Earnings Call: Q3 2025

Nov 4, 2025

Summary

9M25 profit reached EGP 62.1 billion, including a one-time EGP 13.1 billion ECL release; adjusted profit was EGP 50.5 billion. FY25 guidance includes 20%-25% loan growth and ~9% blended NIM.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to CIB's 3Q25 earnings call. Thank you all for dialing in. This is Sherif Rita from CI Capital Research team, and we're happy to be hosting today's call. From management, we have with us Mr. Hisham Ezz Al-Arab, CEO and Executive Board Member, Ms. Yasmine Hemeda, Head of Investor Relations, and Nelly Zeneiny, Investor Relations Manager. We will start off with a summary of 3Q25 performance, and then we will open the floor for questions. I will now hand over the call to management. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. This is our customary disclosure statement. This call is intended for investors and analysts only. As such, if any media representative has gained access to this call, kindly hang up now. Certain information disclosed during this earnings call consists of forward-looking statements reflecting the current view of the bank with respect to future events and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Many factors can cause the actual results, performance, or achievements of the bank to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, including worldwide economic trends, the economic and political climates of Egypt, the Middle East, and changes in the business strategy, along with various other factors. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should any underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may materially vary from those described in such forward-looking statements. The bank undertakes no obligation to republish revised forward-looking statements to reflect changed events or circumstances. And that ends the disclaimer statement. I'll now hand it over to Ms. Yasmine Hemeda to give a brief overview of the financial performance. Thank you, Nelly. Good afternoon and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining an earnings call, and thank you CI Capital for hosting it. I'll give a brief overview of the macroeconomic backdrop, then I will give a brief on the quarterly financial results. The macro picture continued its steady and broad-based improvement across all fronts, and this was mainly supported by disciplined monetary policy. On the inflation front, the rate dropped to 12% as of September 2025, which allowed the CBE to further cut the policy rate to reach 21.5% by end of October, bringing the total rate cut since March to 625 basis points. This, in and of itself, has further improved the macro landscape, creating additional room for more cuts throughout the remainder of the year while still maintaining a real interest rate of around 10%. The decoupling of the sovereign rate persisted, continuing to offer the banks lucrative returns on their excess liquidity and helping mitigate the natural NIM compression, which is typically associated with a declining interest rate environment. On the currency front, the exchange rate has remained within a 6%-8% trading band throughout the past period, with the EGP strengthening slightly versus the dollar, hovering around the 48-48.5 range. More importantly, foreign currency availability has remained consistent, supported by record highs in remittances, tourism, and exports over the past period. Dollar sales were surging across the system. If this says anything, it underscores the market's confidence that the current exchange rate reflects the fair value of the EGP. As a result of this favorable and improving macro environment, CIB delivered another very strong set of results. Loans witnessed a growth of around EGP 119 billion, translating to a growth of 30%, which was driven by local currency loan bookings of 38%, together with foreign currency loans growing by 17%, with corporate loans growing by 34%, of which around 40% came in the form of CapEx. The bank's share of lending to SMEs recording 25.4%. This fed into strong growth in the sustainable stream of non-interest income, with fees and commissions income growing by 22% year-over-year. On the funding side, the bank's deposit gathering strategy continued to yield results. Total deposits recorded EGP 1.04 trillion, growing by 8% or EGP 75.3 billion year to date. More significantly, the healthy share of CASA to total deposits grew from 55% last year to 60% this year. Local currency deposits added 11%, or EGP 61.3 billion, while foreign currency deposits grew by 10%, or $787 million. Consequently, our loan to deposit ratio reached 49.7% by end of period, up from 39.4% last year, and recorded 52.3% upon further accounting for securitization fees, with the local currency portion reaching a record high of 66.6%. This resulted in local currency NIMs recording 13%, showing balance sheet resilience despite the aforementioned interest rate cuts. Costs were tightly kept under control, with improved efficiencies leading to a cost of income ratio recording 14.3%, up from 12.2% in 2024. CIB's new recalibrated ECL calculation was approved, resulting in a one-time release of a total provision amounting to EGP 13.1 billion. The release provision amount has been transferred to a special reserve in shareholders' equity through the bank's P&L statement, hence crediting a before-tax amount of EGP 13.1 billion to the P&L and to the provision balance sheet line. It's worth noting that in line with CBE's instruction, this reserve will not be recognized in the bank's capital base or CAR or distributable profits and cannot be utilized or distributed without prior consultation with the CBE. With this recalibrated model, which more realistically and accurately reflects potential credit losses and the quality of the loan portfolio, coverage of NPLs remains at the very comfortable level of 281%. More relevantly, coverage of the risky performing portfolio is. Profits for the nine months 2025 reached EGP 62.1 billion, and after adjusting for the one-off reversal, year-to-date profits reached EGP 50.5 billion. ROE recorded 45.9%, and upon excluding the one-off provision release, it's 37.7%. Throughout, the bank maintained a strong capital position with a CAR of 30% and a CET1 ratio of 26% by end of 3Q25. Finally, our results this quarter reflect more than just a strong financial performance. They demonstrate the strength, the resilience, and the discipline execution that define CIB. We remain focused on enabling growth and opportunity for our clients, our people, our shareholders, while maintaining the financial strength and solid fundamentals that underpin our leadership and success. With a clear strategy and a strong balance sheet, we will continue to invest in technology, talent, and trust to ensure we continue to deliver sustainable long-term value and support the broader economy. On that note, I'll hand it over to Mr. Omar El-Husseiny, our Chief Global Markets, to give a brief on the past quarter. Thanks, Yasmine. Good morning, and good afternoon, everyone. Just a few updates. From a market and balance sheet perspective, our focus remains disciplined growth, expanding quality assets while protecting spreads and liquidity. This reflects solid pricing discipline and balanced mix between loans and sovereigns on the asset side, and CASA and term deposits on the liability side. On the credit front, we continue to see healthy growth from the private sector, with lending activity broadening across sectors that wasn't there during the past period of time, namely petrochemicals, chemicals, automotive manufacturing, and port development. Though at a slightly slower momentum than tourism and food industries. Year to date, we have added around 99 new credit commitments, including 55 during the third quarter alone, signaling both growing business confidence and CIB play role in financing new investment cycles. On the non-interest income side, because we know that will be one part of the questions that will be asked. On the trade finance volume, it has been increased by more than 30% year on year, yet profitability declined due to higher concessions offered among strong foreign currency inflows, particularly from households, tourism, and exporters. This dynamic reflects our strategic decision to prioritize client relationship and flow retention during a time where we have excess foreign currency liquidity. Finally, the synergies across the global markets, treasury, GTB, financial institutions, enterprise and capital markets, debt and capital markets, continue to strengthen our base of recurring fees, proving how far our integrated markets platform has evolved during the past period of time in a key growth and liquidity engine for the bank. Thank you, Omar. On that note, we will now open the floor to Q&A. Thank you, management team. We will now open the floor for questions. If you have a question, you can type it in the Q&A box or tap the raise hand button and I will unmute your line. We have a question from Varuna from SICO Bahrain. Varuna, your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hello. Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you very much. Am I audible? Yes. We can hear you just fine. Yeah. Thank you very much. I have four questions, if I may ask one by one. The first one is on the loan growth. The local currency loan growth, like you said, was very strong, 38%, but at year to date, I'm saying. But foreign currency, I think it is, correct me if I'm wrong, it's slightly down for the year to date. My question is, what is your expectation for 2025? This year, where can we see loan growth ending, both foreign currency and local currency? And what's your expectation next year? Do you expect the similar momentum to continue? That's my first question. Secondly, I think you mentioned that the government, the sovereign yields, that kind of protected your margins when corridor rates are falling. My question is, treasury yields have been very resilient. In terms of government bond yields, long-term bond yields, have they been also resilient? I just want to get an idea as to what kind of yields are you being able to get. That is my second question. My third question on the NIMs. What is the outlook? So far this year, NIMs are very resilient at around 9%. Can we expect that to continue at least for one more quarter? For the next year, if possible? My fourth question is on the IFRS, the ECL model. We can see, if I look at the corporate segment, your provision is around 1.5% of stage 1, and then for stage 2, around 16%. These numbers have revised down based on the new assumption, I guess. Can we expect these to be the percentages going forward? How do we model that going forward? Thank you. Thank you, Varuna. I will just cover one question and then I will hand it over to our CFO and our Chief Global Markets to handle the rest. For the loan growth, it might seem that it is a bit slowed down in terms of rate on the foreign currency front, but this is because mainly of the repayments, which is very natural and very normal because most of the foreign currency lending is stemming from the tourism sector. It is one of the main characteristics of that sector is that in good times, they tend to prepay. So it might look that it is a slowdown rate of growth compared to the local currency, but if anything, it is growing. But because of the prepayments, you see it slower or even possibly at a single-digit level as compared to the local currency front. In terms of the expectations of loan growth for 2025, we are still on point for our guidance, which is between 20%-25% on a blended basis. The local currency will grow obviously at a much higher pace than that. We will continue to see the same mix that we are seeing, which is basically a lot of working capital and maintenance CapEx as well. This will continue throughout the remainder of the year, and we will continue to see foreign currency loan growth coming mainly from the exporting industries and obviously the tourism sector like I mentioned earlier. I will now hand it over to Mr. Islam Zekry, our CFO, to cover the IFRS model. Just one comment on the foreign currency growth also. When you compare the results quarter over quarter in foreign currency, you will find the numbers are a little bit flat. The decline is coming or the declining trend you are noticing here is coming because of the appreciation of the EGP over the third quarter. When you recast for this, the number is flat given the repayments Yasmine just highlighted. Back to the NIM sensitivity. We witnessed 500-600 basis points of cuts over the past period. Our NIMs, the local currency NIMs, gets impacted by almost 60 basis points. The impact is not linear. The relation is not linear. That reflects the resiliency of the balance sheet. All the efforts have been done on the retail side to increase the weight of the current accounts of savings or CASA deposits to the total deposits, which reach almost 66% when it comes to local currency, 60% on overall deposit base. There were question on the IFRS. The IFRS, the run rate for the provisioning. Technically, when you look at the numbers as we speak after the release, the average cost of risk to the total outstanding deposits went down from 8.2% to 7%. This is 1% slight higher, less than 1% higher than the average of the market. The coverage ratios went down from almost 300%, three times, to almost 2.8 or 280%, which is when the model starts maturing over time, we expect some adjustments on the long run. But you need to keep in your mind that the instructions of the Central Bank and the regime of the IFRS around relaxing or revising the TTC PD or through the cycle, the probability of default process, mandating us to keep monitoring the models for the coming couple of years. Within the couple of years, we may witness a sort of adjustments here and there going forward. Go on. On the government bond yield side, we had a discussion a couple of quarters ago when we said last year we started to extend the duration on the asset side back again to the concept of mixing between assets, between loan growth and securities and sovereign securities. Last year, we started to extend the duration on the asset side in the anticipation of interest rates coming down. The majority of it was being held at the amortized cost and not through fair value through OCI. That is not only on the local currency, that has been as well on the foreign currency side. So we have been extending the duration on both local currency and foreign currency at the fixed side throughout sovereign bonds throughout our portfolio. Okay. As far as bonds are concerned, what is the split between the local currency and the foreign currency? I am very sorry. Can you repeat that, Varuna? The line was cutting a bit. No, my question was, what is the breakdown between local currency and foreign currency bonds, government bonds? Can you provide that? So now we have around $3 billion on the foreign currency side, and on the local currency, we have around EGP 150 billion, EGP 160 billion. Okay. Because the thing why I am asking is that there was a significant increase during the course of the third quarter as far as government bonds are concerned. I was wondering whether you, so basically you were reallocating a lot of Especially on the foreign currency side, because there have been lots of opportunities that we saw in order to extend our duration on the foreign currency, especially with the Fed cutting rates. We wanted to do the same as we did on the local currency side, same as the foreign currency, to extend the duration on the bond side. It has been a diversified portfolio ranging from US Treasuries to other investment grade bonds. Okay. Just to conclude, so what is your NIM guidance on blended basis, what I am asking for this year and next year, assuming let's assume that there is another 600 basis point cut next year. What is your expectation in NIMs? For 2025, NIM will remain almost flattish as compared to 2024 on a blended basis. We are aiming towards around 9%, 9.1% for the full year. That is for this year. Next year, again, like Mr. Islam mentioned earlier, it is not a linear relationship. There are a lot of moving factors. But because of what we have been doing, fundamentally speaking, on the cost side of the NIMs, of bringing down our average cost of funds by growing the CASA portion of our deposit base, reaching the 60% that he mentioned earlier, so that whatever happens on the asset side, we secure a healthy enough margin on the liability side. Like we mentioned earlier, typically with a declining interest rate environment, there is definitely or there were going to be natural compression in the NIMs. But because of what we have been doing, this compression will be more of a gradual one. You will not see the 13% on a local currency front dropping to 3% or 4% overnight. It will take time. It is too early now to guide for 2026. We are still in the process of putting together our budget. Once the budget is finalized and approved by the board by end of the year, I will be able to share the guidance on all fronts with the investment community at large. What you said was, the local currency, the sensitivity you said was a 600 basis point decline. No, it is not 600. At 60 basis points. No, I am saying the 600 rate cut resulted in only 60 basis point decline, right? Yes. Right now, the local currency NIM is 13 as it stands in nine months? Yes, for the nine months. Year to date- Nine months. Year to date is 13%. What is the foreign currency NIM? 2.6%. 2.6%. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Our next question from Rahul Bajaj from Citi. Rahul, your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hello, Rahul Bajaj from Citi. I have two sets of questions. Similar topic, actually. The first one is on the sovereign portfolio, and the second one is on the ECL. On the sovereign portfolio, I understand your margins were strong in Q3, and the decoupling of the sovereign rate has kind of helped you. Two-part question. Firstly, do you expect this decoupling to continue as rates continue to go down? Or you think sovereign rates over time will merge with the loan yield, which is available in the market? That is the first part. The second part of the question on this one is, I remember in previous calls you mentioned that overall loan yields, doing loans is more profitable for CIB than doing sovereigns because of the cross-sell and other things that you mentioned. Now, because of the decoupling and because of the fact that yields on loans are going down, are you reaching a point where they are probably at an inflection and maybe you feel that doing sovereign is more profitable, at this point of time, rather than doing loans? Or you still think that doing loans is more profitable? So, that is my first set of questions on the investment portfolio. The second one is on the ECL model. Now that the recalibration has been done. Two-part questions again. Firstly, I understand the reserve that has been created is not part of your capital now, but is there a provision or is there a discussion with the central bank that at some point in the future, the reserves will qualify as your core capital? Is that something that can come up two years, three years down the line? That is the first bit. The second bit is, now that this recalibration has been done and you have the central bank approval, how should we think about cost of risk or normalized levels of cost of risk going forward? What would be that level? Historically, you have had a jump in fourth quarter cost of risk for the last few years. Should we expect a similar jump in fourth quarter of 2025? Those were my questions. Thank you. Thank you, Rahul, for these set of questions. Those has been the discussions in the ALCO during the past period of time. We are at the end of the day, a commercial bank. Our primary goal will be always getting the loans, especially for the ancillary business. To answer your question, it is still profitable to book loans than sovereigns. That is from one side. The other side is decoupling. Decoupling is happening, and it will continue during the coming period of time, at a lesser magnitude, of course. But definitely the market is discounting. When we compare, shall we book a loan or shall we buy some papers? The market is already discounting further cuts in interest rates on the local currency. So, when we compare, we see the ancillary business versus the expectation of interest rates. One of the things that we always think about, our ability as a bank to pass through the cut in interest rates to our clients on the deposit side. Regarding the accounting treatments of the ECL, yes, the instructions, upon the release decision of the central bank is not to consider it part of the capital base or part of the distribution statement end of the year. However, reserve is reserve accounting-wise. It is part of our coverage. Regarding the discussion with the central bank, again, according to the IFRS 9 regime and the central bank guidelines over there, we will keep monitoring those models for the coming 18-24 months and then all the possibilities are there. Anyway, they are part of our equity right now as a reserve, but all the possibilities are open once we get the assurance about the stability of the models and the resulted probability of defaults out of those models within the coming 24 months. I had one more question which was on the normalized levels of cost of risk, and should we expect a fourth quarter spike as we usually do? Well, let me give you an idea about the cost of risk within CIB. So before the release, the average cost of risk was at the range of 8.2%. After the release, that released almost 1%. So we are at the range of 7% as we speak. The average industry is 6%. So there are 90 basis points, specifically difference CIB higher than the average in Right. Sorry, when you say 8.2% average cost of risk, what are you referring to? Can you please clarify, is this the P&L charge that you're talking about? Compared to our risky assets, specifically loans. Got it. Okay. Understood. All clear. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We have a question from Darren Smith from 337 Frontier Capital. Darren, your line is now open. Please go ahead. Good afternoon, folks. Yasmine, congrats and team on great results. Just a quick question. Can you hear me, sir? Yes, Darren. Okay. You can tell me. Just one quick question. The release of other provisions, I think for the amount of EGP 5.1 billion, or reversal of those provisions. Can you just comment, what is that exactly? That's the provisions of the contingent business. I mean, so you have the direct, which is the seven, which you see it as a separate line, and then as part of the other operating income or expense, this is the contingent provisions. Yasmine, let me elaborate here a little bit. The total release is 13.1. Okay? That's the total amount released. A part of this is almost EGP 8 billion, which is direct loan loss provision that will be reversed, part of our credit impairments accounting-wise when you follow my statements, our statements. The contingent provision is part of our non-interest income, so there is a release of five over there. That's why they are in the 13.1 in two different accounting lines when you look at our financial statements. Sorry, that's the IFRS presentation standard, and that's the first standard we're following down. So they are on two different lines. Understood. These are both obviously related to the ECL model and that contingent business. Are you talking, is this letters of credit or what's in there? Yes. For the LCMF. Okay. For your reference, I mean, you will find it as part of the earnings release. We always put it as under a total provisions line, which it groups basically the direct and the contingent, I mean, for your easier reference, basically. Yeah. Okay. Can I just follow up on one of the last questions around the cost of risk? I do not think I fully understood because I think you referenced, you said 8.2% cost of risk. Maybe the way we calculate is different, but I am taking the provision charge on the income statement over your gross loans, and it is a fraction of 8% each year. Can you just clarify where you are getting that 8.2% from? Oh, I mean, Darren Smith, it is because of the IFRS and all of the accounting things. These are too sophisticated for you and me. But, I mean, in more simplistic terms, I mean, you are talking this is the way we should look at the cost of risk, which basically entails that if you annualize the first half of provisions. So basically, if you annualize the 700 that we took, so for the full year, we would get between 1.4, 1.5. You should consider this as more towards a normalized run rate for the impairment charges moving forward, which would translate to a cost of risk that is almost 0.5, 0.7%. So Right. Yeah. your normalized run rate. Exactly. Okay. That is how I would usually. Just to confirm, that is compared to last year, you did about EGP 4.5 billion, and you are saying you should be around. Okay. Yeah. Perfect. It should be around EGP 1.4, EGP 1.5. You think that's a normal level for at least a couple of years? Is that certainly expected? I mean, provided that we don't get a nuclear war or anything, Sure that will basically wipe us off Earth. Hopefully, this should be the normalized run rate. Fantastic. Okay. Congrats on getting that ECL model approved and a phenomenal set of results. Thank you. It's been a long time in the making. We've been talking about it for three years now. It's nice to see. I can't wait to see the dividend announcement later this year. I have the CEO here. I'm putting him on the hot seat. I'm telling him, "You promised people, so you need to deliver on that. We can get it from ECL. It's one of a kind. Yep, at the time. Fair enough. Thanks again, folks. Anything for you, Darren. Thank you. All right. Thank you. We have a couple of questions in the Q&A box. There are two questions from Ammu. She is asking, profit from currency swap deals revaluation increased from $15 million in September 2024 to $187 million in September 2025. It was a loss of $395 million in Q2. Could you elaborate on the main drivers behind this swing? This one is not the currency swap, it is the interest rate swap. We do hedging because we are expecting interest rates to come down. We did lots of hedging, either on the asset side and the liability side. As soon as the forward curve is starting to come down in anticipation of interest rates to go down, we are making more money on this specific item. Perfect. Thank you. The other question is, there is an increase of about 35% in administrative expenses for the nine months 2025 versus the same period last year. Could you give us a bit more color on the key components behind that growth? Vana, would you help us? Yeah, sure. There is nothing one-off about it. This is normal course of action, but I will walk you through some of the lines that maybe increased more than the others. We had a lot of renewals for expired contracts that were signed back in 2022 that expired by mid-year 2025. These renewals, they sort of embedded new rates for the foreign currency against the EGP because since 2022, we saw devaluations and we saw a lot of inflation pressures over the past 2-3 years. This was reflected in the renewal of the contracts. That is one of the things. The other thing is because we had a lot of finalized IT projects and infrastructures that basically started capitalizing in the third quarter of 2025, you need to account for the depreciation impact on those as well. The third, more significant line is that because of the increase that we saw in the loan portfolio, hence there are a lot of associated stamp duty and regulatory expenses. But other than those, there are not. And even those, they are not to be considered one-off items. The cost to income remains well below the 25% mark. I think we guided one too many times that not only that we have the room, but we have the intention of investing and expanding and doing a lot of stuff to be able to deliver on our growth plans and digital transformation moving forward. Luckily, we have plenty of room to do that comfortably while maintaining a cost to income that is both comfortable for the stakeholders, for the board, and for everyone involved. When you recast for the FX impact, the devaluation specifically, the post growth will be the 17% growth year-over-year. That is the normalized number for the currency devaluation. Thank you. We have another question from Francois, asking. Sorry, he did not hear the question regarding the provision coverage on the performing risky portfolio. It's 7.7%, which if you remember, it used to run at around 14%. It was brought down as promised to 7%. We always said that we will maintain that ratio between 7% to 8%, so now it's at 7.7%. Thank you. There is another question from Sara Gobrial asking, will there be any more provision release going forward? We hope so. The idea is, this is not like an annual event. It's one of a time. The idea is according to the regulation, for the coming 18-24 months, we are reviewing our models. External auditors are mandated to make a quarterly review and report, I think on an annual basis also to the Central Bank to give the comfort level on those releases. For the time being, that's the process. We all have to understand that there's a period of time where risks were very much like an accident, unpredictable. Those unpredictable risks are no longer there. We feel very comfortable either at the board level for the management, that we will not have those fireworks anymore. Practically, the economic condition for the monetary and exchange policy is much more predictable. I think personally that the regulatory authority, the Central Bank, want to be predictable, and that helped a lot in reducing the risk premium in the market. Because we live on the ground there, when you look at anyone who's selling a product, a car, food, you name it, they used to mark their products by 30% and 40% premium for the unpredictability of the monetary and exchange policy. That, and security as well. Even for the CDS? Huh? Even for the CDS? Even for the CDS, yeah. Those unpredictability now are diminishing. Practically, I see it on no more overpricing of product because of the unpredictability of the risk. The same thing we see it in how the economy is functioning, at least our customers. That reflected in the ECL model. I wouldn't say, I've been told not really to put it that way, but really the assumptions we have are very different for the expected risk factors than the assumptions we had five years ago or three years ago. Thank you. There's another question from Amar Aid asking, "We noticed the higher funds utilization rate this quarter, along with a significant decrease in cash balances. Could you please explain what's driving these changes? I can't recall if this is on the local currency or foreign currency. But anyways, it's the spot balances. At some point of times, we keep cash balances in order to meet the client demands, or loan growth. For instance, we might have a loan booking on the 1st of October, and we keep the cash on the 30th of September in order to meet the client needs in terms of the loan growth. And in case it's a foreign currency, it's exactly the same, either on foreign currency loan bookings or we're just buying securities, so we keep the money at our Nostro until the settlement of the transaction. And we need to keep in mind that our loan to deposit, specifically of the local currency, went up from 50% to 66% in this last 12 months. So that's part of the utilization. The others are cash operations, Central Bank cash operations. Okay. Thank you. We have a raised hand button, a question from Salum. Salum, your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hello. Hello, can you hear me? Yes. Hello? Yes. Hi, Salum. Hi. Thank you for taking my question. I have a question, again, on the bond portfolio, fixed income portfolio. Could you give us an idea, what part of the OCI portfolio is hedged against the interest rates risk? What could be the potential size of the portfolio subject to recycling in case the rates drop to capitalize on the interest rates change? You are talking about the foreign currency part or the local? Both. Let's start with the local. I would say 100% of the local and foreign currency is for hedging purposes against interest rates going down. That is my plain answer to your question. Excuse me. Could you repeat, please? I was saying, either on the local currency or the foreign currency, 100% of what we are having, either on fair value OCI or amortized cost, is for hedging purposes against interest rates coming down. If I correctly understand this, in case the rates drop, the magnitude of the gains from the mark to market will be limited in that case, right? Or if I have correct understanding. It's for hedging purposes, it's not for trading purposes. If it's for trading purposes, then as soon as interest rates will be coming down, we'll be making more money, then we'll go just sell it and realize the profits. But as long as- I see. And what is the part of the portfolio that could be subject for recycling, for selling to realize the gains, let's say, from the fair value OCI portfolio? Based on our business model in the bank, fair value OCI and amortized cost are for hedging. We cannot recycle those until we face a severe liquidity crunch in our balance sheet. Then we will have to go and liquidate the part on the fair value OCI. I see. Thank you so much. Thank you. We have another question that is in the bottom from Mohammed. Mohammed, your line is now open. Please go ahead. It seems we have lost Mohammed. We have a couple of questions in the Q&A box. Sara Gobrial asking, could you please refresh guidance for 2025 and give us color for 2026? Hi, Sara. Thank you for your question. Let's work it bottom up. We are still on point to record EGP 70 billion on a normalized basis because obviously now we're at EGP 62.1 billion, which includes the reversal. If you normalize for this 13, basically this 50.5 should read 70 by year end. Loan growth, we covered it. We're expecting on a blended basis between 20%-25%. Again, driven by stronger growth on the local currency side and strong enough single-digit growth on the foreign currency front. With that loan growth, you should expect healthy growth in the fees and commissions line that will feed very positively into the non-interest income line as well. Costs will remain tightly under control, again, very much under 20% for the full year. NIMs will remain flat as compared to 2024. We are guiding for a blended NIM of around 9% for the full year. ROEs, it should remain well above the 37% mark, again, on a normalized basis. What else? What else? Loan growth. Deposit growth, we're set to close the year with 10%-15% growth on the deposit side. Most of the growth will be coming from CASA, current and savings accounts. We're always targeting that at least 55%-60% of the new acquisitions will come in the form of CASA. Okay, thank you. As a reminder, if you have a question, you can type it in the Q&A box or tap the raise hand button and I will unmute your line. We have one more question in the Q&A box. Salma is asking, how is CIB positioning for potential EGP volatility? What are expectations for interest rate normalization in 2026? I'll take the interest rate part. Since the beginning of the year thus far, we saw cuts of around 625 basis points, which is in line with the market consensus. If you remember when we talked at the beginning of the year, we were guiding along with all of the other macroeconomists that we are to see between 6% to 8% cuts on the policy side throughout 2025, of which we saw this 625, and we're expecting to see 200 basis points more throughout the remainder of the year. I think for 2026, we'll see the remaining balance. If we saw since the devaluation hikes of around 12%, if they cut 825 basis points in 2025, then the rest will be cut throughout 2026. So by end of 2026, interest rates should go back to the pre-devaluation level. I'm not sure if I get it correctly. How do you mean how is CIB positioning for potential EGP volatility? Are you talking from a capital perspective? What are you talking about or what do you mean exactly? Until you answer, if you're asking about from a capital perspective, I'm sure you know that as per the CBE, all banks should be 100% matched in terms of tenure and currency. So, we have to be 100% matched from an assets and liabilities perspective. But we do have, as any bank, because our capital is denominated in EGP, so we have this chronic sort of mismatch, which we moved very early on to hedge when we ventured to get the Tier 2 subordinated debt. And we're now at a position where for every EGP 1 depreciation, this would eat up around 20 basis points off of the CAR. In case the second part of the question is related to the FX positions, you know that as per the central bank regulations, we can go long or short up to 10% of our capital base, which we are maneuvering based on the market conditions, our expectations, foreign currency inflows and outflows, and client needs, either they are on the trade finance or repatriation or the lease. Thank you. Since there are no further questions, would management like to make any closing remarks? Thank you everyone for dialing in. We are very happy to report yet another strong quarter, and we look forward to reporting the full year. It will not fall short from what we promise as always. Thank you so much, and looking forward to talking to you all soon. Thank you. Thank you, CIB management team, and thank you all for attending CIB's 3Q25 earnings call hosted by CI Capital.