you're making in Q1, for example?
I can certainly give you. I mean, the RWAs are about, I think, 48, 50 billion, and the capital is about DKK 6 billion. I'm not sure we go into the details on the profitability.
No, given the, given the processes going on, we would shy a little bit away from giving that detailed information. As we said, we're gonna update you on Q2. Again, keep in mind, reclassifying the assets into under IFRS means that we need to book them at the lowest possible value.
Just to make clear, the DKK 6 billion, is that then assuming, or is that then including the 5 percentage points is in the risk buffer, or is that at current? Okay.
No, that would be just for that business.
Okay.
You're right, there could be opportunity in terms of different approach to the way the systemic risk buffer impacts the rest of the Norwegian business, so to speak.
Just last on Norway, even though you don't want to give a profit number, is it fair to assume then, I guess it must have been sort of mid-single digits return on capital after tax?
It's fair to assume it would have been in the absolute lower range of profitability, yes.
Okay. Just final question. On the slides of Large Corporate and Business Banking, I think you have pooled together the impact from higher loan losses or normalized loan losses and capital. I've noticed, especially in Large Corporate, I think it was a 9 percentage points or so reduction in the return due to that other bucket. Is that because you're pushing a lot of capital from personal banking into, or from group, into LC&I and business banking, and why?
Yeah, I mean, most of you can go into the details, Stephan, but I mean, most of the gray box is to show the allocation of the Basel 3.1 hit, or whatever you wanna call it, that sits centrally out into the businesses. On top of that, there's also tax. Also, why the LC&I business has a bigger gray box is because you also have a substantial goodwill component. The goodwill from our Sampo purchase , which all of it sits in, LC&I. I'm not sure we give the number on the goodwill, but.
No. Yeah, but it's important to note, I think that's what we said earlier, we are holding these buffers on group level, we wanna make sure that we push them now into the segments to make sure that also pricing and other components of the business get the right inputs, in their models.
Just last follow-up on that, are you then changing the return targets for these businesses, i.e., to lower? Will they have to go out and raise prices significantly to achieve the same?
No, I mean, The return plans that we have here and the hurdle rates that we have here is, in effect, continuing to be competitive, thinking about the business, the way that the businesses have outlined. Clearly, we're always gonna look at how we can reprice more smartly, how we can look at capital allocation, how we can optimize capital, which is also what we've done in the last couple of years. The returns are the returns that we believe we can deliver by continuing to do what we're doing, including with the different sort of tweaks and priorities that we've laid out today.
Thank you.
Okay. Thank you for your questions, Jakob. I saw a raised hand from the table behind Jakob.
Thank you. Håkon Astrup from DNB Markets. Just to follow up on Norway, do you see potential negative effects of what's left of the Norwegian business from exiting personal customers? I was thinking, for instance, on the recruiting side or on customer acquisitions in the business area.
I probably, because I think we don't believe that there is any impact on our LC&I franchise. The business banking business is the most obvious one where you could question, you know, are there impacts there? I think, Johanna, maybe you can speak to that part.
No, we of course, we've looked into it extensively in this work, but the business customer segment in Norway is a quite solid, standalone business on the business customer side. Of course, we could have some, common, customers, business owners, that is also personal customers, but it's very well contained. In our strategy, when it comes to, growing together with customers with advanced needs and international needs, Norway's a really important market for us in also that, context. It stands alone, solidly.
Not having a private banking franchise in Norway will not, say, impact your growth potential there?
No, that is not the way that we see it on the upper segment, the customers with the most advanced needs and international needs.
I think it's also important to remember, we are historically a business corporate and institutional bank in Norway, right? That's the legacy, that's what we've been good at. We've shown that we can grow with our customers being focused on that. As Johanna also said, therefore, we don't see a material impact. You also mentioned on talent, I think we'll continue to be an attractive employer in the business and LC&I space. I think it's by and large, different talents that we're looking at in that part of the business. We feel good about our ability to hire the best and brightest in those business areas.
Thank you.
Okay, thank you so much for your question, Håkon. We have a couple of questions coming in, virtually, but before we take them, I saw Asbjørn Mørk, raise his hand before. Asbjørn, please go ahead.
Thank you. A couple of questions from my side. You mentioned Norway, we should expect a solution for Norway, a news connection with the Q2. There was one business you did not mention today, Northern Ireland. What should we expect there? To what degree are your financial targets depending on something there? Do they also have profitability targets, towards 2026?
We feel good about our Northern Ireland business. It's the biggest bank in Northern Ireland. It has strong scale. It's number one on customer satisfaction, both in retail and commercial banking. It's long deposits, and with the changes we've seen in interest rates, it's a very robust business model with strong profitability. We haven't focused on it today. Clearly, it's not part of a focused Nordic strategy, but we continue to manage the bank well, and in fact, we like what we're seeing in terms of profitability, and certainly, Northern Ireland is incorporated in the overall targets that we've spoken to you about today.
All right. if I may, to Stephan Engels, on the profitability targets, given the capital release potentially from Norway, given the other moving parts we will have on capital distribution, I'm just a little bit uncertain what we should actually use to calculate going forward. Is that the DKK 170 billion of equity by 2026 that you will deliver the 13% on, or is it also a moving parameter going forward?
No, the assumption is, the 13% on DKK 170 billion, and that includes, the distributions, including the Norway component that we have talked about. We are starting this year more like, call it DKK 162-ish, DKK 164-ish, so you can do a little bit of an averaging out over the year, but DKK 170 is the number for 2026.
All right, final question from my side. Three years ago, you talked a lot about the better ways of working, which should impact 5,000 people. There was a lot of redundancies or potential redundancy or efficiency gains, at least. I guess some of the things you mentioned today, Frans, is a result of that, could you give us a little bit of an update on what we should expect going forward? Is there more to come from that?
Yeah, thank you for the question. Indeed, I refer to that on one of the slides, that what we've seen arriving from that is a 17% higher productivity and increased efficiency by these 350 teams working together. We still think because the maturity of a model like that, and we implemented it early 21, it takes some years to further mature, but it is also a curve that is going like this, right? It will continue to be one of our cornerstones in terms of our delivery and efficient delivery. I think we've seen most of the efficiency coming from that from that model. It is working as intended. I hope I also made that made that clear.
All right. Thank you.
Okay, thank you so much. Let's move to some of the questions that we have got online. Let's start with Riccardo Rovere from Mediobanca. Riccardo.
Thanks.
Okay, good. Please, state your question.
Yeah, thanks for taking my question. Thanks. A couple, if I may. The first one is on credit losses, the 8 basis points. Just wanted to be sure that in the 8 basis points, you're assuming the use of the Post-Model Adjustments, so technically, the DKK 6 billion or more than DKK 6 billion, so technically, it would be more than 8 basis points. The second question I have is just to be sure that all the numbers that we see, cost and revenues in 2026, they do exclude the contribution from personal banking in Norway, from retail operations in Norway. Just want to be sure about that.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Riccardo, yep, we can confirm the latter, and the 8 basis points should really be seen as a through-the-cycle loan loss rate. We have a substantial amount of Post-Model Adjustments within our allowance today. You know, you would expect Post-Model Adjustments to be used in case of severe stress, and then you would imagine that you would replenish Post-Model Adjustments over time, in good times. I think I would look at the 8 basis points of loan loss risk, again, as a through-the-cycle, including sort of an allowance account. That's roughly where it is today, including continuing to have a fair amount of Post-Model Adjustments.
Okay. Carsten, sorry, are you basically saying that the Post-Model Adjustments will continue to be part of the furniture forever?
I would assume that you would always have a level of Post-Model Adjustments. I think that's very common across banking, as we all know that models cannot include all risks. Clearly, now, Post-Model Adjustments are probably at slightly higher than they would perhaps be in times where you're in a stress, because the Post-Model Adjustments that we're looking at now are of course, in place because we have significant uncertainty. I'm not saying that you would have the same level of Post-Model Adjustments, but I would imagine that you would always have a level of Post-Model Adjustment, and that's why I guide to 8 basis point loan loss rate is a fair assumption through the cycle with our risk profile.
That's clear. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Okay, thank you. Let's have the next question coming from, Madhav from, JP Morgan. Can you hear us?
Yeah. Hi. Hi, Madhav from JP Morgan. Thank you for taking my question. I have a couple. First, if there are going to be any goodwill write-downs before 2026, given that you have DKK 6.1 billion of intangibles? Second, on personal customers, particularly slide 56, there is no mention of pensioners there, are you not focusing on pensioners? I mean, is that not a profitable customer segment for you?
Why don't we?
On that piece.
Thanks for that, Madhav. Why don't you do the goodwill piece, and Christian, you do the insurance question?
The goodwill piece is relatively simple. We do not expect any goodwill write-offs for the planning period.
In regards to the segmentation model that you refer to, absolutely, retirees are an interesting segment for us, for better or worse, or luckily for us, I guess in these societies, we live longer and longer, and there is an active, also economic, situation as you sort of move out of your working life into the next phase of your career. We see more and more of sort of intergenerational, also interesting financial opportunities that we can address. Certainly those segments are also core for us. I would also say we have a good exposure to those segments already today, so.
Okay, thank you so much.
Madhav, thank you.
The next one on my list, is, I think it was ABG. Yes, please go ahead.
Hey, Jan Erik Gjerland from ABG. Just a couple of questions from my side as well. The first one is on the LC&I. You had some illiquid asset and collateral and product financing in lending needs you wanted to do. How should we think about then, margin versus loan losses in such lending book? That was my first question.
Yes, thank you for the question. What we are striving towards is to be able to support our Nordic institutions, and they are moving into more illiquid and alternative investments with a strong focus on sustainability. That will mean that we will also increase our exposure on project finance and leverage finance. You could also see on the bridge that will demand some increase in our capital consumption, but we are also investing further in our originate-to-distribute. How we want to measure our success here is following our fee income. We definitely don't intend to keep it on our books, because exactly as you allude to, the profitability to keep it on the books is not where we would like it to be. This is more to just get other business going, as I also showed on the presentation.
Okay, very clear. Thank you. On the cost side, it seems like all business units have a uptick on the cost or investment in cost, while you on the group level, have a downtick on cost. Of course, the IT had some downtick. Could you shed some more light to the question that question I also have on the cost side, just so we understand how we actually should bring the cost just to DKK 26 billion by 2026, since I still have some questions there.
I think just to recap very briefly on the main building blocks in the cost slide, there's the remediation cost going out, there's FCRP normalizing, and there is additional cost initiatives that will drive costs down. The majority of those will have its impact in PC, which is what you have seen in Christian's part, and in TNS, which is Frans' part, and which, as a business segment, is not a segment, but rather a headquarter, I think most of you call it, whether it's headquarter or.
Perfect. Thank you. Just on the Norwegian process, could you say something about this is one bidding process or it's a bidding process? Is it one buyer, or how should you read that sort of conclusion, 21st of July?
No, I think you should read it as that we're far progressed in looking at options. This is a piece of work that we've been looking at for a while, together with the rest of the strategy work. I'm not gonna promise that we have a final conclusion by the J uly 21st, but that we'll give an update on the J uly 21st on where we are. I'm not gonna go into more detail on the rest of your question.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you so much. I think I saw a raised hand in the back of the room before. We have Jacob Kruse from Autonomous, please.
Hi, thank you. Just a couple of questions. First, on the cost, you still have a very big group functions divisions, which hasn't really been covered, which is about half of your staff base at the moment. Is that being addressed? Could you just outline a little bit what those staff are in terms of AML, IT, et cetera? My second question was just on the NII bridge between today and 2026.
If I get you correctly, you have the 150 plus 150 billion of strategic balance sheet items, which will reprice by about 2%, roughly DKK 6 billion of NII gains from that. You have the loan growth of 2%-3%, which I guess is another DKK 1 billion-DKK 2 billion. Is the balance here, how big is the kind of headwind that you're building in, and what is it relative to? I just have. That part seems a little bit opaque to me. Thank you.
Yeah. Should I
Why don't you start with NII piece?
With NII piece. Again, I think the first remark would be, I wouldn't expect that the full DKK 300 billion that you rightfully mentioned will reprice completely to 2%, because the average duration is three, so there is some in three. To completely reprice the portfolio will probably take two years more. I would shave a little bit off your 0%-2% assumption. That's to begin with. Then we are now getting back into this, how do I explain a dynamic income development by applying partly static assumptions?
Simply speaking, the uplift from the DKK 300 billion, call it more at 1.5, rather than probably two, will compensate for the peak that you see on the short-term rates that will drive and that would compress deposit margins, probably starting 2024. That is the main building blocks. Headquarters, should you?
Does that answer net interest income? On the head office cost. The head office costs, of course, include both technology and services, as well as the financial crime piece, as well as substantial part of the remediation costs. I think we talked about roughly DKK 1.1 billion of remediation costs this year. We've spoken about the DKK 2.3 billion-DKK 1.5 billion directionally on financial crime. We've spoken about roughly DKK 1 billion of operational efficiencies, of which large parts of that will also be found within that area. That's how you should look at the moving parts. If I would expect the staffing number could to come down?
Yeah, you should expect that a significant amount of these costs are linked to FTEs, both on remediation as well as on financial crime. Also, as you've seen, for example, the example that Christian gave, that as we automate and digitize, you will also see FTE improvements over time as we free up time and capacity, customer self-service more, and so forth.
I would add that in addition to the more idiosyncratic matters that we were talking about with remediation and FCRP, TNS obviously is also part of this headquarter position. I think you saw quite some of Frans's clear ideas on how this is gonna progress going forward.
Okay, thank you so much, Jacob, for the questions, and let's jump to a question coming in online. Martin Birk from SEB, can you hear us, Jacob? Oh, sorry, Martin?
Yeah. Yes, I certainly can.
Okay.
A question-
Please go ahead.
On Swedish... Can you hear me?
Yes. Loud and clear.
Perfect. A question on Swedish personal customers. I assume this also means a canceling of the TCO and the Saco partnerships. What are you guys gonna do with the sort of non-premium personal bank that will be left in Sweden? That would be my first question.
Okay. Shall I take that?
Yeah. Thanks, Martin. Christian.
You mentioned two of our important partners on the acquisition side in Sweden, TCO and Saco. We believe that these partnerships can still serve us well, and especially on the Saco side, I think that's aligns pretty well up with the client segments that we're also aiming for going forward on the retail side. We will continue to work with these partners and to develop those partnerships. Will they need to be adjusted in some ways? Likely they will over the coming year as we refocus the business in Sweden. This is something that we are initiating with our partners during the coming period.
There has to be sort of customers also outside the TCO and the Saco partnership that are not fitting-.
Yeah
... into your premium retail bank strategy.
Just also to be clear, we are, of course, we have a strong acquisition channel through these partners today, but one of the benefits of our Swedish business today is we also have a quite strong organic acquisition model. Compared to our Norwegian business, for example, we have a lot more customers start coming into Danske Bank outside of these union partnerships in Sweden. We feel quite comfortable that our organic acquisition model will work in Sweden.
I guess when you talk about the market share in different countries, there is sort of a rule of thumb that says that you typically need to have a 10%-ish market share in order to run a profitable bank. You're still gonna have a long way to go in order to reach that in Sweden. When we look forward, are we still gonna see Danske Bank being a challenged bank, to stay challenged bank in another way in Sweden, or how should we think about that?
Yeah. I think first of all, of course, we know rules of thumb, but as most rules of thumb, I don't know if they are natural laws or anything. We would love to have 10% market share in Sweden, if it's in the right segments, and we believe we have a plan now where we can actually achieve 10% market share within specific segments, the ones that we find attractive. We're comfortable with the plan, and we will follow it very closely also during the coming years to show how we perform.
, just to underscore as well, you know, if you look across our businesses today with the changes that we've made, we're close to your rule of thumb in all of our businesses, except Sweden, Personal Customer Sweden. We believe that Personal Customer Sweden is a market that's interesting, where we have some interesting product propositions, where we have a more distributed and diversified distribution potential, and where we believe that we can grow. So that is the one area where we want to invest and where we want to see our business growing, whether the magic number is 10% or something else. We actually believe that in the plan period, we are planning with that. We don't get to a 10% market share, but we can do this business profitably within the hurdle rates that we've introduced earlier.
I think in that context, it's useful to note that the rule of thumb probably assumes a country-by-country separate platform, and that is where our one platform approach will come in handy, to say it that way.
Okay, then just maybe a final question and a more broad question? I guess over the past half decade, you sort of have been alluding to that sort of M&A was post a settlement. How has that changed now? Are you looking more opportunistic at potential targets? Could you potentially also be, like, acquiring additional stock in the Nordics?
Thanks, Martin. I mean, the plan today is clearly an organic growth plan. But we also present, I think, a business that generates substantial capital, both for distribution, but also for investment. I'm not gonna rule out that there won't be interesting acquisition opportunities within the business areas that we've decided to focus on and that we've presented to you today.
All right, thanks.
Thanks for your questions, Martin. I think we have a question from the front table here. If we can get a microphone. Thank you.
Hi, Fredrik from BNP. I have a question on specifically maybe to Johanna. I can hear a lot of the strategy going forward is to focus on the Swedish market, both on PC and BC. You also mentioned that some of the larger or the mid-sized corporate clients' international needs. Could you elaborate a little bit on that? What kind of international needs do you see with the client segment, and, in what areas in particular? Maybe to you, Christian, as well, because that defines, of course, deepening the relationship with the PC and BC clients. What kind of partnerships do you look at in particular? Not to go too deep, but thanks.
Should I talk?
Please.
Firstly, as also I outlined in my presentation, all four Nordic countries are profitable countries that we will do execute the strategy on when it comes to the customers that are the most advanced needs and international needs. Of course, we can see now that just with the larger country, the opportunity to find a larger pool, of course, larger in Sweden. When it comes to customers with international need, then the first step it is of course, Nordic countries growing within the Nordic area. Danish countries growing into the other Nordic countries and the other way around. That is our main focus to go into this new strategy period.
I think on the partnership side, I mentioned a number of examples in my presentation as well. I think for us, the first priority is to make sure that we have a very strong coverage on what you can call basic banking needs, which I think we can cover very well from the group, and then the adjacent sort of things like pension insurance and so forth, where we have partners in place today in Denmark, but also in the individual Nordic countries, and we want to do more with them. In addition to that, as I mentioned, we have plans on additional types of partnerships especially in areas that link back to home ownership, but there are also other areas in the pipeline. I think that's all I want to say today, because we are in progress sort of discussions with various partners.
Just also Fredrik, on internationally, it's clearly also mid-corporate customers that start trading across Europe or with the US or what have you, right? That have FX needs, that have other advisory needs, where we will help them here in the Nordics with those needs. That is where the key segmentation, understanding when that happens, what the triggers are, and then being able to be there practically for those customers, where the value proposition is.
Okay, thank you, so much. I think we have five minutes left of our Q&A. Asbjørn Mørk has raised your hand.
Yes, thank you. A couple of questions on the digital part, Frans. I guess there are some limitations regulatory-wise, in terms of what you can store in a cloud and what you need to store locally. How does that impact your sort of cloud strategy? You spent a lot of time today focusing on the one platform. What are sort of the discrepancies between that and moving to the cloud, which I guess your competitors will be able to do as well going forward?
Thank you for your questions. Maybe on the first one, this is mainly related to data that would flow outside of the EU, obviously, and we don't have any plans to do so. Any public cloud provider that we will partner with, we will make sure that the data sits safely in the EU. That's for the first part. The second is, I think it's really important that when we're talking about the single platform, that means the core banking platform, that is a single, a single instance. You could think about it as that you would have the core banking platform and a number of satellites all linked to that platform.
What we're looking at is to move some of those applications into public cloud and then get the benefits of that. They won't run standalone, because I think that is an issue that many other banks actually have. They will be connected to the same single platform. I hope that answers your question.
Okay, thank you so much. There is a question from Namita, and then I can see one from APG afterwards. If you have any further questions, please let me know, also Johannes, because otherwise I will close the list of speakers or questions after the three of you. Okay, please go ahead, Namita.
Hi. Just a question on the tech investment spend of DKK 4 billion in 2026. Why is four the right number? Like, I'm just trying to understand how you got to that number and why it shouldn't be five or 10. Secondly, just on the Danish mutual funds business, how are you intending to turn around the market share losses? Because they've been significant for some time, and it's quite transparent that competitors are taking Danske's share.
... Just on the, on the overall, the DKK 4 billion is the overall investment envelope that we have. I think we made clear it's both tech, infra, but it's also digital and how we service digitally our customers, so digital solutions and so forth. Today, we have a run rate of DKK 3 billion. We're increasing that to DKK 4 billion. There is no science around that it has to be four, but it is a substantial amount of additional investments, both that we're freeing up, also because of spending less resources on compliance and other regulatory needs. One, you're freeing up from the DKK 3 billion, two, we're deciding to invest more to basically deliver the plan that we've taken you through today.
Here, it's really important that I hope we get across that we've spent a lot of time on this plan, bottoms up, on looking at these investments, on looking at how much we wanna invest in these different pieces, and looking at the competitive environment, and looking at how we believe we can differentiate and when. This DKK 4 billion is well grounded in a plan where we believe that we will be able to differentiate and win in these different segments. On the AUM question, I think maybe Christian, clearly, it's both institutional and retail, but I think retail is really one of the most important focus areas for us. I think, Christian, maybe you can bring to life what we're doing there.
No doubt, it's a key focus area for us, is to improve our distribution muscle when it comes to investments within the retail space in Denmark. There has been some, you can call it, we've been a little bit behind on some of these things. We are enabling both advisors to have better meetings. Also, we have recently launched new digital solutions that help people to get started with investments. There's more to come over the summer, which we feel will close that gap and put us in a much more competitive position. I don't know, Berit, do you have anything to add?
I think it was well said.
Okay, thank you.
I think it's an important part of our business, definitely.
Okay, thank you. We have a question from ABG.
Yes, thank you for that. Just to square the equation around the above 30% ROE versus the business units 18%, 21%, and 29%. Where is the remaining capital, and what kind of drag is on the Danica and maybe Northern Ireland, probably very, very profitable? Where should, how should you read that sort of mismatch between 13% or above 13%, sorry, on the rest of the business units? Thank you.
The main bridge between business unit and group is obviously tax. You need to deduct tax, then weigh the segments, and then there is a couple of billion DKK unallocated capital still at group level from different bits and pieces, Pillar II buffers and other stuff that kind of drive the difference.
You would not, give that, all of that Pillar II buffers to the business units.
No.
that they can price correctly?
Not all of them, specifically those which we think are transitory.
We said 13%, and then I think the CEO said rightly so, of course, we'll try to out-deliver the 13%, but it was 13%.
Thank you.
Okay, thank you so much. Going to the last question from Johannes from HSBC.
Thank you, Johannes Thormann, HSBC again. On your risk cost guidance, can you bridge the difference between the up to 14 basis points this year? How much will this be driven by post-model adjustments? Do you plan any bigger effects from there to get to 14%? How volatile will be the 8 basis points seen during the next year? Should we rather see like 14 and six, or is it more, a bit more steady? The post-model adjustments you showed in Q1 of DKK 1.9 billion for commercial real estate, is this enough to cover any problems, especially for the Swedish part of your portfolio? How big is it? Are there any other worrying sectors in your view currently? Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for that, Johannes. I think a couple of things. You know, we guided towards an up to DKK 2 billion of credit losses, right? down from DKK 3 billion.
2.5.
Two and a half, down from DKK 3 billion. DKK 2.5 billion . We're not seeing any asset quality deterioration at this stage. The guidance of up to two and a half was based on a very uncertain economic environment, right? That we still feel that we're in. In fact, we don't believe that we've seen the full transmission mechanism of higher rates. We also don't believe that we necessarily understand the ramifications yet. We also believe that there are pockets of risks out there, just like the ones we saw with the bank crisis that we saw in the US in February. The two and a half guidance is not reflecting any asset quality deterioration that we see in our portfolio today.
If we don't see it clearly, that will not be... You had a question around how volatile should we think about this? Unfortunately, the case is that it will be quite volatile. I think that's also what you saw on the slide, that in good times, you see almost no loan loss rates, and then when a pandemic hits or macro tensions hit, that's when you book the losses. That's a little bit the nature also of the way that the allowance modeling works. Our view is that we take a very prudent and proactive approach to minimize that volatility by ensuring that we also have appropriate Post-Model Adjustments in place.
I mean, in terms of to what extent and the total real estate PMA is probably slightly above the number that you give there. You know, it's very difficult to say, right? Because right now we feel comfortable with what we have. We're not seeing any actual material deterioration. Clearly, with a guidance of loan loss rate, rates of 2.5%, I would have thought that a material part of that would potentially come from the bigger pockets of risk, which predominantly would be around the real estate sector. Again, we're not seeing that at this stage, and we feel quite comfortable with the way we've managed our commercial real estate book. I think I mentioned we haven't grown that over the last five, six years into the cycle, and in fact, we've also reduced our Swedish real estate exposures. Did that cover?
Yes.
all the questions?
Yeah. Probably if there's any other industry sector.
Yeah, I mean, other sectors, again, I think we're pretty broadly diversified, and I don't. You know, in the SME segment, you will have some segment structuring, such as construction and the building and development, that value chain, and then the retail value chain. We've also seen struggles there, but that's nothing new, so to speak. I mean, we've seen that for some time. When you look at sort of the higher bankruptcy levels that we see across Nordic countries today, I would say it's driven by retail and building and construction, but still at the low end, even though the variance is high.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, thank you so much. It's 3 minutes past 12 noon, we have almost kept our time schedule for today. Thank you for your many good questions. Before we leave, back to Carsten for a final comment.
Just really a big, big thank you from myself and the team at Danske Bank. Really appreciate you all coming to spend a half day with us, and a special thanks to many of you who have also traveled in to be with us here in Copenhagen, and also a big thanks to all of you on the live stream. As always, if you have any questions, Claus Ingar and his team will be ready to help and support you. Thank you once again.