Well, thank you Clotilde, and good afternoon to every one of you. I'm very happy to host this second specialized workshop, two years after the first one we organized on the insurance activities of the group of Crédit Agricole S.A., which was held at Crédit Agricole Assurances premises in Montparnasse. Now, thanks again, to be in Montrouge for those of you who, as Clotilde said, overcame all the obstacles, the weather, and the strikes in Paris, and of course, welcome also to those who are on the webcast. Today's workshop is focusing on our CIB activities, as Clotilde said. These activities are, alongside precisely the insurance activities, one of the two top contributors to CASA's net profit. I will take the opportunity of this introduction to explain a little bit how these CIB activities fit into our global model.
Let me start just by a quick reminder of CASA and Crédit Agricole Group main characteristics. The first one is that we are large. We are indeed one of the 10th largest banking group in the world. The second characteristic is that we are robust. We have a CET1 ratio which is in excess of 15% at group level, and we have an external rating which stands at A+ or even AA-, with one of the three rating agencies. The third characteristic is that, of course, we are focused on French retail activities, where we rank by far number one. We are actually a very universal, diversified banking group. Mastering, and this is clearly an objective that we continue to pursue, mastering all the aspects of the financial services industry with all our specialized activities, systematically in the top players, where they are indeed active.
Obviously, in this global setup, CACIB or CIB activities are a must in such a business model, as long, of course, as they are designed in such a way that they fully fit into our global philosophy. As you are going to see throughout this presentation later on this afternoon, since the refocusing of CACIB's activity after the financial crisis, clearly this is fully the case. Firstly, I would say CACIB is an important contributor to CASA's P&L. It's the case both at the level of the top line and at the level of the bottom line, with around 1/4 of the revenues and even more than 1/4 of the net profit of CASA coming from our CIB activities. Moreover, this contribution has been very regular in the last years.
The second component of this contribution to CASA's P&L is that it enhances its resilience and its diversification. Actually, indeed, CACIB is providing diversification benefits to CASA with a low degree of rate sensitivity, contrary, for example, to our retail banking activities. Also with a major part of its revenues coming from outside Europe and from outside the Eurozone. The first point I wanted to stress is here, CACIB is clearly enhancing CASA's profitability in terms both of level in absolute terms and resilience. Secondly, clearly, CACIB is fully integrated in the group, in CASA, but also more globally in the group, with, I think, two characteristics which you may want to keep in mind.
The first one is that it provides its skills and its expertise to the rest of the group with, I would say, a virtuous circle, in which CACIB is developing its skills, its expertises in the field of ALM, in the field of asset origination, in the field of financing, and funding on the market for the benefits of all the entities of the group. Based on this expertise accumulated in serving the group, it develops its own franchise, and it then provides to the group its enhanced capacity, which has been developed on the basis of external customers. Clearly, it's inside the group to provide its expertises and skills to the rest of the group with a virtuous circle with serving outside customers.
The second point is that actually it enhances also the capacity of the group to serve its global clients. It participates fully in what we have stressed in the Medium-Term Plan as a key element, fueling our growth going forward, which is the capacity of generating additional revenue synergies by simply making two different business lines working together. As you can see on the right-hand side of this slide, actually, CACIB is clearly a key contributor to these cross-selling efforts that we permanently develop inside the group. Let me put it bluntly, CACIB is not a business which is on the side of the group's business model. It's clearly fully and integrated in the business model of the group.
CACIB is a key asset for the effective implementation of one of the main priorities of our last MTP, which is to become the strategic partner to all the SMEs that are clients of one of our retail networks. As you can see, both Crédit Agricole regional banks and LCL in France, and Crédit Agricole Italia in Italy, have already developed a strong customer base of SMEs, and their intention is to better accompany these SMEs and small corporates in their international projects. Thus, CACIB provides its international network. CACIB brings its specialized lending capacities, and CACIB is even more in investing in the development of dedicated IT solutions. In order to fulfill even better its mission towards SMEs that are already clients of the retail banks of the group, CACIB is putting in place a dedicated organization.
Jacques Ripoll and his team are going to provide, in a few minutes, much more details, and are going to describe much more in depth today's CACIB and its role inside Crédit Agricole Group. Here, in a nutshell, were simply a few elements showing again how CACIB, as it has been reshaped after 2007 and 2008, is a full and key component of the group's business model and strategy. Now it's my pleasure to pass the floor to Jacques and to his team. Thank you.
Thank you, Jérôme. Good afternoon to all of you. Let me try if I can use this. There you go. Let me maybe just say a few words on the way we're going to organize the rest of this presentation. As you can see in the agenda, the idea is that I will try to explain quickly, what is the strategic positioning of CACIB, giving you a few hints on what is behind our business model. We'll roll out a very classical agenda with clients. It will be Didier Gaffinel, who will take the floor there. About financing with Jean-François Balaÿ. You'll have markets with Pierre Gay. A few topics on transversal layers, including Anne-Catherine Berters, our Head of Human Resources, and Olivier Bélorgey will finish on the financial trajectory for 2022.
Let's kick off with my part, which is about the strategic positioning. Maybe before getting into that specific area, let's maybe try to have the global picture of what has been the commitment of CACIB within the MTP 2022. If you look at this slide, you have maybe a few important words and a few important figures. I think that on the left side of the slide, the word which is important is homogeneous. Why? If you look at what we have committed to deliver going forward, you see that the growth is 3%, but it's mainly the same kind of growth in every area of the business, which means that fundamentally, one should not expect from us any kind of twists in the way our activities are being balanced.
Maybe, capital market activities are growing a bit higher rate than the others, but it's just because there's a bit of a rebound in 2019. The rest of it is really homogeneous. On the right side of the slide, if you look at it, there's a few important figures, and it goes around return on equity and cost to income. It is interesting to see that when I speak with a certain number of investors, certain people outside CACIB, in a lot of cases, people don't realize those two figures. We're a corporate investment bank with a return on equity, which is a 12%. We've decided to present it here at 10% because we consider that 12% today, there's a component which is due to the cost of risk, which is historically very low.
Even if you try to normalize this cost of risk, we're still a double-digit return on equity corporate investment bank, and this is something that we will maintain across the years till 2022. On the cost to income, same thing. In a universe where a lot of cases you hear about much higher cost to income, it was important, I think, to mention that we have a cost to income, which is 57% in 2018. If I'm not wrong, I think it was even 54% in September 2019. Those are the main ideas in our MTP, keeping through growth a 10% return on equity, keeping our cost to income at a very low one. Now the question you probably ask yourself is, okay, but how come that we are able to achieve a result which is a pretty solid one?
I think that on that one, there are really three main ideas that I would like to detail with you today. There are three main strategic choices that explain our positioning. The first one is that we have decided to focus more on corporate clients than financial institutions. The second big choice is that we are a bank which is more of financing activities than market activities. The third very important pillar is the fact that we have decided to keep growing and have well-coordinated an international network. You'll see that those three basic ideas, more corporate clients and financial institutions, more financing than market, and a strong, coordinated international network, they largely explain why we can reach a 12% or 10% return on equity and a cost to income, which is mid-50s. Why? Let me first start with the market activities.
When it goes to market, and some of you know that this is my background. When it goes to market, we historically had, 15 years ago and maybe in another world, we had activities which were able to generate very high return on equity with cost to income, which were, say, reasonable. Of course, there was some risk attached to it, but that was a business which was a very interesting one. I think that this has changed and that Crédit Agricole has one specific thing, is that it realized this change and transformed its business model probably five, 10 years ago. Well, certainly five, 10 years ago, and probably five years before some of our competitors. What has changed in market activities? I guess you know it all.
The products that can be produced and sold in market activities have moved from having a very nice margin due to complexity into products which are more and more very standard products with margin, which are much lower. At the same moment, if you look at the cost of running those activities, it goes around regulation, best execution, compliance. You see that the costs have been blooming during the whole period. Third level of this perfect storm, we are in a situation where it goes to market activities, where the capital requirement on a given transaction in capital market has also increased massively. Once you have those three elements, you end up with businesses which are very challenged because they end up with high cost to income and a return on equity, which is very often very challenged.
The name of the game is not to have or don't have market activities. We have market activities. We're very happy with this. It's more, what is the size and what is the focus of market activities? In our case, 10 years ago, because of the crisis, we have decided to right-size our market activities. In the last four or five years, we've been pushing, organizing our market activities with really one basic idea. They're here to service our clients. We're not creating products out of the blue and trying to sell it. We have clients. We have a very strong corporate franchise, especially, and we build market solution for our clients. That is why we've escaped this kind of trap of market activities with high cost to income and low return on equity.
Once you've said that doesn't explain why you have been able to generate a low cost to income and a high return on equity. On that point, it's maybe a few minutes on characteristics of a financing activity. A classical financing activity is an activity where the cost to income is very low. Why? The cost of doing a business in financing activity is much lower in terms of systems, in terms of platforms, you end up very quickly with a low cost to income. The issue with financing activities is that you can also be in another kind of trap, which is having a low cost to income, but also low return on equity. Those activity, if they're too much about plain vanilla financing, they can't generate a high return on equity.
That's where the very specific DNA of CACIB enters in play. We are a bank who has been, in the last 20, 40 years, really focusing financing activities with high margins, structured finance activities, and you know them all. You know we're probably top three in the world when it goes to aircraft financing, top three when it goes to rail, top three when it goes to shipping. We're a huge player in securitization, project finance, infrastructure, and all those activities are certainly not plain vanilla activities with low ROE. To the contrary, they're activities where we can generate comfortable margins and especially high return on equity. On top of that, in order to reach that level of return on equity, we've added a certain number of boosters to our business, and it goes around the idea of the wide international footprint. Why?
When you have a network in which you're able to do cross-border transactions, you're able to accompany your clients when they acquire a gas pipeline in Brazil, you're able to work with a Chinese client who is entering into a German car manufacturer. When you're able to generate all this cross-border business, and that's where it's important to be wide, but also to be well coordinated, and Didier will explain clearly how this works. When you have this, you add also value to the picture. The second idea is that if you want to be able to generate those high return on equity, you can't be in the very old-fashioned model in which you just use your balance sheet and stay and sit on it.
Of course, like every bank today, we have created the organization that enables us to have a rotation of our balance sheets, and this is the distribute to originate model on which Jean-François will give more details on the very strong performance that has been generated, especially in the last two years. Last but not least, the market activities. They're the continuum of financing activities, which means that when you're, for example, working on a very sophisticated financing for an acquisition or for a project finance, when you're under the tent, it is much easier to say, "You know what? You need a swap. You need a hedging for your Forex." We're here also to provide you the service. When you're under the tent, definitely you're in a better position than if you just ask for a price after the deal is public.
Let me maybe end up that slide with one element, which is key also on why we're able to reach high levels of return on equity, and that goes around the EVA process. Didier will explain in detail what we call EVA here, but what is very important, in a way, is process. We're not in a situation where we just look at things. We have a systematic approach of all our clients with dedicated teams, which are producing on a regular basis, photography of where we stand, what kind of capital we use, and going forward, is it the best usage of the capital that is being given to us? Third element for strategic positioning, it's the risk profile of CACIB. As you can see, there are a few components that explain what is a risk profile, which is notoriously a low risk profile.
I think that first it goes around framework. Every activity, every geography, is embedded into a framework which is pretty fine in order to know before what is exactly the kind of business that we do. We have invested a lot in forward-looking of our risk, in dynamic monitoring of underwriting, and of course, in rotation of the balance sheet, which is also a way to avoid issues. Overall, as you can see, our portfolio is largely investment grade. We're talking of 87% investment grade. One thing which is very important also to understand is that because we're financing real economy, because we're financing real assets, well, in a way, our cost of risk is very much linked to those assets and the structuring of those transactions. It's not the same to finance a corporate and to finance a ship, the ship of the same corporate.
The kind of security that you have is much better when you're at the level of the asset. That's why you can see that on our real assets portfolio, we have levels of losses which are really in basis points. Market risk, logically, as we really accompany our clients, we have a level of market risk, which is low. If you measure it through the VaR, you can see that we are at EUR 7 million versus an average, which is at least twice bigger for our peers. Operational risk, which is also something which is very important, and can be painful. Well, as you can see, we've been pretty good in this area, too. Especially, as you know, we've exited last year of the DPA in the U.S. with no penalty and after the first step. I'll conclude before passing the floor to Didier.
Once explained those elements of our strategy, in announcing just a few focuses that I would like to emphasize on afterwards, which are around the group project and how do we fit in those group projects. One is about something which is one of the cornerstones of our business, which is sustainable banking and green financing. A second one, which is on digital, you'll see, hopefully, you'll consider that what we will say on digital is not just the usual message about we want to be digital and so far and so on. We try to be a bit more detailed in what we want to achieve. Catherine will focus on the human project of CACIB, and then Olivier will speak of the financial trajectory. Now it's time to have Didier on the floor. Didier, it's green for go.
Thank you, Jacques. My name is Didier Gaffinel, and I'm going to present you our client and international strategy with two main ambitions. One, our client strategy is how to generate more business with our clients, thanks to a streamlined coverage and investment banking organization, and using two levers I will insist on, client selectivity and profitability, and sector expertise. Second, our international strategy obviously is still growing outside of France, and I will make a focus on Asia- Pac and more specifically on China, where we want to achieve a superior growth. Maybe to start with just a quick overview of how we are organized here at CACIB.
We have already put in place for a long time now a dedicated corporate coverage organization independent from the business lines. We have reinforced this organization by adding FI and some real asset client drivens, and putting under the same reporting line both the coverage and the investment banking. We have today on the ground 330 senior bankers across the geographies, and we have 220 investment bankers. IB, investment banking definition at CACIB includes industry groups, M&A, ECM, tailor-made solutions on registered equity, and a JV on equity solutions with our capital market activities. How our coverage works, well, it works as single entry points within the bank for the clients. It is product neutral, and we are very agile in the allocation of our resources across the globe. How to generate more revenues with our clients?
Well, by first focusing on high-value clients, which are the clients with whom we have a long-standing relationship, and this is clearly in the DNA of CACIB to be a long-term partner to our clients. This is a way to capture the elephant transaction, be it a large acquisition, be it a major project finance or major swaps. Also, by boosting client profitability and leveraging our sector expertise. Let me detail how we want and we achieve client profitability within CACIB. A relationship for a coverage banker is not only generating more revenues, it's equally being more profitable. For this, and as Jacques has mentioned, we have in-house sophisticated CRM tool, which I believe is very powerful. You have here on the slide, a real example of what is a dashboard of the monitoring of the performance of a client.
You have on the right-hand side, the business mix of these clients by product line, the split by RWA, and equally also by our profitability indicator, which is designed as a kind of EVA. You have here on the left-hand side, this concrete example of how it is working. In our definition, EVA is the portion of NBI left after cost of capital, based on our RWA, our credit and operational RWAs, cost of maintenance, and expected loss. Obviously, we are focusing on these high EVA clients, and through a systematic process, assessing this EVA from onboarding to continuous tracking. We ask to our senior bankers, a three-year business plan, for each client, an assessment of the EVA for every transaction, so that we can have a discipline in client selection and follow-up.
Obviously, when you have this high value EVA clients, we push for doing more business, and this a good way to allocate our resources, which are scarce, and Olivier will come back on it. On the other hand, when we have low EVA or negative EVA clients, we ask the coverage people with the product line to take some measures, either to put in place and implement, I would say, specific action plans, or even exit some clients, and we do it, and we intend to do more, so that we can increase the overall profitability of our client base. The second lever is the sector expertise. We have also put in place, some years ago, a soft sectoral coverage organization, gathering coverage people with industry groups for our investment banking teams and structured finance teams, so that these people can share information and the strategy around these clients.
It has already given, I think, very good results. Let me give you some recent example of what we have achieved. We have been advising, for example, LVMH at the beginning of the year in the acquisition of the luxury hotel chain, Belmond. This is, I think, a good combination of strong relationship with the clients and the real hotel and the real estate sector expertise. We have also been advising on the sell side, Cargill, the U.S. agribusiness, in their divestment of their malt business in Europe. This is here a good combination of a strong relationship with the clients in the U.S. and a strong agribusiness expertise. We have also been advising some of our important clients, on some real assets divestment or acquisition. In one case, divestment of a Japanese client on a infra asset in the U.K.
Another one was on the buying side, advising Asian utility buying power assets in the U.S. This is really the result of this sectoral coverage organization. We want to do more. We have, based on the criteria like client franchise and solid credentials and proximity also with obviously Crédit Agricole Group, we have selected eight sectors, among which five are real asset-driven sectors, where CACIB has undisputed worldwide franchise, and Jean-François will develop on this, but also agri-food, insurance and automotive. These sectors give us access to a large wallet size, EUR 40 billion Only for IB and debt products. These sectors, as of today, have generated about 45% of the total NBI of CACIB. On top of that, we also believe that our clients are moving, their business model are moving, and we need to adapt.
We also want to create some internal ecosystems to address concept like energy transition, obviously, but not only, smart mobility, smart city. We have also in mind that green sustainability and digital are challenges that are also impacting both sectors and these ecosystems. In that respect, we have already created an internal ecosystem for hydrogen, putting together some resources from our sustainable team, from our power and infra team, and we are already engaging with some clients on M&A advisory on this front. All in all, we expect that this A sector will deliver an above-average growth over the Medium-Term Plan, with annual growth of 5%. Second, our international strategy, and as Jacques mentioned, we are relying already on a strong and global enough footprint.
As you can see, CACIB is already achieving 70% of its business activity outside of France, well-balanced across the geographies, with 29% in Europe, 20% in the Americas, 3% in the Middle East, and 80% in Asia-Pac. I think what is important is to have in mind that we are addressing more than 30 markets, which represents about 80% of the world's GDP, which means that our international network is deep and very granular. This we are fertilizing, this international network, by accompanying our clients all across the geographies. As of today, we are achieving 25% of the total NBI of CACIB with the international subsidiaries of our clients. For example, we are working with a large French cosmetic client in Russia or China, or a large Japanese automaker in the U.S., or even the large Chinese corporate in the industry in Europe, for example.
We want to do more, and Olivier will give you the split of our regional growth over the midterm plan. We have identified Asia-Pac as a growth driver for the bank, probably the main one, and based, I would say, on three dimensions. First, clients and deepening some FI relationships and growing the corporate client base, cross-border transaction, and also supporting the real economy. If we move to China, which is I would say, where we'll pay more attention, our strategy will relies on three pillars. The first one will be to selectively increase our corporate client base by targeting the top 200 or 300 large corporates, and we are mostly working with SOEs, and we'll only address some investment grade profile clients. Also we need to invest in some of our business lines, obviously market activities, especially to deepen our relationships with our FI clients.
We'll develop also a domestic cash management offer. Jean-François will give some details on it later. We want also to grow our M&A advisories. Also, we need to build a solid onshore structure. We are one of the only few international bank to have a strong local presence in China. Obviously, to fuel this growth, we need more capital. We have recently done a capital increase on this. All in all, we expect our revenue ambition for Asia-Pac to be of 6.4% annual growth over the midterm plan. Of which an additional EUR 100 million revenues with China. To conclude, just a quick wrap-up. I believe that we have a streamlined coverage on investment banking organization that will generate more revenues.
We pay a lot of attention to client selectivity and profitability. Very important, we have the tools to monitor this selectivity and profitability. We are also strong believers in sectorial expertise. We want to develop and invest more in eight sectors to deliver superior growth. Thanks to our global footprint, addressing 80% of the world's GDP, we'll pay specific attention to Asia-Pac, and China in particular. Thank you. I pass the floor to Jean-François.
Thank you, Olivier. Good afternoon, all. I'm Jean-François Balaÿ, I will now tell you how we're going to deliver growth with the financing activities. If it works. I'll start with treasury finance. Our teams are experts in financial real assets. Jacques mentioned it, Didier mentioned it, our teams are experts. They have a global footprint. When you have a sector knowledge and expertise, you need to be global and local. You need to understand the local environment. You need to understand the different parameters. I won't go in describing what we have on the screen. You see on the slide, the positioning, the ranking of the team. That's quite impressive. We're also quite well recognized by our peers and our clients. That's a real asset for the bank. If I give you some example, take a project finance.
Project can be a power plant, can be financing a motorway or a rail concession, or even a renewable asset. When the team are starting to consider a transaction, they're not talking about financing. They look into the asset. What are the parameters? With the clients, what technology is going to be used? Is it tested? Does the client know where is the region? That's how it starts. Then comes the financing. Is it an asset which is producing reliability or is it on the market driven? All of this is the assessment. That's where, in fact, when you discuss with the client, and you're in front of them, you start showing that you understand really the underlying asset. It makes a big difference when it comes to financing them. Another example, maybe shipping.
As you know, 80% of the goods, trade transaction goods which are traded globally, are carried, in fact, through vessels. That's different maritime routes. You've got then different type of ships. You've got containers, you've got dry bulk carriers, you've got cruise, you've got tankers. It's all different. For each type of good you're carrying, depending on the route they follow, you have different boats. Naturally, the teams are well aware about that. That's very important when you make a financing, to know as well the value of the underlying asset, the price of the daily projects. That's the important point. What's our hang here is to continue to be leader in our worldwide leading position in structured finance. Naturally, it's very profitable.
We've got a good experience of throughout the crisis, we've seen different cycles. Therefore we know what could be the evolution of the asset depending on the market. If I elaborate there, I would say the management of the teams, they've got an experience over 20 years. If you take the full teams, that's the interesting point. It's very attractive to young talents. Young talents represent, if I take SFI business, 25% of the global team. It's well spread because we've got seniors and we've got juniors. It shows that there is no issue about succession plans. Another point as well on risks, the teams which are originating the transaction are the ones which are going to follow it during the whole life of the facilities. That's what we're calling the first line of defense.
As I mentioned earlier, they've seen cycles, so they know during the crisis how to deliver, how to restructure facilities. For instance, when you have a situation and you have to repossess an asset, in order to repossessing a flight or a vessel, you need to be an expert as well, and then put it as well with another client or get it reemployed in other activities. That's where we consider that structured finance is going to be still a key asset of our development. During the Medium-Term Plan, we consider we can generate 3% growth over a per year during the period. You may ask, why the 3 A's? What do you mean by getting growth with the 3 A's? I think that's quite easy.
When you look at markets where there is ample liquidity, where balance sheet is not a problem to provide facilities, how do we differentiate ourselves? The first A, advisory. If I take the example of an acquisition, Jacques mentioned earlier, even event transactions, you want to be under the tent. You want to be sitting next to the client. You can help if you're financing an acquisition, can be an asset or a company, a target. You want to give an advice on what's the proper level of equity for the transaction, what's rating you will get post-acquisition, which market you can tackle. Is it high yield? Is it U.S. market, European market? All of this, you can advise the clients. I mentioned social finance. When you work on the greenfield project, you can sit next to the client and you tell them, "Are you going to finance this asset?
Which market, again, you're going to tackle, what pricing you'll get, which investors you will tackle. Arranging now. We set up a team three years ago to specifically work on corporate acquisition facilities, event to event facilities. This team is global. We have in excess of 20% right now. They are in several countries in Europe, in the U.S., and also in Asia. Here, we go back to, in addition to the advisory, we propose specific financing, and this team has really developed over the last three years, and we've got very good results. There is a clear, close relationship with the clients when you work with them on such transactions. Because once you don't want one, two, this type of transaction with clients, you get repeat mandates, in fact, and it's known in the market, and you're a reliable partner. Now, agency. Agency, you may ask why.
Agency, when you arrange a syndicated facility, the agent is the one, the first bank the client is going to talk if there is an event, be it weather, be it a change in the structure of the facility, be it an acquisition, additional line. Therefore, here again, you're a close partner. You're the first one the client will talk to. Within these three As, we consider that with the corporate acquisition facilities and also the advisory, we can bring a 3% growth per year during the Medium-Term Plan. Now, Jacques mentioned earlier our D2O model. How it's important to have a strong and robust distribution team. That's the case. This is a team we've developed regularly for the last few years. As you can see on the slide, we've got impressive results in terms of primary distribution, secondary distribution.
The team is global and you have a unified distribution platform. I mentioned specialists and expertise on the origination side, we've got similar teams in distribution. When you distribute project finance transaction, or be it LBO or an aviation transaction, you need to understand the asset. You need to talk to the investor. It's not like when you sell, or the transaction where it's not necessary to give a bond, for a bond when you give a rating. Here, you really need to spend some time, explain the due diligences, and really get the investors along to approve and get into the transaction. We are distributing what we've developed. We developed several channels of distribution. Here I mentioned the primary one, the secondary one, which is in fact selling the asset, in its loan format. We have also developed other channels.
I will mention a few examples. First one, in shipping. I'm coming back to shipping. A few years ago, five years ago, we did set up with SMTB, which is a Japanese bank, a partnership to arrange a transaction together. SMTB is an Asian bank specialized in shipping transactions. They were only specialized in Asia. What we brought, we arranged some facilities, European market, U.S. market, and we brought them along. We got an agreement by which we take a portion of the facilities, they take a portion of the facility at the initial stage, and the rest we can distribute. Second example, we recently closed a transaction in Germany. It was a rail concession. Here, we are arranging the facility. During the construction period, we're going to finance.
We have already an agreement that when the construction is completed, we have an investor which has already committed to replace us. Here again, we finance during the initial period of the construction, which is where we bring our expertise. We follow the development. Once it's done, we have an investor to take over the facility. Maybe a third example, in aviation. Take airline company. We recently closed a transaction for them with a Japanese operating lease. What did we do? We find a bank to fund the debt portion, and we find a lessor to finance the equity portion. Here again, we arrange a facility for a client. We get fees and no commitment on the balance sheet. That's another way of distributing. That's not only what we're doing in terms of channels of distribution.
We've also developed innovative solution that goes to synthetic securitization program, that goes to a risk participation agreement. We've got a specific team within the bank to develop those solutions. They're next to finance, they're next to D2D, which is our distribution arm. We are giving some examples. We've arranged some FPAs for the shipping portfolio. We've done two transactions for a total amount of $1.5 billion with three insurance companies. You see when it shows that, when you know that shipping is considered sometimes as a risky business because there are lots of cycles. In fact, we know well our portfolio, we know well our clients, and investors are really confident and trust us on the ability to select a transaction and arrange transactions. Naturally, we want to continue to develop our underwriting capacities, but within also a very conservative risk framework. Transaction banking.
We want to develop our transaction banking. What are we talking about when we mention transaction banking? As you can see on the slide, we're already financing suppliers, buyers. That's receivable discounting, that's supply chain finance. We're also very strong on import and export. Here in the international trade finance, we're, let's say, very strong in tailor-made transaction. As you can see on the right side of the slide, we've been regularly awarded by the market. Cash management. This was mentioned earlier by Didier and Jacques. We want to develop our activity in cash management. We want in selected countries to be local, but also regional, to accompany our international clients. What does that mean on the next slide? Our ambition in transaction banking. First one, supply chain solution.
This is an area we started to develop 18 months ago, and we have a lot of potential to grow. The investment initial was done in Europe, and we're also going to continue to develop in the U.S. and also in Asia. I'll come back to Asia. We consider we can multiply by two our revenues in supply chain finance, during the plan. International trade. Here, we want to accompany the development of the market. More and more you see open account transaction, less and less LC related transaction. Here we need to accompany our clients and develop the flow business and also the digitized transaction. To give you an example, we are one of the founders of the komgo platform, which is a blockchain platform to provide some financing for trade and commodities finance. We are among international banks and also some international players, clients.
This will be a really efficient way to finance exports, imports, and international activities. Here, we consider we can increase by 20% our revenues during the Medium-Term Plan. Cash management. Cash management is something a bit more recent for us. Clearly this is something we have started to develop 18 months ago. We had some experiences in cash management. For instance, we are quite strong already in Russia. In Russia, our international clients do see us as a safe haven. With our rating, with the type of transaction we are doing. We mentioned earlier, Didier mentioned Cosmetic Group, international companies, they are very pleased to work with us there. We want to replicate this. Cash management, we want to be local in France. We will continue to be local in Russia. We'll be local in India as well. Why India?
Here again, there are a lot of foreign investments in India. We developed the cash management earlier this year. After nine months, we know that already our return on investment will be done within two years. We'll do the same in China. We mentioned how we want to develop in China. In China, we'll develop the e-commerce solution, but also the full-fledged of the offering in cash management in 2021. That's large investments, but we will clearly get some return. Just to tell you how the potential is great for us. Today, if we check our client base, only one out of 10 is using cash management. It shows how we can grow. Therefore, cash management, we consider we can increase by 1.7 times our revenue during the Medium-Term Plan.
Globally, transaction commercial banking activity will bring 25% of the growth we estimate for CACIB during the medium-term plan. That's where we see as well some growth. Now to wrap up, we want to continue, as I mentioned, to be a global leader in asset financing. We're financing real assets. We accompany our clients, and we accompany as well the evolution of our clients. Mentioned renewable, mentioned transition, in the climate environment, we are on the forefront helping our clients. We also want to create values with the three A's, advisory, agency, and arranging. As I mentioned, that's also expertise we want to put at the service of our clients. Distribution arm, we need to continue to develop, to reinforce our activity there. We will develop the flow business, cash management, and also supply chain finance.
We are pretty sure, very confident, that we will bring growth with our ambitious target for 2022. Thank you. Now I'll pass on to Pierre.
Good afternoon to everyone. My name is Pierre Gay. I'm in charge of the Global Markets Division. Maybe to start with, as Jacques said in his introduction, actually, our activity globally of Global Markets is under massive pressure. We've got some headwinds. I'm not going to mention it too much, but coming from regulation, coming from the pressure on margin, coming from the low level of interest rate, coming from also new joiner, being the fintech, being all these type of actors, which are basically putting pressure and all that. What I'm going to explain you is why, first, this model was resilient from the past, and why we, because of the strategies that we implement, why for the Medium-Term Plan for 2022, our activity is going to be an increase of revenue for the four years to come.
The first thing is to explain and to focus on what are the strengths of the group. In fact, what are the key elements, what are the differentiator that the global market activity is using in front of the competitors? We identify, in fact, five different pillars, which are basically a differentiator for us when we're in front of client. The first one is around the balance sheet. The group has a strong balance sheet. This is definitely something when you're in front of a client that the bank already put a couple of EUR million on the table.
It's easier to have a discussion with them about what do they want to do in terms of hedging, what they want to do in terms of hedging on the FX, what they want to do in the hedging on the rates, if they want to issue some bonds or whatever. This is something that we capitalize on the strength of the group, which is basically by providing cash to this client, we are able to be closer to them and to increase the intimacy that we have with them. Second element of strength is our rating. Be a double-A bank today is something that not many of our competitors have. When you want to do a cross-currency swap for 20 years, having a double-A bank in front of you is something which is a strong differentiator, and will help you.
Of course, you need to have a good price, you need to have good services, but in term of discussion, it's something that at the end of the day, is going to give you some element in your favor. Third element. To start with, these two first elements are very linked to, I would say, structural strengths of the group. Balance sheet rating is something that has nothing to do too much with the capital market activity. The third one is more about cash, even, and the third one is more about the, I would say, the expertise that we have. The third one is about the network. Network is something very important for us. Why?
When you have a client in Europe who want to do a hedge in Taiwan, who want to do a hedge in Korea, having someone on the ground, which is the case, we are perfectly aware of what's going on in the market, who are the buyer on the FX. Is it central bank? Is it hedge fund? Is it a real money account? It gives you some element of information that you can provide to your client, and when it comes time for the discussion, because of that, you are able to get the trade, and you are able to increase the footprint that you have with him.
The second element of differentiator is that when you talk to the local clients, we are a French bank, we are big in euros, you are able, for this local client, when they want to do a transaction, being on the EUR bonds, being on the swap to EUR, being on the repo, because of our strength, and this is a fourth point, on the EUR market, we are able to get this business with this local customer. Our network bring us two forces. The first one being able to bring our clients to these different countries, and second one, bringing this client locally into the EUR market. Fifth point of strength is our expertise in all type of innovation products. We just have been rewarded by Risk Magazine about the Investment Product of the Year.
This is something which is in our DNA, and that we're pushing as a solution for our client. Doesn't mean on that part that we are the one providing with a very sophisticated type of product. We are more, I would say, on the tailor-made, which mean that because of the intimacy that we have with the client, and this is something very important, I want to re-insist, is that as Didier and as Jacques said, because of the close relationship we have with the client from the beginning, on our side, in GMD, we are able to understand more what are their needs, being on the hedging side, being on the investment side, and we're able to provide them with the best solution.
One more time, it doesn't have to be very sophisticated, but it answer to the need of the client, which is something that I think when we discuss with the client, is a very strong differentiator for us in term of activities. If you look on the left part about the split of our revenue from different customers. You see 40% of our revenues are coming from corporates, 10% are coming from the group. In fact, we have the rest coming from financial institutions. We split the financial institution into three parts. The first one is the one where we consider, typically insurance company, that they are, in term of behavior, very close to the corporates.
The way they want to hedge a balance sheet for an insurance company is very much aligned with what a corporate is doing, so we almost consider them as corporate. Another one are, when you have a corporate who's issuing a bond, you need to have the investor who's going to buy the bond, right? It cannot be another corporate. You need to have this relationship with financial institution who are able to give you the capacity of distribute the bond that you just have issued. This part is very much linked to a corporate. Even the rest, it's also very linked, because when you do swap, if a corporate want to hedge his balance sheet by paying the fix, you cannot keep the position in your book forever, right?
You need to have the financial institution whereby you can do the opposite transaction and square your position. Very much focused on the corporate business because of the knowledge of our clients and because of the nature of our business. I was talking at the beginning about the fact that our business is resilient, so we can see from the past. As Jacques said at the beginning, after the crisis in 2008 and 2012, we resized and we downsized the global market activity quite significantly. From, I would say, the last four years, we are restarting to rebuild credibility on that activity. Year after year, we can see that this element of market is increasing in terms of revenue. From EUR 1.6 in 2014, we moved to roughly EUR 1.8 in 2019.
Putting the objective of EUR 2 billion for 2022 seems to be aligned with what we have done before. There's no magic. There's no suddenly we did not find the gold mine, which did not give us a lot of new revenue and opportunities. It's a continuum of what has been done before. The way we're looking at it in term of increase of revenue from moves from EUR 1.7, which was the result in 2018, to EUR 2 billion , which is the Medium-Term Plan, we have split it into different element, of course. First one is, as you know, 2018 was a difficult year, particularly on the credit side, right? There was a massive drop, particularly on the fourth quarter of the result of the activity.
We have decided to put a kind of a plug for 2019, which is basically putting the level activity of where it should have been. The EUR 75 million on what we call the revenue credit, is basically to compensate the decrease in 2018 on this activity. EUR 100 million on repo. This is something very important. This is something where, as of today, a lot of activity has to do with financing of bond, financing of govies, of the activity. Where we're pushing and where we're developing more activity is definitely on the collateral management side, being on the collateral grade, collateral degrade. All the operation on the forward bonds, all the operation on the secure funding, which is basically not costing us any balance sheet, but which are a lot of development and which allow us to grow this activity for the years to come.
Development in Asia, it has been mentioned before, we have EUR 100 million of growth of revenue, which has been scheduled in China. Half of it will come from our Global Markets Division. Synergy with the Crédit Agricole Group is basically all the development that we're going to do with all the SME business and, together with the Caisse Régionale, with LCL, we are putting in place the organization to make sure we will push and develop this activity. In terms of organization, and one more time, this is to really because something I think you need to have in mind is that our business model for the Global Markets Division is quite different from the other banks.
In a sense, that is very well integrated into what the bank is doing, and this is why we did this kind of presentation with a puzzle to say that we've got a switch of finance commercial bank. From that, we integrate to the financing and funding solution, which is one of the part of the Global Markets Division. Why? When some customers, they need some cash, they can go to their bank and ask for some loan. Sometime they need to go to the market. This is where we can provide them the liquidity by using the DCM activity. Another part of activity is all the securitization. If the customers want to do some securitization, we have to, in a kind of sense, a continuum of the activity, we can propose them the securitization business.
When they do that, they have to hedge a position. Why? Because when you issue a bond in USD, maybe you need to have EUR. We are able to provide them with a currency swap. If they want to do a fixed rate on the DCM, we can provide them the swap to hedge a position in rates. This is really to demonstrate that this is a continuum, and that there is no per se developmental activity on the Global Markets Division, which are really dedicated to one specific point. It's a global offer that we have. A quick element on the different pillars. On the financing and funding solution. What we have basically is 2 type of activity. We have the securitization business, where we are pretty strong, and we will stay strong, particularly in Europe.
We are very strong in front of captive automotive, the energy business, the telecom business, so strong position on that one. We have operation securitization in Europe, meaning in France and in Italy, and also in the U.S., where we have strong activities. On the DCM side, the target is to stay on the top 5 in the organization in the EUR business, and to continue to develop with a bit more sophisticated type of approach, pushing the solution in terms of the DCM activity. To help, and to, I would say, to continue the activity, we have the hedging investment solution based on FX, structured product, investment product, and secure funding, which is basically, one more time here, to complete the offer to our clients.
We know, and as I start with that the market is under pressure, and we need to do something, and if we stay like we are, we will suffer in the years to come. We have not stopped to think about what's going to be next. We continuously improve our setup, make some changes to make sure that in the years to come, we continue to be profitable. The first thing is that we adjust the setup. We are moving on the financing solution toward a setup which is more of what we call the credit chain, which is basically to make sure that we have an alignment between all the different element of this credit chain, being the credit trading, being the sales, and being the DCM.
We want to make sure that we are doing the right business in front our customer to make sure that it's completely aligned. The front-to-back valuation, something also very important, to make sure that from the front office to the back office, everything is aligned, and that we are able to optimize the setup and to reduce the cost. Third point, adapt the sales force. We know that in some of the activity, electronification is more and more one of the key elements. You don't need to have, as we used to have, sales everywhere. Centralization, particularly on the flow product, is something very important, and we are pushing in that direction in order, one more time, to rationalize the setup, optimize our cost. Second element, this was more to do with the organization.
Second element, also very important, is that we need at one stage also to be disruptive. In some of the activity, we know that competition is strong. Talking about the fintech, we know that some of the fintech, particularly on the flow business, are very aggressive in term of pricing, very aggressive in term of setup. They are able to give very good pricing to the client. Instead of fighting with them, at one stage, we need to integrate the fact that we have new joiner in our business, and we don't want to stop the activity, because we need to have this activity to serve a client.
In some of the case, we will need to find some partnership, either with fintech, with other bank, or to make some, which is currently a reflection with some others, to create a pool of bank where we will be able to offer this kind of service, but with a cheaper cost. All these initiative are well resourced in 2019, and some of them will be put in place in 2020. All of this is linked to what? It's linked to two objectives. The first one is to keep our investment capability in the near future, to be able to invest in the area where we are strong, one more time, on the five pillars. The electronification, because of regulation, we will need to have some investment.
Secondly, to reduce the cost of our market activity, particularly, we have committed that on the direct cost, we will have a decrease of 10% of direct cost by 2022. To sum up, the first point, very important, is that we have a resilient fixed income model, which is based on the strength of the group and the strength of CACIB. One more time, it's very strong link with our clients.
The market activity is integrated in our financing and transaction activity to serve our clients. It's a continuum of what has been done in the other area. Third point is that we will streamline and transform the setup in order to invest in the area where we have strengths and where we want to push and develop our activity. I think now it's time for a coffee break for 10 minutes. Thank you. I think that we're all back now after this little coffee break. Let's have a few moments on the transversal levers, then financial targets for 2022, quick conclusion, and then the Q&A session. Let me start with one of the cornerstone of our DNA and our business, which is sustainable banking. Now, it's kind of a tough slide to present because everyone today is green.
Everyone is doing sustainable banking. If I just tell you that we're the leading bank in sustainable banking, you're probably going to shake head and say that you've heard that already 20 times. Well, it's the reality, and I think that we have been, because it's also Crédit Agricole, we're a bit of a special bank. We have been in this field for at least 10 years, day after day, at a moment of time where it was not that trendy to be in sustainable banking and in green financing. When it goes to rankings, we took the widest one, all green social sustainability bond, all currency. As you can see, there's not always a French bank which is number one worldwide. We've been number one in 2017, in 2018, and we're still, in 2019, the first bank in this field.
Logically, our market share is almost twice as big as our natural market share in this field. Of course, we finance the economy, global economy, and global economy is also a carbon economy. In our case, for example, 64% of our electricity generation portfolio, for example, today is already a renewable one. We have implemented a certain number of new things in order to boost this kind of business. One is the green liquidity factor, which is kind of an add-on that we give, a kind of a little sponsorship that we give on rates, in order to favor those investments. We're really now having some great credentials. It's not only just this. It's also trying to make this sustainable banking and the innovation join forces.
That's how you can see on the right side of the slide, we're also at the forefront of every new product, which is innovative product. It can be the first ever bond issuance of sustainability development goal. It was done with Enel, with the book runner. It's the transition private placement we did recently with AXA, and a couple of examples of this. As you can see, we mentioned that 70% of our business is outside France. Well, when Hong Kong, for example, is doing its inaugural green bond, and they choose two banks in the world, they choose Crédit Agricole as one of the two banks to bring them to the market. The same way, it's not only issuance, sophisticated issuance, it's also product link.
We have, for example, what we call the double green products that we sell in our networks, where there's the funding, which is green, and there's the indexation, which is green, too. You see, green is not just looking backwards, it's also looking at all the new things that can happen. Although we're the number one in this field, our ambition is not only to stay at least in the top five, but also to go much further, because we feel that this is nothing like marketing. This is really a very serious issue that we will face, and that the next generation will face. We're very strong on this. We want, as a bank, as citizen, my team, we want to be active in this field. We have committed to really respect the sustainable development scenario in line with the Paris Agreement.
In every sector, we looked at what was the impact of the sectors, with regards to those goals. We took, in some cases, some tough decisions. The one which is the most well-known now is our attitude vis-à-vis thermal coal, which we think is a real issue on which we'll probably get into more details during the Q&A. We've decided to be very strict in this, and not just looking, because that's in a way too easy, just looking at the photography, because once again, the economy is a carbon economy today. Also bringing inside our system a notation, a transition notation, which is a way to say to a certain number of our clients, "Listen, this is the picture you start with, and we're going to measure what is the direction.
We're going to measure what are the things that you're changing, in order to make your energy model evolve. We're going to have a relationship and a dialogue with our client, which is not only based on the photography, but also on that transition note that we implement. We have also, as you can see here, very precise commitments, especially a big one, which is to double the size of the green loan portfolio between now and 2022. Second lever, second transversal lever I wanted to speak of. It's the one on data. Again, a bit like green, how can we show that this is really something very concrete? I hope that you've seen that on this beginning of this presentation. We're a very pragmatic bank.
When it goes to digital, it's not about words, it's about concrete actions. If I may just insist quickly on that one. The fundamental belief that we have is that today we start, like almost every player, with IT organization where everything is bundled, where you have a big bundling between the legacy systems and the data, which are the underlying resources of those legacy systems. If we want to be digital, we have at one stage to first get into kind of a tedious, long, painful exercise, which is really to map and separate legacy systems and data. This, we have engaged in, is going to be a three, four-year journey, but gradually we make sure that our legacy systems and our data are in a way isolated. What is the rationale behind?
The rationale is that legacy systems are fantastic to do the life cycle of the product, the settlement of bonds or whatever you want to do with them, but they're not the right way to get into the new world where you have risk management, which is becoming more and more based on the data that you have, where the client needs, suppose that you have artificial intelligence, on what they're doing, on regulatory requests that are more and more asking you to have a huge data set ready and available. The data will be used for agile development, and the legacy systems will be used mainly for life cycle of products. Once we will have achieved that, definitely, we will have the ability to develop much faster. The time to market is going to be much faster, new solutions for our clients.
We will have, obviously, costs which will also be reduced because there's less reconciliation, because all the process are going to be much more seamless. It's going to be great also in terms of innovation, because once you have those data available, sky is the limit. Of course, each time that there's a new regulation, you won't have to transform your systems. We will just have to plug in new ways to get into the data and find what a regulator is asking us to do. That's the big thing about the digital. We are going to be one of the best digital bank because we're going to do first this journey of really having an architecture of our IT systems. Second thing which is very important is when it goes to innovation, again, let's be very concrete here.
My personal feeling as the CEO of this bank is that big organization are resilient because they're good at killing innovation. In a way, they try to avoid any attempt to make them change. A lot of people consider, and I think it's true, that if you want to really foster innovation, whether you buy some startups, because they've been able to create innovation outside big organization, or and maybe we'll do that from time to time or partner. The other way is to make sure that your innovation team is not embedded somewhere in your organization and is not systematically censored or arbitrated, when it goes to budget, when it goes to priorities.
The idea when I arrive, is to create an innovation team made of roughly 15 to 20 people reporting directly into me, which means that those people, when they want to create disruptive projects, when they want to have a data strategy, when they want to have a market watch or new tools, they come to me and I'm the one who is deciding if this is a priority or not. It's because this innovation team is really plugged into the CEO at the highest level of the company, the CEO and the Comex, that it really is able to generate innovation for CACIB. Those were the main things I wanted to show you on those things. Now let me pass the floor to Anne-Catherine, who's going to talk about a very important topic for us, which is the human project. Anne-Catherine?
Thank you, Jacques. Well, you may think it's quite unusual to see an HR addressing investors, but we believe in Crédit Agricole, in CACIB, that our people are our strength. When we say that, we mean that not only they're our assets, but they're our lever to reach our ambition and performance. While you can see our people roadmap behind me, which is on three dimension, I would like to focus on four items of this roadmap, which will allow us to answer the needs of all our stakeholders. I mean by our stakeholders, our clients, our regulators, our investors, our society, and of course, our collaborators. The first dimension, building the future. Jean-François Balaÿ, Didier Gaffinel, have mentioned all across their presentation that we have very strong expertise within this company. We have built it throughout the time, and we have been able to construct it.
We are continuously investing on their training and on making sure we keep it extremely engaged. We also need to build up new generation. For this, we are continuously investigating the market on a very selective manner to pick and choose the right competency we need for our future, and also to onboard juniors and new generation. I would like you also to notice how much we have been cautious to contain our workforce, allowing us to engage our people on a midterm, allowing our people to project themselves in an organization which has not been going through many stop and goes. You know how damaging could be social plan for a company, especially in France, when it's volunteering. You lose competency. You lose your best people. Well here, we have chosen to engage them and to invest on them.
On the second, it leads me to the second dimension of our people roadmap, which is engaging our staff. We have described a very strong organization, worldwide-based, reaching out to many different type of clients, offering a lot of experience sharing and possible way to develop themselves to our staff. Where we need to continue to make sure we enhance this cross-selling, and that we bet on our cross-fertilization, allowing everyone to use its talents. It's very important for us to tell you that we are clearly going to focus also on fostering further diversity into our workforce, allowing us to answer all our clients' expectations. On the third dimension, which is fostering a new deal, a new deal with the society, a new deal with our collaborators.
We want to make sure that we enhance our ability to welcome new way of working, and allowing as well our collaborators to explore new way of working. To give you an example, we are sending regularly with our startup mission projects, some of our collaborators to start up for four weeks to six weeks, for them to embed the way of working differently, and to bring it back into our organization. In the same time, we are going to welcome freelancers on IT developers in order to work on very agile manner on different projects that we have. All this, mixing our DNA, will also ensure the resilience of our organization. Last but not least, while we have strongly invested on impeccable conduct of our staff and train them, I would like you to look at one number. Having impeccable conduct is a must.
Having 73% of engaged staff in a company is not a given. Clearly, we want to be proud of this number, because this is showing, this figure is demonstrating that our people are clearly one of our differentiating factor and will allow us to reach our ambition. Thank you.
Thank you, Anne-Catherine. Good afternoon, everybody. I am Olivier Bélorgey, CIB CFO. All my colleagues have made wonderful teasers. Let's now talk about what you are all waiting for, figures and financial targets. Well, our financial targets are ambitious. Ambitious despite headwinds. Headwinds coming either from macroeconomic uncertainties, like low GDP growth, like low rate environment, like potential trade war with impact on Forex rates. Fortunately, CIB is not sensitive to the absolute level of the interest rates. Our portfolio are at variable rates, so we don't care about long-term rates. On short-term rates, we operate worldwide, including regions where short-term rates remain positive. In Eurozone, we tried term deposit with large corporate at negative rates, while sight deposits remain flat.
Market practices have evolved, and have introduced on the asset side, a floor on the EURIBOR index, which almost mitigates completely the impact of the floor on the liability side. Moreover, we will benefit from the tiering of the ECB. Concerning Forex sensitivity, if the euro dollar parity moves from 110 to 120, for example, our NBI on an annual basis will lose 1.2%, which is measurable, but at the same time, our expenses will decrease and our RWA will decrease as well. Meaning that at the end of the day, the sensitivity of our Return on Normative Equity is really minimum. In fact, like other European CIB, the main challenge for CIB comes from regulatory headwinds. Across the period of the plan, either coming from already transport Basel III recommendation on securitization, which will account for EUR 5 billion of increase of our RWA, 1st of Jan next year.
Other recommendation on input flow, on operational risk, or coming from the internal model review conducted by ECB or the TRIM exercise. The total amount of the impact or regulatory impact will represent EUR 21 billion, almost 20% of our RWA basis. Which mean that in order to keep a very high level of profitability, we need absolutely to have a very tight management of our scarce resources, RWA. To manage it, we have identified three levers. First one has been described by Didier and concerns strategic client selection. Through the very systematic process, EVA calculation, filtering any transaction and clients that Didier has described, we aim at reducing the allocation of RWA to our clients with a long-lasting, low profitability by approximately EUR 4 billion. We also, and Jean-François has described it, have enhanced our capacity to improve the rotation of the balance sheet.
We have identified assets that either through synthetic securitization, either through tailor-made solution that we can offer to real money investors, we can save assets with relative impact. On top of that, we will foster the optimization of our unwarranted RWA, like accounting to risk gaps. Managing scarce resources means also managing liquidity. For sustainability reasons, we want to limit the reliance on institutional investors, either on medium and long-term funding, and we intend to stabilize our loan-to-deposit ratio, meaning that any new funding requirements will have to be covered with new deposits. As well on the short-term funding, where we have a liquidity management, where we do not rely on money markets. For example, on our LCR or liquidity coverage ratio in USD, has been constantly positive over the last two years, even without the contribution of money market fund.
Concerning the management of the RWA, all these action will contribute to improve, on a pro forma basis, that is without model changes, our profitability on RWA by 70 basis points. In this context, macroeconomic uncertainties, but with limited sensitivity for CIB on interest rate and Forex, and scarce resources constraints. Our ambition in terms of NBI trajectory are realistic, with a 3% annual growth rate. 3% is in line with the worldwide GDP growth expected during the period of the plan. They are realistic and also align with the strategy described by my colleagues in terms of geographical analysis. Meaning that the main part of our growth will come from Asia, where we have historical presence and strength, and where the GDP growth is expected to be higher than in some other regions.
Middle East will also contribute, for sure with a lower starting point, but will contribute very efficiently as well. This strategy is also well-balanced, and Jacques has said that the growth will be spread homogeneously across our business line. As you can see, our financing solution activities, which currently represent 75% of our NBI, will also contribute 75% to the overall growth by 2022. As you can see as well, the achievement rate is in good shape. We are ahead of schedule, which was at least partially anticipated due to the rebound effect Pierre has mentioned. If you allow me, let's now have a look on the cost-income ratio, and let me insist on the cost-income ratio. Jacques has mentioned in his first presentation that the cost-income ratio of the CIB is highly dependent on its business model.
Our integrated business model of expertise has managed to deliver, over the last three years, a cost-income ratio around 55%, which is clearly below the average cost-income ratio of our French peers, even below the cost-income ratio of their pure financing activities. This is really a very good achievement. Our challenge for this plan is to keep and maintain this cost-income ratio at this level. Which is a challenge because, over the course of the plan, we need also to invest. This has been mentioned by my colleague. To invest and to control costs. Concerning cost, we have adopted a very pragmatic approach.
First of all, we have taken into account what we call the organic trends, meaning inflation and the increase in IT maintenance costs due to the very high level investment we've made these last two, three years, especially for regulatory reasons, MiFID, EMIR, compliance, and so on. To cover this evolution and these organic trends, we have even identified selling costs. That we have divided into 3 categories. First, around innovative solution, cloudification and agile development in order to improve the productivity of IT department itself, or artificial intelligence and robotics, in order to improve the productivity of our business and support function. Second category, process optimization, the systematic front-to-back review Pierre mentioned is part of it, and also a review of all our setup. The last one, being more traditional about sourcing and on organizational improvements, including offshoring.
In order to achieve all these cost-saving, we have created a cost efficiency unit, who is in charge of challenging every business, every organization, every process, in order to be able to improve our cost efficiency, and which is also in charge of steering and coordinating all these actions. This unit reports directly to general management in Comex. All these action allow us to keep room for investment, more or less split with a balanced manner between IT investment and business development, and keeping an average growth rate of our expenses at 1.3%. Concerning the cost of risk, our expert teams over the period 2012-2018, have been able to deliver an average cost of risk of 21 basis points. 2018 was clearly atypical, with a positive cost of risk, net reversal of EUR 61 million. This is not repeatable year after year, of course.
Over the course of the plan, we have adopted, I would say, a neutral approach, we have made the hypothesis that the cost of risk will progressively converge to the expected loss of our Basel III model. At the end of September, the cost of risk, EUR 101 million, one tenth of the cumulative hypothesis of cost of risk we've made over the period of the plan. To summarize our financial targets, how can we qualify them? For me, they are ambitious, realistic, and well-balanced. Realistic and well-balanced concerning our NBI trajectory. 3% growth rate is in line with expectation of worldwide GDP growth. Well-balanced because homogeneously split between all our business line.
Ambitious and realistic in terms of cost control, keeping a cost-income ratio at 55% or below 55%, with an increase of our cost of 1.3% annual growth rate, which is below the anticipation of inflation over the period, is ambitious. It is nevertheless realistic because we have ring-fence room and amount for investment for the future. Neutral in terms of cost of risk, with a gradual convergence towards the expected loss of our portfolio. Ambitious and realistic concerning RWA, EUR 10 million of increase of RWA between September 2019 and end of 2022 represents 50% of the regulatory impact that we face during the period, and definitely ambitious in terms of return on normative equity, with the intention to keep a return of equity above 10%, our organic growth mitigating and compensating the regulatory headwinds. At a wrap-up, I would say that our business model and our plan are resilient versus headwinds.
This plan aims, in its financial target, at absorbing regulatory and model changes and preserving our profitability. Our ambitious, realistic, and well-balanced financial targets are perfectly in line with our integrated business model of experts teams, which are our strengths. Thank you very much.
Time comes for me to make a conclusion. Thank you, Olivier, for giving a few figures in this presentation after us just doing the teaser. What can I say as a conclusion before we go to the Q&A? One year after joining this company, what strikes me is first, the level of expertise which is inside CACIB. It's really a bank where, in all the sectors that we described, the amount of expertise that we have is just amazing. I think also it's a company in which we work as one team, and that's why it was so important to have most of the Executive Committee today on the floor, because it's not a one-man show. This is just about making people work together, and it works.
I also think that the fact that we have a good level of profitability and a very sound strategy based on good balance and a good articulation between market activities and financing activity, it does not describe fully the structure. I think that CACIB is a company with kind of a special touch. Is it linked to our DNA? Is it linked to the very long-term view that we have on products, on clients, on employees? Is it our attachment to sustainable banking? I think that this company has really a special touch, and I'm very proud to be the CEO. Thank you very much, and happy to take any questions from the floor and from the web. Maybe let me ask just the Comex to come with me. Don't leave me alone.
Hi, it's Omar Fall from Barclays. Three questions, if I may. The first one is just on the revenue growth targets of 3%. That's kind of well ahead of the origination of about EUR 5 billion of risk-weighted assets. Could you just put a bit more meat on why you should grow the top line so far meaningfully ahead of net RWA growth, specifically given that if you look at your originate-to-distribute model, a lot of those gains have already been done. Even in your targets, I think you have it flat at 40% or so. The second question is just on the EUR 100 million revenue benefit from repos. I didn't really quite understand that.
If you could put a bit more color on that point, and maybe just give color generally on the repo market and what you're seeing, given that it leads to a lot of volatility to French bank balance sheets, and there's some regulatory changes around window dressing. I know that you've specifically given your leverage ratio on an intra-quarter basis since the beginning of the year, so I guess you agree there's changes coming there. Sorry, last question is just, you mentioned the benefit of tiering. My understanding was that tiering at group level wasn't very meaningful because you'd be sharing the benefits with the CRs and then at CACIB, as well. Maybe if you could put some figures on that. Thank you.
Yeah. Does it work? Oh. Thank you. No. There, it works now. Me, what I would suggest is on the repo that, Pierre, you take that question. On the tiering, it's gonna be more on Olivier. Can you just elaborate more on the first one, because I was not sure to understand, and want to answer precisely. What you're saying is that how do we explain the fact that we have 3% growth of our revenues versus the growth of our overall risk-weighted asset?
Correct. If you look at the I think you had it up at slide 51. You've only got 5 billion of RWAs increase from new origination, like 1% a year versus 3% revenue growth, just wondering.
Okay. Let's start with, maybe you, Olivier?
Yes. Thank you. Perhaps part of the answer is related to your second question, in fact, because repo activities consume almost no RWA or very little amount of RWA, part of our growth anyway is, I would say, if I simplify RWA free. Second, on market activities, Pierre will perhaps also elaborate on it. We intend to develop flow business on Forex, in emerging market and so on. That does not consume a lot of RWA as well. As I mentioned, we have some levers in order to free RWA, and these levers are relative. When we want to decrease the allocation of RWA to client with long-lasting low profitability, clearly these clients are dilutive. Getting rid of this improve anyway the profitability of our RWA.
When we make synthetic securitization, when we elaborate tailor-made solutions for real money investors, once again, we only do that when this is relative in terms of RWA consumption. We have effectively made a kind of clearance, or look at this kind of clearance, of course. What we have calculated is that improving or increasing our origination by around 10%-15%, and in the same time, getting or improving also the intimacy with the clients through all the initiatives Didier has mentioned, will allow us to increase our underwriting without increasing the final take. Meaning also that we will improve the rotation of our balance sheet without impact of the RWA. All these elements effectively let us confident that we will achieve that kind of target in terms of NBI without increasing more the RWA.
You want to take the one on the repo, Pierre?
Yes. On the repo, what we are pushing in terms of development, actually, as I said in the presentation, a lot of what we were doing was more plain vanilla type of repo, which is financing, whereby we are pushing now towards more the type of transaction like forward bonds, like collateral grade, which have the advantage to be, in terms of balance sheet, could be net at the level of the balance sheet. Which mean that the overall envelope of increase that has been allowed, because we are working in the constraint on the repo side, has been maintained, we do not expect any big significant growth of the balance sheet for this activity, despite revenue which are basically EUR 100 million higher for 2022 compared to where it is today.
The last one is on tiering, Olivier.
Yes, concerning tiering. I won't speak Throughout the group, it has been decided that each entity will manage its tiering and benefit or not from it. It's coherent with the presentation of our result by business line and big business lines. For CACIB, as long as we keep the floor on site deposit for clients, which cost us some money, there is no matter and no reason for giving the benefit of the tiering to the clients. In fact, we already give them for some years. The implementation and the introduction of the tiering right now by ECB will effectively at CACIB level be positive.
Next question.
Thank you. Guillaume Tiberghien at Exane BNP Paribas. The first question relates to your slide 20, where you talk about the EVA per client, and you charge cost of equity. I was curious to know how much cost of equity you charge, and also how you calculate what is exactly the maintenance cost. Is it like a fraction of the overall cost? The second question, when you talk about 10% ROE, obviously you're only allocating 9.5%, but the group needs 11. Actually, it's nearer 8.5% ROE on a normal capital allocation. Also, I was wondering whether the ROE includes or is before the AT1 coupon. A third question relates to the originate-to-distribute. Is there a glass ceiling about how much you can actually reduce the RWA?
Could you not become, in 10 years, a bank that actually doesn't have RWA? I'm exaggerating a bit, but this is the question. Final question, when you say you wanted to cut the market activities direct cost by 10%, what is direct cost? What proportion of the overall cost of market activities is that? Thank you.
Okay. I'm not sure we're going to be able to answer all the things in detail because we don't necessarily disclose that level. Let's try to do it. Maybe first on the first one, which is the EVA. I don't think, Olivier, we disclose the rate that we use on the cost of our capital internally, but I don't know if we can do it.
No, I don't think we disclose it. It's clear entries market practices.
Let me say that can think that the answer is a bit too vague, but in a way, it's not really the issue. The real issue with the EVA is to shift culturally the bankers from looking at revenues into looking at something which is revenue minus cost of capital. You can say, okay, it's 10%, 9%. You can take whatever you want as cost of capital. The mere fact that you say, okay, an RCF, okay, it's good money, you make some revenues. No, in reality, in RCF, you destroy EVA. This just cultural change, changes completely the dynamic of the relation between the banker and his client, regardless of the level of cost of capital that you put. Second question is on the maintenance cost.
There are many ways, and you've seen that we have put it some blank on that one because we think that it's a bit of a internal recipe that we don't want to necessarily to give to our competitors. Let me just say fundamentally, that you have two ways of looking into those maintenance costs. The first one is you look into the marginal cost of a client, which is fundamentally, I look at, okay, what does it cost to add just one client or to reduce our portfolio by one client? Fundamentally, we all have in mind that the cost base is in a way, is not very elastic. The second way is to look at the average cost per client. You take the whole cost base, and you divide by the number of clients. In reality, there's nothing right or wrong.
There's two philosophies, but one is a philosophy in which you create growth because you take a marginal cost. You encourage the bankers, when they have a client with whom they make EUR 300, EUR 400, EUR 500, you encourage them to move to EUR 1 million or to EUR 2 million. The other one is the one which is in a way punitive because you start by a cost base of whatever, EUR 1 million per client. In that case, you can encourage the bankers to say, "You know what? I'm making half a million EUR. It's not profitable. Instead of fighting to get above the threshold, I'm going to abandon the game." It's a real philosophy of, although there's no right and wrong on that one. Second thing is the return on equity, what kind of level of capital that you put. Once again, it's very standard.
Today, the way the group calculates it is 9.5%, if I'm correct, Olivier. You can just make the math if you use 10 or 11, it just changes. Does it change fundamentally the equation? I don't think so, because today, for example, we have 12% return on equity. If you take whatever, 11% of capital in front of your risk-weighted asset, you're going to go down to 10.5. You're still a double-digit bank, corporate investment bank, in the current environment. One question was direct cost maybe, but I'm not sure we disclose that, Pierre.
I don't think we do. I'm not going to disclose the amount of direct cost for GMD.
To be honest, why do we keep that KPI? We want to really have people who have levers on what they should achieve on their KPI. For a front office, the first direct thing that you could do is your direct cost. Of course, after, at the level of Pierre, it's about also making sure that when we run new projects, when we make new investment, the indirect costs are under control. That's why we take this KPI, although we don't disclose the percentage it represents. Maybe, Jean-François, can you be more frugal and can we be a bank with almost no risk-weighted assets?
The question was not no weighted assets. It was glass ceiling. No weighted assets.
First of all, there are several ways maybe to answer. The first one, we implemented the D2 model three years ago. Since we implemented the D2 model, we continuously increased revenue, arrange facilities. I mentioned earlier that we developed different channels of distribution, and notably the ones where we are just arranging facilities and putting in relation investors and clients. I would also add that when you're arranging transactions, they don't have an infinite validity, and we perfectly know what the average life for corporate facilities and also structured finance facilities. We can have a project, let's say, with a maturity of 20 years, they never stay 20 years. They normally are refinanced in a very short time because there are additional CapEx, because they change from one hand to another, because they are refinanced, especially on projects which are investment grade.
They're refinanced in a very short time with the bond markets for its capital issuance, can be project bond, and so on. There are plenty of ways to monitor this rotation of the assets. In fact, what we're following, we're following our clients. We provide financing solutions. As it's mentioned, Olivier mentioned as well that we are developing strategic securitization. There are plenty of ways which we are still developing. Glass ceiling, I hope not. I don't think so.
Maybe if I can just add one point. The beauty of the model is that, because we focus on real asset and corporates, we're able to originate loans and transaction with a good yield. The positive thing is that on the other side of the fence for financial institutions, they're currently desperate for yield. In a way, they're very interested in doing business with us because we have this angle in which we originate transaction with a good yield. There's a kind of a virtuous circle, which could, as you were mentioning, at one stage, help us further to reduce risk-weighted assets. Another question from the floor?
Hi, Matt Clark, Mediobanca. Can I ask a question about your regulatory impact on risk-weighted assets? I think you had a EUR 12 billion from memory increase there, which seems quite low given you've got both TRIM on low default portfolio to come, considering the EBA impact studies that have been done Europe-wide tend to have quite high impacts on market risk, which I'm assuming is mostly going to be in CACIB, and then also on CVA impacts. Perhaps you could just shed a bit more light on why that EUR 12 billion figure is so low and what assumptions you've made in terms of CVA exemptions and that kind of thing that might be helping you out there.
Olivier, on the 12 and 12 plus nine.
We have effectively taken into account the fact that the CVA exemption will go on. After that, you have to analyze it, not only the EUR 12 billion, but the EUR 12 plus the EUR 9. In a sense, the internal model review by ECB is front-running some of the so-called Basel IV regulatory impact. If we don't have any model review from the ECB, the regulatory impact would be higher. In a sense, it has to be analyzed in a common way.
Just to be clear then, so for you, TRIM is within the model changes bucket there rather than the regulatory changes bucket?
It's not exactly the same. It's a way to classify it. The impact will come through the internal review that are conducted by ECB, and we classify it in the model change. After that, it will come through application of Basel Committee recommendation, and we classify it as a regulatory impact. If we had no impact or no ECB review, the strict application of Basel recommendation would be higher. It has to be analyzed in an aggregated way, to be honest.
Also on operational risk, have you assumed ILM equals one or any of those things?
We don't disclose the exact number for operational risk, but it has an impact, or it will have an impact, but rather limited. On top of that, you should have in mind that our market activities have very low risk consumption. The impact on our market activities of all these evolution is rather limited compared to many competitors. At the end, if you take all the evolutions, EUR 21 billion, almost 20% of our RWA, is more or less in line with what is expected for European banks.
Thank you very much.
Hello, Jean Pierre Lambert from KBW. I was wondering if you could help us a bit with what I could call the Rubik cube, which is the interrelationship between CIB and the rest of the group. You told us that 50% of CIB.
revenues come from 1,100 customers out of the 4,000, it's at slide five. On the other hand, we know the regional banks approximately account for 10% of the revenues. What is the return on the Caisse Régionale de Rhône-Alpes? What kind of arm's length relationship you have? Secondly, if you share these customers, are you left with the low margin vanilla product and someone else in the group, like the regional banks, offer payment services which are lucrative and so on. You're kind of loss leader. I'm taking an extreme example. The second question is related to the RONE again, but for capital markets. We know it's about 5%-6%, depending whether you take 9.5% or 11%, whatever. Do you see an improvement? I didn't see this in the presentation, do you expect an improvement?
Also, what is the RONE on the repo activities, the new ones, you kind of expanding to more exotic versions. Thank you.
Let me answer the first one, and maybe I'll let Pierre answer on the second one. On the first one, first, I think that the slide might be a bit misleading. What we're saying here is that our clients are not just clients of CACIB. In most of the cases, our clients are also having touching points with the rest of the group. It can be that we can bank, for example, a big retailer in France, and this retailer will also be a client of the Caisse Régionale, or we can bank with a agribusiness company, and they also have a presence in Egypt and the rest of the group. It can be small, it can be big, but what we're saying here is that 50% of our clients are also having another touching point in the group.
To be honest, I think that we should improve that. We should be in a situation where, apart from people who just have to dealing with CACIB, that each time we have a CACIB client, we make sure that the rest of the group is also able to sell them consumer credit for people who are distributing products, or leasing for people who are in need of leasing, or asset management with Amundi, and so forth and so on. That's the first thing. That's why we say we have half of our clients which also have touching point. With regards to the relation with the Caisse Régionale and are we leaving on their side the juicy business and keeping only the low margin, I would really want you to have this lesson to the customer because they tell me exactly the opposite.
They say, "Listen, you leave me with the bad load, the loans, and you take the juicy business." I think that there's an equilibrium in our relation, but fundamentally, no one is really losing there. In some cases, they have the products such as you described, the payments, for example, which are gonna be done locally. In other cases, we're gonna do the M&A, we're gonna do the structuring. It's a pretty balanced business. What is very important is that there is probably a nice potential there. If you think about it, we have 30%-ish of the market in France. We have a presence in Italy, and especially in the north of Italy, which is the richest part of Italy, which is incredibly granular.
On that one, if we're really able to build stronger and stronger bridges between this deep network and the product offering that we have on our side, it will be fantastic for the rest of the group. It will be also great for us because when I see roughly five clients per week, I see 200 clients per year. When I go and see a private equity fund, for example, they love the idea that through Crédit Agricole, we are able to give them primary deals of small and medium-sized company in the network where, because of our Caisse Régionale, we know the company, we know the CEO, we know that he wants or she wants to retire, we know the kind of price range, the sector, and so forth and so on.
There's a lot of synergies that can be generated, and trust me, we're not leaving the juicy business on one side or the other. It's a teamwork there.
Sorry-
There was a question on-
The question on the ROE on the repo. I think this is something very important and quite different from the others. We are not looking at the business and not looking at the ROE for the repo business because we strongly believe, and this is really the key message, is that if we're doing repo, is that we know that this is something that serve a client. We will use that as a leverage to do something else, and we will use that to sell the client in front of everything. We're looking at the ROE globally. We're looking at the ROE per customers, but I will never, ever do a repo transaction just because I think it could be juicy just for one client that the bank is not serving.
This is very important that we're looking at the business as talking about the repo as a business which is serving the rest of the client of CACIB. This is true actually for the full setup on GMD, which is here not to develop and to try to extract some value from the market, but really to support the client base of CACIB and the group.
If I can just add one thing. There is one thing which is interesting in the slide of Olivier on the cost to income, where we compare, I think the cost to income, our cost to income, which is 50-ish, and one of our peers. We don't compare it just with our peers. We compare also within our peers between the financing and the market activity. It's interesting because even if you compare with the financing activity of peers, we're much below. That shows that, so in our case, it can be frustrated. You can say, "Hey, but why don't you separate market and financing, it will be clearer." No, it's one team in front of the client, and when you have this
You're even below than just the pure financing activities of some of our competitors. I think that's where you really show that it's the blending that creates the competitive advantage. Another question.
Yes. Two clarification and two question. Clarification regarding slide 15. When you talk about senior bankers and investment bankers with only one point of entry, do you mean that investment bankers are in charge institutional clients and senior bankers are in charge corporate? What exactly does it mean? I don't see the difference between what we call senior bankers and investment bankers. Regarding slide 32, could you give us a clarification or an example about what we were thinking about when you talk about a banking pool and new solution of partnership? Can you give us just an example just to give us an idea of what you mean? Regarding question, I would like to know, with your new eyes on the company, you're quite new.
After the restructuring, regarding the equity business, which has been more or less sold, what do you think of that now, a few years later? Do you think it's something that is missing in your global setup for your customers? Regarding IT platforms, we know that Société Générale or BNP, for instance, are promoting a lot their IT tools, like Cortex, for instance, or SG Markets. Where do you stand from this point of view in terms of IT tools to delocalize to customers? My last question is regarding NEA. You talk a lot of Asia, and Asia, a better growth in NEA. In what countries, what is the basis? Is it a small basis? That's why the growth is high? What are exactly your ambitions there? Thank you.
Okay, maybe to answer your first question about the difference between a senior banker and investment banker. A senior banker at CACIB is expected to deliver and to sell to the clients the overall product offer of the bank, which means financing, market activities, and advisory. Investment bankers are mainly, as I've mentioned, industry groups, sector bankers, M&A and ECM bankers. These bankers are more, I would say, transactional-driven, and they are really, with this new organization, closer and closer to the senior banker to help them typically to elevate the strategic dialogue with the senior banker. The senior bankers are, the client franchise of the bank is both corporates and FI, and we have senior bankers for corporates and senior bankers for FI, for banks, insurance, and SSA, mainly.
Investment bankers are subordinating.
They are not exactly subordinated.
Subordinated to Didier.
We have one single reporting line, for sure, but then they are collaborating. The senior banker is the main and the single entry point within the client organization. Having said that, there is a balance, and actually, most of the senior bankers and investment bankers, especially when dealing with a strategic, I would say, transaction are, I would say, going together to see the clients.
Did you want to answer also on the M&A?
Well, on the MEA, as Olivier mentioned, we have an ambition of delivering plus 7.5% over the midterm plan. We have a long-standing presence in the region. The development will be mainly based and focused on two sectors, energy and infrastructure. There is a lot to do, and we have these structured finance teams specialized in these sectors. In terms of client approach on SSA, you have a lot of wealthy sovereign funds that we know well. The second, I would say, growth driver will be to safely increase our footprint to better serve the many MEA, I would say, clients of the regions for their outbound, I would say, needs, typically investments, for example, in Europe or other regions.
On the partnership, the idea is to say in some of our business, we see some new joiner, very agile, we are able to provide technology which is very efficient. I strongly believe that instead of trying to fight against this guy, doing partnership to do some part of what we are doing today, trying to integrate the model and what they are doing into our system, is a way to globally reduce our cost to be able to, what I was saying, to give more room to invest in other product where we have some strengths and differentiator.
For some of the product whereby it's typically flow business with very low return, very low margin, it's better to find a partnership than to stop the activity, because stopping activities is always very damageable in term of relationship with the client, in term of image of what you give in front of your competitors and the staff also. Doing some partnership in some business where we know that technology, where we know that the margin are very low and it's very difficult to stay competitive, it's a way for us to continue to give the service to a client in an efficient manner.
As we're talking of partnership, let me answer the question on the IT tools. To be honest, I don't know exactly what is the strategy of our competitors when it goes to selling outside their IT tool and some of their products. There's no good and bad strategy. There is a strategy which is adapted to who you are. I think that in our case, I wouldn't feel comfortable in a way, having an IT service business within CACIB, in which I would sell a IT tool, and I would maintain this IT tool, and I would do the marketing of it. It is very different to have a tool for yourself and to sell it to one, two, three, 100 clients. Today, it is not our priority. As you have seen today, we have so many things in which we can generate growth.
There's so many clients, geography, products, that opening a line of business, which would be to sell our IT tools, is not our priority. If some are more advanced on that, good for them. When it goes to the equity business, it's interesting because you say, is this something which is missing in your remit? First, it's not missing in the sense that we have today, an equity and an equity derivative business. We offer, for example, for corporate clients who have stakes in companies or shareholding or whatever, we offer them solution, we adapt our products. This works. Also in terms of investment, we have a capacity to produce and structure transaction. What is important is the size of what you have and can you focus on the real area of interest.
My background is equity derivatives, and of course, a lot of people were expecting me to develop this, and this is not my intention for a very basic reason. If you look, for example, at the investment product in equity derivative, there is the client, and then there is the network, and then there is the person who is structuring, and then there is the engine of performance, the trader that goes into the risk. Where is the margin? The margin is mostly on the client side, on the distribution side, on the structuring side, and a little bit on the trading side. Today, we are much more comfortable in maximizing our efforts in inventing products, in structuring things, in being able to have a good connection with the network, the incredibly strong networks of Crédit Agricole, of Amundi.
We don't necessarily need to have huge books on equity derivative because we will always find in the market people who are ready to take this risk with a margin, but which I consider is a small one, and keep during 10 years correlation products or risk. You see, it's not missing, it's just that we focus on areas of the value chain where we can have a real impact and a very strong return on equity. This we don't have intention to change. There's growth there. We're still plenty of things we can do and just focusing on that.
Hi. Tarik El Mejjad from Bank of America. I have two questions, please. On competition. It's very good opportunity to have all you guys around. Can you tell us about how do you feel competition from the large U.S. banks, in constraints of Europe, both probably we know about global markets, but more on the financing bit as well from the pricing aspects, but also balance sheet commitments, given that they probably have less constraints as European banks have at the moment. Second question is on ROE, again, on the CIB division. If you assume 9.5% okay, target 10%, that's probably just covering cost of equity. We can debate what's covered with equity, but let's say covers cost of equity.
When you look at the group level or CASA level where other divisions deliver much higher returns, what's the discussion you have with the CEO in terms of, are they asking you to do more efforts on costs, on growth, or you can say, "Look, this is what it is. This is a business. This is maximum that the business can deliver." From analytical point of view, because of synergies, this is actually what you really deliver. What's the discussion actually? Having a business and balance sheet commitment to business that dilute the overall possibilities, it's counterintuitive. Thank you.
Maybe Jean-François on the competition of U.S. banks, and maybe Pierre also from the market side.
Naturally, first of all, we're evolving in a very competitive market, and this competition is not coming only from U.S. banks. If we mention event-driven transaction, corporate transaction, U.S. banks are very present, like other banks there, and it's very competitive. However, you've seen our league tables in loan syndication and you've seen that we are in the top ranking, so we resist to competition. The second point maybe is what type of financing we are arranging. I mentioned earlier on all the real asset financing we're organizing, and you need expert there, and you cannot invent yourself an expert. That's where an area where U.S. banks are not that present. The competition is more here, I would say between European banks and other banks, not so much U.S. banks.
We get competition of U.S. banks, not only in Europe, we've got them in U.S. as well, but also in Asia. When we play in U.S., we play on our niche market, because we're not competing with U.S. banks, which are achieving on 80%-90% of the market. Where do we play there? We play with project finance. Here again, our expertise in asset financing, and that's also Latam. In Asia, that's project finance. That's similar transaction. Yes, U.S. banks are very competitive. They try to get in some markets, but we do resist well.
For the capital market activity, this is mostly the same, right? We know that they are very big, that they are very aggressive. One key differentiator for us is the relationship, and the deep relationship that we have with the client. One more time, when you look at our model, which is basically based on the fact that we want to serve the client globally, this is something that sometimes the American bank doesn't have. Yes, they are more aggressive in terms of pricing, more aggressive in terms of maybe product, but the quality or the deep relationship that we have is something which is still a competitive advantage, and help us to develop and to push our business.
On the question, I know Jérôme wants to add something on it, but I may just clarify one thing. There are two ratios, there are two percentages, which apply here. The first one is what I call the conversion percentage. When we say 9.5%, it's a conversion percentage. It means if you have 100 of risk-weighted assets, you have 9.5 of capital. In a way, it's not about the return that you make, it's about the amount of safety net that you want to have. That's why I was saying you can put 9.5, you can put 10, you can put 11. In a way, it's just a metric.
There's a second ratio, which is the one that you mentioned, or yield, which is, okay, once you've calculated the amount of capital that you use, what is the return that you want to have? In a way, you can have 11% conversion ratio and still say, okay, with the kind of business that we've explained today, which, to be honest, is a very resilient, stable, low-risk business. You can take a conversion ratio of 11 and say, on that one, I'm happy with 9% return on capital because of the current environment. I just want to make the distinction between the two things. With regards to the CEO, where Jérôme presents, I can tell you that he's asking me every time to reduce my cost and to increase my revenues.
That's for sure. I think you must understand that CASA is not a portfolio of businesses in which we would arbitrate regularly, selling the businesses with low returns and buying businesses with higher returns. CASA and Crédit Agricole Group is a global business in which we have different activities working together, feeding the global growth of our revenues. This global business model has a global target in terms of return on equity. This is especially the case for the listed vehicle, on which we have set, by the way, a new target in terms of return on tangible equity, which is now at 11%, when it was at 10% in the previous Medium-Term Plan. Clearly we have raised our ambitions.
What we have said when we have set the minimum returns that each business line must meet, we have said that if each of our business lines meet its individual target, which is designed simply to define its capacity to generate revenues and results, considering all the regulatory constraints, this will make it possible for the listed vehicle globally to meet its overall target. You must not assess the profitability of each business line like you would do in a portfolio of activity, being able to sell one activity again and to buy another one. Simply, it's the combination of all our businesses that is generating globally the growth and the profitability of the listed entity. Of course, we are pushing every business line to improve as much as possible its profitability.
Bear in mind that CACIB has to stand in the coming two years, an increase of more than 20% of its capital consumption, i.e., RWAs, for regulatory reasons. Obviously this is putting a certain constraint on its capacity to generate return for the duration of the coming two to three years. It's clear that when we are going to work on the next Medium-Term Plan, we are going to raise again the hurdle for CACIB. That's for sure.
Hi there, it's Kevin Viraja, HSBC. Can I go back to the client EVA dashboard and just ask, how many actual client relationships have you exited since you introduced that dashboard? Just to get a feel for how disciplined you're really being, in terms of client-by-client productivity. A question for you, Jacques, having been here a year, how would you rate that particular EVA dashboard versus the equivalent tools at some of the previous firms that you've worked at, in terms of really pinpointing relationship-by-relationship profitability? Thanks.
Well, maybe to answer the first question, actually, we are using profitability indicators for a long time, and we have already in the past had to manage our RWAs, made job of either exiting, well, also very important, having some action plan to reduce RWAs with the clients. I would say that it's a combination of both. It's still going to be a combination of both. Well, what I can tell you, and Olivier mentioned, in the financial section, that we intend to globally decrease, thanks to the client selection and using these tools to reduce our RWAs with this action of about EUR 4 billion over the Medium-Term Plan.
To answer your question on how does that compare with what I've seen or implemented elsewhere, to be honest, the tool in itself is not nuclear science. Face it, you can do it on an Excel spreadsheet. It's just you take the revenues, you calculate your risk-weighted assets, you deduct the cost of capital, the maintenance cost, and so on and so forth. It's no magic there. What is really difficult is first to have it on an automatic basis, to be able to roll that out on thousands of clients, so that the banker, when he's discussing with his management, when he goes to see a client, he has this plug-and-play. This is really something in which you need to have robust system, and we are rolling that out, so this works.
The second thing is, you need to change the culture, as I was mentioning, of the banker, so that they understand that it's not, "Oh, I did a great year. I made plus 10% of revenues." No, it's, "I did a great year because I've incremented by 20% my EVA." On that one, it takes time. I think we're good. I will not make comparison with the previous firms in which I was. Definitely, the trend is very speedy. People really catch that. Maybe just one remark. I'm not sure I see it correctly because it's very far away, but there's an interesting thing, for example, in this EVA graph. If you look, for example, I think that on that one, we have, for example, a dud in the pie chart, which is very important, is big, and still the client is very profitable.
Coming back to what Pierre was saying on market. It's a good example because it shows that you can have on a given client, D2O is mainly the RCF business, not only, it's also Distribute-to-Originate. You can have a client in which you have a certain number of products which are not making good money in the sense that they have a negative EVA, they have a low return on equity, and still the client is incredibly profitable like this one. Why? Because that's where it makes the link with the market activity. If you look at businesses too separately, you say, "You know what? I'm not going to give RCF to my corporate clients. I'm not going to do this product because individually, it doesn't pay." The reality is that if you cut an RCF to a client, they cut all the business.
If you say to the client, "You know what? You need the FX, you need this and this, but you know what? I'm not interested. Go elsewhere." At stage 1, he will not bank with you. That's where, it's the blending of the products and not the individual profitability which matters. Olivier, you wanted to add something?
Yes. I cannot make any comparison with previous, or other banks. One point, I don't know if you notice it, the logo's thing . One, it is distributed to bankers, and all the figures are provided by Finance and validated by Finance.
Hi, Delphine from J.P. Morgan. Just two questions. The first one is to come back a little bit on your EVA and ROE. There doesn't seem to be any mention of leverage and balance sheets or return on total assets or total leverage. Is that because there's no focus at the group level? Just trying to understand a little bit, if you're trying, half of the growth in terms of revenues is going to be driven by fixed income or repos, part of it is repos. Should we expect the balance sheet size to grow? Although your risk-weighted assets are going to stay broadly stable because of optimization. The second question is on your regulatory impacts, Basel IV in particular, which is going to have quite a bit of an impact on structured finance.
Which businesses adjustments have you done in terms of maybe exiting some of the activities given the impact, or have you not done that yet? Just trying to understand the adjustments you've done ahead of Basel IV. Thank you.
Perhaps in terms of balance sheet growth, effectively, the balance sheet will grow. After that, at Groupe Crédit Agricole, you know that the leverage ratio is very high, above 5.5%. Clearly at Groupe Crédit Agricole, the leverage ratio, we consider it as a backstop ratio, and we do not manage and fix targets on the leverage ratio. Anyway, we have plenty of room in terms of leverage ratio. Pierre mentioned it, that's one of the strengths of Crédit Agricole, and that's one of the strengths on which our market activity can leverage in order to do business with clients and to improve the profitability. Effectively, I don't think that balance sheet size is really a problem for us. That doesn't mean that we do not manage the balance sheet, that we do not take care of doing profitable business anyway.
Effectively, the balance sheet size is not a real problem for Crédit Agricole.
Maybe a few word on the repo, just to give you some element of sort. When the big move on the repo in the U.S. happened back in September, we were not affected at all by this move, which means that the size of balance sheet, we have even on the repo, very strong constraints in term of where we should lend, what is the size of what we can allocate to our customers. This is very much something that is monitored on a daily basis.
Concerning Basel IV and our financing activities. As you've seen on slide 42, we're giving details of the impact of regulatory changes.
The impact of the model changes both on financing and some of the securitization business as well. As you've seen, this is compensated by rotation of asset and optimization of our portfolio. We do not intend at all to exit some of our activities. Each of the structured finance activities, we have a deep knowledge, and we are distributing those assets. What we continue to deepen is the D2O model. As mentioned earlier by Jacques, we have two types of clients. We have our borrowers, where we are arranging structuring facilities, and we have also investors. Investors, they are continuing to be very attracted by those assets. What we have not computed here in our forecast is an evolution of pricing. We assume that pricing will not evolve.
I think, that's also something which could move up, which is difficult to quantify right now in view of the competition in the market. Clearly, we want to continue and keep each of the engines we have in terms of financing.
Jean from Goldman Sachs. I had two questions. The first one is relating to the advent of banking union and maybe the lessening of London as financial center as per the recent op-ed of the German finance ministry. If, as and when that takes place, it seems that Paris is growing as a financial center in Europe. You've yourself said that one of your USPs as Crédit Agricole CIB was the depth of your relationship with the local clients, or the clients where you are present across your network. I just wanted to understand from an HR perspective, risk to retention, as in when other firms move more here and try to get more granular, so that they've all described that they want to do. How essentially you make sure that essentially no player is bigger than the club. My second question was on the green thing.
Natixis came in with some green ratings, which I think were interesting to many, with essentially promoting inside the portfolios rotation towards more green through that angle. Another bank, UniCredit, I think recently had a conference call saying they don't want to do green rating because they don't want to incentivize the wrong risk attitude. I guess both of these strategies carry their own risk in terms of retention of the bad credit or over-allocation to the good credit. What's your position here?
Let me start maybe with the green rating, and then give the microphone to Anne-Catherine on the HR part. On the green rating, you're right. Perfectly right. There are some people who are in favor, some people who disagree with it. My natural inclination is to say, like UniCredit said, that you can have a green liquidity factor. You can add a little bit of money to the financing of green projects, because at the end of the day, you are the one who masters your financing, and if it costs you a little bit, you can do that. When it goes to risk-weighted assets, because the green factor is twisting the calculation of the risk-weighted asset, you can do whatever you want, but at the end of the day, this is not an incentive. It's a measurement of risk.
The measurement of risk, the regulator, at the end of the day, he puts a figure on it, and there's no way you can escape that. You mix, in a way, your strategic need to support green financing with a risk measurement. I think that personally within CACIB, I will not implement that, because I think that once you start to have kind of a blur line into an indicator risk-weighted asset, which is supposed to measure risk and now measures risk, but lowers down the level of risk when it's a green risk, I think that you can be in trouble. I'm sure that the people who do this, they have a second level of control that enables them to go back into a measurement, which is pure risk, regardless of being green or gray.
With regards to London, before leaving the Anne-Catherine answer to Paris, I think that we have to be also clear on the fact that, I've lived six years in London. London is a fantastic place. It's a fantastic place where there's a huge talent pool, and there are a certain number of resources that we will leave in London because that's where a certain of talents are being recruited and can be recruited tomorrow. Our vision is not to say that after Brexit, one market will disappear, and everybody will move to Frankfurt or Madrid or Paris. London will, I think, still be a place where there's going to be plenty of talented people. When it goes to retaining the French people, or not the French people, the people in Paris, Anne-Catherine?
Yes. I think it's always a chance to be on a competitive market. It's a chance for our people because it pushes us to be better as managers, as HRs, as leaders. It also allows us to challenge ourselves on the way we motivate, we retain, we responsibilize our people, and I believe that HR is about care and monitoring, so we have to make sure that we allow our people to project themselves in the long term. This is probably a huge difference with being working in an American bank in Paris, is that you are probably less able to project yourself in Paris for the long term.
I don't say that it's a handicap, I believe that for our experts, for the team who have been loyal, and we say 20 years on average in some area of our business where we are very strong at, well, it's not that attractive. We need to pay specific attention to juniors, because those guys want an international experience. Of course, an American bank is probably very attractive on that point. We have to make sure that leveraging on our cross-geographical presence, allowing our people, wherever they are based in the world, to have an international experience and exposure in their day-to-day, is allowing them to believe that Crédit Agricole is a great place to be.
A bank with a human face, as we are trying to show, and intending to live in our day-to-day way to manage people, is clearly for us a differentiating element towards some of the competitors.
I think at some point, Lauren for UBS, sorry. At some point you said that one in 10 existing customer were cash management customers. What is the ratio you think you have by 2022? Perhaps to follow up on Jean's questions around the green financing, what's today the share of manufacturing and fossil energy financing you have within your total portfolio? Also what are the metrics that you put in place to measure the achievement of your climate change policy?
It's a careful answer. The first one was on cash management. We are at one out of 10, and you want to get to 10 out of 10 probably in 2026.
As I mentioned, we have high investment in cash management. We want to be local in some countries. We've got India, which we started, China for 2020, 2021, and also France. Europe will start next year. We think that the proportion, we at least want to multiply by two the revenues. That's one of 10. I would say we didn't count that way. We look at the clients. We looked at the setup in the countries we are going to implement cash management. There is the local but also the overlay business we can do at the regional level. What we calibrated is, which offering can we embark and propose to our clients and what revenue it will bring. It's a different approach.
By giving the image of one out of 10, which is what we have today, it just shows our potential we have there. It's not only to develop cash management in itself, brings also stickiness with clients. You're on the day-to-day banking. You can also generate some liquidity, and that's quite useful as well in terms of monitoring, because that's stable. Corporate deposits are quite stable, so that's also improving our positioning. We see a lot of attraction there to cash management. Second question about fossil energy. We've given some information about our portfolio in oil and gas. It's at end of September EUR 26 billion. That's certainly a sector which is prominent in our activity. We are accompanying as well our clients.
I mentioned earlier project finance, and if you can see on the slide, I was mentioning that 30% of our project finance activity was renewable activity. If we look at the growth this year in terms of revenues, the power team did see a very positive growth. Yes, fossil energy will be still, when you look at the statistics, in 10, 20 years, fossil energy will still be there. We are accompanying our clients, I think, as well in that way. We're also accompanying them in the transition.
Question?
It's at 26. Sorry, it's 21.6 and not 26.1 concerning the oil and gas. Thank you, Olivier.
I have a question on the AML. I know you exited the deferred prosecution agreement last year. Do you still have to work a lot more on procedures for AML? Your group CFO was saying last year that as far as AML is concerned, the past is unpredictable. Do you spend a lot of time looking at the past of what you may have done that could still cause some issues, or as far as you're concerned that's done and dusted?
Yeah, of course. AML, is one of the aspect of compliance, on which we focus a lot and a lot. We revisit every single issue we have on operational risk, including AML, to make sure that we don't repeat the same kind of mistakes. You're never at zero risk in those areas. There are some business models which are more exposed or less exposed. The fact that even when we go in some geographies that can be a bit complex, we are there mainly, as Didier was saying, with the main multinationals expanding in those countries, or we are helping the very, very big names in those countries. We don't have the intent to become an SME player in India and Russia, or not even in Germany, which is a country that we know much better.
With regard to AML, our business model, the geography in which we operate, in a way should protect us a little bit. The areas in which I think on AML, you run probably more risk is on trade finance, for example, in which you have a certain number of things that you have to really monitor carefully. Maybe you can give, Jean-François, an example of, it's not really AML, it's more sanctions. Do you know, for example, that when it goes to ships, Jean, you want to explain what we do on vessels?
When you have a trade and you have the goods which are carried through maritime routes, we do follow the route of the goods. We know where the boat is going to stop. If there is, let's say, you have a defined route and the boat is stopping at one area, you know that the unofficial offloading of boats, we can see that. You can check documentation. I mean, the issue on documentary credit is that you have to be very precise. You have to look at the correct formalities, the bill of lading. You have to look at all the documents, which boats, and so on. I mentioned earlier that we are investing in a platform, komgo, as we are using the blockchain.
There, it will be very useful to be even more complete, secure, and to make sure that you can, let's say, detect any issue on transaction.
Jérôme, you wanted to add something, as you were explicitly mentioned.
I was quoted, I think I need to precise a little bit what I already had the occasion to explain, I think, in front of you, Guillaume. What I've said is that, of course, every time there is an AML issue raising for one bank in the world, it has to do with past operations, and you can never be sure that the way somebody looks at the operation you did a few years or several years ago, is the way it was looked at the time of when these operations were put in place. It's impossible for us, as for anybody else, to say regarding AML, no problem. We are absolutely certain that nothing can be challenged in our scope. What I said is that we can provide you with three elements of comfort. The first one, Jacques just told about it.
It's our business model. It's a business model in which we focus on operations. We focus on trades and on customers and on geographies where we think the risk is weaker, especially considering the way we intend to conduct our operations. The second element of comfort we can provide is our attitude if a problem arises. I take the example of what took place now more than 10 years ago, when the OFAC issue started. As soon as we identified in our scope of activities a potential problem regarding the implementation of OFAC rules, almost the first thing we did was to report the problem to the American authorities and to be as transparent as possible. This is the second element of comfort that we can provide you, is that we will behave in a very reactive and transparent manner.
The third element of comfort, again, is illustrated by what happened with the OFAC issue. When we've put in place the remediation plan, we did it very seriously. This is why, three years after the agreement with the American authorities, we managed to get out of the processing with the American authorities because they had acknowledged that we've put in place exactly as we committed to the remediation plan that we had decided. This is why we managed to exit from the deferred prosecution agreement, and we've managed to see the case dropped by the American authorities as quickly as three years after the settlement. This is only the three elements that we can provide, but I think that those elements are quite comforting.
Maybe if I can add a fourth one, which is a bit intangible, but I think it's very important, and it's about ethics. What is the real risk that we have in a lot of cases is that something which is legal today becomes illegal tomorrow, or which is legal and acceptable becomes illegal or just unacceptable in five years. When you're to look first, you should never cross the line between legal and illegal. That goes without saying. Even, you have to be sufficiently careful to stay within a range in which even if something is today legal, today acceptable, you think, "Okay, is this business, is this kind of attitude vis-à-vis the client, whatever, will this be still acceptable by the society in five years?" That's what sustainable banking is about. It is looking forward of what is acceptable.
Trust me, if I have one thing which is crystal clear after one year in this bank is Groupe Crédit Agricole has ethical DNA, which is just impeccable. We might make mistakes. We are not perfect. We get really far from the red line. One last question, I think. Other question. Okay.
Pierre Chedeville, CIC. Actually, I have a question on the strategy and the two focus you have on the geography and eight sectors. On geography, could we say that business in France and Europe is, let's say below average in terms of priority and that pushing, moving forward to Asia would be a higher margin? On the sector, same question actually. Is the eight sector already contributing higher than the non-eight sector focus and by year-end 2022, the speed we have today, the 45%-55% in sector would become 50/50 or 60/40? Internationally, what kind of figure we could expect now today is 70% outside France will be 50%?
Let me take the first one and let Didier answer the second one. On the first one, which is the importance of France and are we more putting our eggs outside France? Not really. When you're at the helm of a company like this one, if you really want to make things sustainable and grow in the long run, you have to ask yourself in terms of geography, what should be my balance? If you stay just in France or in Europe, you can overperform the market, but if growth is one or two %, you can overperform and get three or four, but you will always be capped by the growth of the region. Even more when your business model is not to create money out of the blue, but to be behind your clients, on the side of your clients, and accompany your clients.
When I looked at the overall business mix, the geography mix of this company, I thought if we don't go into areas where there is growth at 4, 5, 6, 7%, then we can do good business, but we will cap our growth. Once you've said that, you should not be naive. It's not because there is growth in Asia, for example, that we should do everything in Asia. It would be foolish. There are already some good players, and we have to bring something to the table. What we say in Asia, for example, is okay, or even in the U.S., we go alongside a sectorial approach because that's where we can really bring something to the table. You see, it's not really saying that France or Europe is not an interesting region. It is.
In a balanced way, we need also to have exposure to Asia, exposure to U.S., exposure to Middle East, to have a global business which is stronger. You want to say something on sectors?
Yes, maybe on sectors. Well, the sectors we have been mentioning are global sector, where we have a global presence, and so they will accompany, I would say, the growth of the bank. We believe, as we are expecting a 3% global on average global growth for the bank, that we will deliver superior growth on a global basis. We didn't, I would say, calculate that in terms of return on capital employed and so on. It's more a growth story that we believe we can achieve. Second, if you look at the proportion of NBI with this eight sector today, it means that it will slightly change the breakdown of the overall business activity of the bank, but not very materially. It will go probably up to around 50%, something like that, but it will not materially change the breakdown.
Mathilde, do you want to take the second one?
Yes, we had questions from the webcast. One question from Jacques-Henri Goulard from Kepler, who is saying that one of the few areas of CASA forecasting where the company has been consistently wrong was the extent of the recovery of the cost of risk. Why would you be right this time around, all the more so that the monetary policy seems very accommodating? The second question, more philosophically, Jacques, aren't you in some sort of a mission impossible conundrum? You have picked up the division at peak earnings, you are going to take the full extent of regulatory RWA add-ons, and your cost of risk is bound to deteriorate. This is Jacques, I'm quoting. Can you really improve the financial performance of Jacques-Henri's, pardon. Can you really improve the financial performance of CIB? Is it simply possible? Thank you.
Knowing that it's time for annual reviews, thank you for the question. More seriously, on cost of risk, yeah, you always have to be cautious because you never know really where the next crisis is gonna come from. What is very important is that you need to put in place a lot of tools so that you're able to identify early signals of deterioration of your risk and be able to react very quickly through hedging or through distribution or through cutting your exposure. I think that if you look at the cost of risk we had in the past, first, we made some losses on products, on markets in which we're no more there for since the last 10 years, so this is completely, you can take this out. In terms of corporate risk, credit risk, we've implemented early detection of all our exposure.
We implement, including with artificial intelligence, tools that enable us to have kind of a first assumption of de-rating of a certain number of counterparts. It works. We put in place strong frameworks so that you don't look at the risk at the moment, or you don't look at risk when you enter into a deal.
You have before, kind of a global envelope per sector of activity, per geography, in which you say, "Regardless of what is going to be the atmosphere in a year, I don't want to get higher than this and this, in this geography or this sector." It's this kind of forward-looking, global framework, early detection, that helps us to be pretty comfortable on the fact that, yes, there will be a downturn, because today we're at level of risk, which makes no sense, but that we will be largely able to weather that kind of storm. You wanted to add something, Olivier?
Yes. That is, whatever you put in place in order to monitor your risk, anyway. Our business and our day-to-day business is to take risk, and nobody has crystal balls. Once again, I think that we have taken a neutral approach, and we have given you our hypothesis, and we have, in a way, quantified this hypothesis. After that, you can make your own assumption. We have assumed that we will converge progressively toward the expected loss of our Basel II models. Neutral approach, no crystal ball. After that, you can make your own assumption.
Trying to answer the second question of eye on the mission possible kind of challenge, I'm going to shoot myself in the foot in this moment of time. No, I don't think so. It's impressive, the potential that I discover here. That doesn't mean that my predecessor have not done the job. They did a fantastic job, because if you think about it, what have we told you today? It's a story of a bank that has made a certain number of choices, probably five years ahead of the pack. All the restructuring that was supposed to happen on market, all the refocusing on structured finance, all the work on risk-weighted assets, some have done that already, like us, but definitely, my predecessors have done the job in the previous years.
I'm now in a position where it's true, the revenues are at a high level, but including in the first nine months of this year, we've been able to increase our revenues. The cost of risk is at a very low level, but I think that, as Olivier was saying, we all know that this is kind of a bit of an odd situation. I personally think that the potential is still ahead. Can you imagine in terms of the amount of expertise we have today, the tools that we're able to implement on the EVA, the cross-border transaction that we have because we really play as one team across geography, across product. I mean, the upside is clear. I'm going to give you just one example of what team player means in CACIB.
Sorry for being a bit granular on that one, but we have, for example, in our team, people who are helping companies in big transaction with what we call the LBO team, and we also have some teams which are on the high yield side. When you're a company engaged in a big transaction, and which is kind of a high yield one, if the market is there, you will issue a high yield bond. If the market is not there, you will have a banking loan through the LBO. Before, those two teams were separate, which means that we were working under the tent with a company, and at the last moment or in the last mile, when time came to know if we would do a bond or a bilateral loan, there was one team which was winning and the other one which was losing, 100%.
Because fundamentally, if the high yield team has worked and it goes into bilateral, they've lost. We said, "This doesn't make sense." What is important is not our own organization. What is important is the client. The client, in a way, they don't care how we get organized. They don't care if it's a high yield or a bilateral loan. We decided to merge the team and to create not even a joint venture, it's a team. Suddenly, everything changes. Suddenly, those guys, they go in front of the client and they say, "You know what? Don't care about what is going to be the final solution. CACIB will always find you the best moment, and we don't really care. We will give you the best advice." That's the kind of thing in which when you free that energy, there's plenty of room for improvement.
No, I don't think it's a mission impossible. It's a hard one, but it's not a mission impossible by far.
I think we have other questions, but I think we're going to stop there, and we can always answer your other questions by email and on the phone with IR, of course, naturally, but it was good to stop on that end comment.
Thank you very much. Bye.