Thank you for being with us this morning. Because of the health crisis, for two years, we haven't had the opportunity to meet very often together. Once, for general, a meeting last October. It's been for two years, we haven't had a major general meeting face-to-face, so thanks for coming. It's a real pleasure to see you, and the Board Members are here as well with us, as is General Management. Members of the committees with the shareholders are present as well, as usual. Thank you for being here as well. I'm going to proceed with the opening ceremony of the general meeting, BNP Paribas for 2022. We have met today in the first convening notice. This is a General Assembly, as usual, which is a public meeting.
The discussions, as you know, are recorded under the control of a bailiff, which will be drawing up a detailed report on the proceedings, which will be available on the bank's site. The meeting is also being broadcast on the bank's site. I'd like to take advantage of this to give you the date of the next general assembly, which will decide on the accounts for 2022, dated, set today, Tuesday, 16th of May, here, unless extenuating and unforeseen circumstances should require a different date. We have these financial statements for 2021, and the management report, and the council report on the activities of the group is proposed on the way in, and it's also available if you haven't yet received it. You also have the full report, which is a synthetic document.
Where the global and long-term perspective is provided. As usual, there are two types of forms that were handed out to you. One is a pink one for questions having to do with the agenda. Green for questions having to do more individual questions which have to do, you know, with customers of BNP Paribas. I'd like to indicate as well that, as was the case previously, Mr. Jean-Laurent Bonnafé is here. He will be responding with members of staff who are present here to questions you may have. We will, obviously, be collecting those written questions that you may submit. We need to comprise the bureau. I am presiding over the assembly, compliant with Article 18 of the bylaws.
The functions of scrutineers are fulfilled by the holders of shareholders, by shareholders which represent the biggest number of shares, and they have accepted this. I'd like to thank for, to this end, Mrs. Laurence Bovy, Chair of the SFPI, who's here and accepted to be one of the two scrutineers, and the other is Mr. Axel Joly, I'd like to thank as well, who's a member of the supervisory board of the SCPA, who's also a shareholder. Thank you. I'd like to designate as well Mrs. Guylaine Liévain as Secretary of the Assembly. Guylaine is here. The Statutory Auditors have been convened, duly convened. Mr. Dulac, represented by Laurence Dubois, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, represented by Mr. Patrice Morot. Mazars, represented by Mrs. Virginie Chauvin, who are all present in the first row, ready to take the floor should that be required. Our.
The first convening notice establishing the presence sheets, which is available to members of the bureau, as well as the shareholders voting by remote mail, which the figures fully respect the quorum, which is of 65.01%, representing 800,560,626 shares. The assembly is meeting in a regular fashion. The documents have been deposited on the desk of the assembly, and I'd like to remind you that the order of the day was published, and you have this agenda, and you can now, we can now start our work. Thank you for your attention. For a few minutes, the hostess will be picking up written questions.
I suggest that the written questions be collected at the same time as we continue, and we're not going to stop for a few minutes just to do that. I think that we can do this as usual, we can do both at the same time. The hostesses will be coming through. If you have any questions, you can hand those questions over to the hostesses, who will convey them. Before we, I would like to share with you a few comments in the name of the board of directors, the work that the board has undertaken and provided over the year, the previous year. Before I do that, I'd like to say that, a word about the situation that you're all aware of in Ukraine.
Subsequent to the event which started on the 24th of February 2022, and military operations that we are all obviously aware of. I'd like to do this by specifically mentioning our 5,000 staff who are in Ukraine. As you know, BNP Paribas has an affiliate, UKRSIBBANK , which is a Ukrainian bank. Their headquarters are in Kyiv, and they have branches throughout Ukraine. We have 5,000 staff who are in sometimes very difficult situations from a human point of view. I won't describe them, but you can understand that very easily. I just want to say two things. The first thing is that these members of staff have done a remarkable work as bankers in the field.
They've maintained the branch offices open so far as possible to do their work, and doing their work in a difficult period, a period of war. I might as well call things, say things as they are, to provide banking services to customers. We often talk about proximity services, local services, and that's what they're doing. They're taking special care that the salaries be paid into the customer accounts, and taking care that the customers who so wished could access their bank accounts to withdraw cash, because in the period of conflict, that's very important. They've done that. They maintain the relationship with customers, and they were available, and they are available, including in the worst possible circumstances. I'd like to pay tribute to them in this respect. It's a hard job. It's an important job.
Some have been refugees with their families, some in Poland, which is a neighboring country on the west of Ukraine. Others were in the east of Ukraine, and they moved to the west of Ukraine. The second comment, I'd like to underline to what extent general management and above all, the general director of the bank, have been very attentive and devoted much time and resources to helping all of these members of staff and all of these families of staff to take care of their safety, their transport, and to find what was necessary to live. I'd like to say just one thing, Jean-Laurent Bonnafé took care that the bank had to know at all times where all members of staff were located so that we could help them.
This is a remarkable job that was done by the teams of the bank. It's not a banker's job, but it's an employer's duty that was well done and well run. The bank intervened via various contributions to ensure a full solidarity by supporting partner associations and activating the emergency fund and development fund of BNP Paribas, which to contribute to the support of Ukrainians. This being said, from the economic point of view, the previous year was delicate. The conflict had many significant consequences. These are changes of the deep nature, which occurred in 2021, which were marked by many events marked by the health crisis and the economic crisis. There was a higher growth rate last year.
This rebound can be explained by a pickup in demand following the contraction in demand, supported by the government and central banks, and by the role played by the banking industry more generally in financing the economy. Naturally, we know that BNP Paribas has played its role in the recovery. We helped companies and private individuals in their investment programs, in their funding programs and development with a view to encouraging a more responsible economy. I'd like to talk about two points which characterize 2020, a deep commitment as a very solid bank to support the economy and the progress being made towards a more responsible involvement as a bank.
Now, the board of directors shares with general management the conviction that all of the issues linked to the climate and the economic transition, and saving biodiversity comprise a priority which are imposed upon everyone, public authorities, and citizens, and private operators, which have an essential role to play in this transition, and BNP Paribas has every intention of providing its contribution. Now, the geopolitical situation illustrates the European Union's vulnerability and to get out of its excessive dependency on fossil fuels, and we have an important role to play as a bank. Financial players must thus accelerate the rhythm of funding they have supported this massively to reach a carbon neutral by 2050. That's what we had a long discussion in the board about this, and the consensus is very strong, and management is well-defined in their objectives.
BNP Paribas pursued its mobilization in this direction and has taken some structuring actions under GTS 2025, which Jean-Laurent Bonnafé is gonna be presenting later on. I'd like to just remind you that the board of directors has every confidence in the relevance of these strategic orientations which have been decided, and in the ability of the Executive Committee, under the management of general director, with all of the bank teams, to implement these in the coming years, despite the uncertainties that do exist, and we will probably get back to that a bit later. It's very clear the bank knows what they must do, what they need to do, even if there are some areas of uncertainty which will require obvious adjustments, but the heading is clear.
Be that as it may, BNP Paribas will continue its European leadership with the support of its shareholders, with your support, will be all important in an inclusive fashion. Those are the few comments I wanted to make as the Chairman of the Board to say things clearly right at the beginning of the meeting. We haven't had this format for quite some time, and it seemed useful to me to remind us of the deep commitments of the board with respect to these questions. I think that we have a corporate film that we're going to show you, so it can serve as an illustration what I just indicated.
Welcome to BNP Paribas, the bank of a world in change, providing new solutions for a sustainable world. At first, in the first.
We are the first European bank present everywhere in the world, in the American Continent and in Asia-Pacific to accompany our customers where they are developing. Our diversified and integrated model makes possible a close cooperation in all business lines for a unique service to our customers in the world in which we live. We advise and design financing solutions, saving solutions, and investment solutions that are both innovative and secure. Whether it be private individuals or corporate, or funding or financial, to accompany you in your development for the energy transition. Our new strategic plan, GTS 2025, has three main pillars, growth, technology, and sustainability, GTS. In growth, our development is part is over time, and we are writing a new chapter here.
Thanks to our performing and distinctive model and our position as leader in Europe in most of our business lines, we are pursuing our growth regularly and under control. Technologically now, we continue to invest and develop our expertise and our partnerships in technology and data to offer an optimized experience to our customers and staff and to reinforce our performance operationally. Sustainability now. Pioneer in sustainable finance, we are involved in the continuance of enterprise. Remember the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, we are moving towards the net carbon by 2050 to encourage reduction of pollution in appropriate sectors and to accompany our customers in this movement towards a sustainable economy. Thanks to our steering and governance, we are developing training of our staff in terms of sustainable development. We're present in many areas.
We are attached to promoting equality, equal opportunities, and inclusion. We act in favor of mixity and diversity, gender equality, including in management. We are next to our association partners to encourage insertion of young people and the vulnerable and to provide support in emergency humanitarian situations, as was the case recently in Ukraine. We are 190 men and women in the world that are experts in their business and fully committed every day next to our customers and partners to design and implement collectively solutions for a sustainable world.
[Foreign language] Thank you. Let's move on next now to the heart of the matter, so to speak. Lars Machenil. Lars Machenil, who is our CFO in the group, will now present the 2021 results, which are the focus of our meeting, of course.
Jean-Laurent Bonnafé will present the new strategic plans for 2025 for the bank. Laurence Pessez, who is in charge of CSR in the group, will present the main guidelines going forward. At the end, as usual, I'll make a presentation on matters to do with governance and compensation for the corporate officers. Lars Machenil, you have the floor.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders, it's a great pleasure for me to speak to you today and present to you the results of your bank, BNP Paribas, for 2021. If you look at the screen before us now, you will see that BNP Paribas has put in a sustained performance. What do we see here? We see four tables with bar charts, really.
Could you put it in focus? Ask somebody in the audience. It's not easy to read from here. If you could bring it into focus, please. Thank you. Is that clearer for you now, sir? Thank you. Okay. You can see here the bar chart. In green on the right, the light green color, 2021. In the middle, darker green, you've got 2020. 2020 was, of course, a year that was impacted by the pandemic, so a rather particular year. We also represented 2019. On the left, you see the revenues. On the right are our costs, our operating expenses. Bottom of the left, the balance sheet, and bottom of the right, the net income. Let's start on the top of the left, the revenues.
You see that the revenues for 2021 are up compared with 2020, and this was consolidated by the general approach we've been taking to service the needs of our clients and the economy. Now, on the top of the right, you see our operating expenses. That shows our ability to invest in the bank. The Jaws effect is positive. This Jaws effect, I'll tell you what that means. It means that you've got the revenues up on top going up, and going up faster than our operating expenses. That's because BNP Paribas is servicing its clients out of platforms. So if you've got clients in France and you're supporting them in Germany, we're using the same platform. We don't need to set up another platform. These are pooled platforms.
If you look at the bottom of the right bar chart, the net income, you see it's up compared with 2020 and 2019. Now, if you look at an indicator that is of interest to you, which is the net earnings per share, this one went up quite substantially as you see here compared with 2020 and 2019. Also, if you look at the longer term, if you look at the period between 2016 and 2021, it went up also. If you look at the growth rate annually, the CAGR, the C-A-G-R, from 2016 - 2021, you see it went up by 3.9% every year. This is indeed a sustained performance on the part of your bank. If we compare your bank with its peers in Europe in the broad sense.
Now, you see here on this bar chart that BNP Paribas is indeed a European leader. Now, on the left-hand side, you see the banks in the European area, and then BNP Paribas way on the left, as you see with the high figure. Then ones based in London, HSBC and Barclays, and those in Switzerland are on the right-hand side of our chart. So BNP Paribas is indeed a leader in Europe. You're in, you're out in Euroland. Now, the bar chart for BNP Paribas have been similar over the years. For other banks, there were more ups and downs. It was a bit more random, let's say, in terms of development in Euroland. Now, that's a picture of your bank. Now if we look at the three main operating divisions in the bank.
You see here the revenues. On the right, you see the group, and you can see there are two main figures each time. The ones on the top in green, these are the trends, the developments we've seen. In blue, we put in the trend on a like-for-like basis in terms of consolidation scope and foreign exchange. You see that here. You know the U.S. dollar has become stronger and so on. Our businesses in the U.S., when we convert to the euro currency, 'cause we're a European bank, and our figures are in the euro currency, well, it gives us less euros. The figure is lower. We've put in the like-for-like figures as well.
If you look at domestic markets, DM, comprising our business in France, Belgium and Italy, you see sustained growth, strong growth in our revenues because of the increases in the networks here in France and also an increase in the dedicated business lines, the specialized business lines like Arval. IFS, that's International Financial Services in the middle. This comprises, among other things, business lines like asset management, insurance, and also our Bank of the West activities in California. Here, when we look at the like-for-like situation, given the trend in the dollar I just mentioned, you see an increase in the revenues. Finally, we have CIB, Corporate & Institutional Banking, comprising market oriented businesses, the financing of large corporations and securities services.
Here you see a growth in the revenues at a high level compared with 2020. As I was saying, 2020 was a particular year because of the COVID pandemic. If you compare with 2019 then, you see the trend is 17.8% of a difference. There are three main operating divisions, progression all round. If I look at that our operating expenses on the other side, you see the trend here is 3% of a difference group-wide. To go back to the Jaws effect I mentioned earlier, the revenue's going up by 4.4% and the cost by 3%. That means there's a Jaws effect. There's a differential of 1.4% between the two. That is the summary of the three operating divisions.
If you look now at the individual divisions in detail. Let's start off with domestic markets. When you look at the trend here, it's interesting to have a look at the balance sheet. On the left-hand side, the assets, you've got loans, and on the right-hand side, liabilities, deposits. Loans went up by 4.2%, and deposits went up by 8.6%. You can see here the support being given by the bank to its clients and the economy. This is only one metric. Let's look at another one. The upswing in activity can be seen also through the acceleration of the mobile uses of banking services in all of the markets, domestic markets, I mean. For example, to quote a figure, we have 172 million connections monthly to the mobile apps.
That was figured at the end of 2021. That is a contact more than 25 x a month on average. To sum up, the net income pre-tax goes up quite strongly, EUR 4.1 billion, an upswing of 26% compared with 2020. This is the first division. The next division is International Financial Services, IFS. If we look at the economic activity here, we see on the left the strong momentum in the asset management and insurance business lines. What do we see here in detail? If we look at the Assets Under Management, they developed on the left, as you see, quite substantially and ended up at 1,271. This is, of course, a very large figure. We're talking about billions of euro here.
If you look at the commercial activity, this was also sustained in the network activities internationally. If you take, for example, Personal Finance, PF, you see an upswing in production of 11% compared with 2020. That's good business development. In that division, you also have the business activity of Bank of the West in California. On the 20th of December, 2021, you've seen that we announced the divestment of that business activity to the Bank of Montreal, which should be closed out at the end of this year, the transaction. If we round off our review of the divisions by Corporate & Institutional Banking, here we see a very sustained level of business activity in all of the fields encompassed. This is continuous development that was further bolstered by two strategic operations that were finalized in 2021.
Firstly, the integration of Exane at 100%. That was completed in the summertime of 2021. Secondly, the finalization of the transfer of the prime brokerage and electronic execution business activities of Deutsche Bank to BNP Paribas. If you look at the left-hand bar chart, we're not in the hit parade here up on top, but we're in there. Look at CIB in Europe. In the EMEA, you see the five largest players. BNP Paribas has a respectable position here. We're the largest European bank because upwards of us, and even below us, we have U.S. banks. So we're in there. We're in the league table, and 2021 showed an increase of 36% in the performance compared with the previous year, 2020.
Here we have seen now the revenue and the cost items and the different divisions. Let's look at something else that's important, which is on the screen here, the cost of risk. Now, here you see a lot of bars in the bar chart. There are three groups. On the right, light green, you see. By the way, these bars in the bar charts, when we're talking about the cost of risk, we're expressing it in euro terms. Cost of risk in euro over outstandings, so it's usually a percentage figure. As it's a percentage of the provisions we set aside for the outstandings, that's if it's less than 1%, it's basis points. Basis points, not just percentage points. So these are the bars here.
Now, on the right, you've got the four light green ones, 2021, each quarter, each of the four quarters. In the middle, darker green, you have each quarter in 2020. On the left, you have for the year 2021, and the 2020 and 2019, 2018 figures as well. Let's have a look at 2021. Cost of risk at a low level. This is because of the limited number of new defaults and a higher base, comparative base. Of course, because we're comparing with 2020, which was the pandemic year. You see the cost of risk in 2021 therefore has come back to the level we had prior to 2020, similar to what we had in 2019 and 2018, in other words.
Now, if we round it off with the financial structure, let's have a look at this. The financial structure is really robust. It's very sound. If we look at it through the CET1 ratio, it's 12.9%, up from 12.8%, and the level is higher than what's been notified by the European Central Bank, which is 9.2%. We're quite a bit above that. Now, this figure may not be meaningful by itself. We've got to look at the liquidity reserve as well. Liquidity reserve, that's the headroom, the room for maneuver we have in terms of liquidity reserves. This reserve for 2021 is EUR 452 billion.
These are the reserves we have, in other words, and that is why your bank has a financial structure that we can deem to be really robust. If I round it off with the last item here, this last slide, if we convert this and look at the balance sheet throughout the cycle, the bar chart on the left, firstly. Here we see the tangible net book value per share, and you have the figures. Then if we divide it by the number of shares, we rounded off 2021 at EUR 78.7, which is up by 7.4% compared to the previous year. It's not just the previous year. You see the bars over a period since 2008, the way they've evolved, and on average, the CAGR is 7.2%.
The CAGR, as you see here on the screen. It's gone up year in, year out, and the average is 7.2%. If you look around us, at the other European banks, I don't think you'll find the same picture anywhere else. That is the tangible net book value. Now, if we look at the right-hand side of our chart, we'll see the total amount paid out to shareholders, EUR 5.4 billion. On the one hand, in terms of dividend, if I put it in terms of dividend per share, EUR 3.67 per share in cash, 50% of the income as we did the previous year, too. The yield is 7.4%. That's the rate of return.
This was supplemented by a share buyback program of EUR 900 million worth, executed in Q4 of 2021. That led us to cancel 15.5 million shares, and that was therefore the equivalent of 10% of our income. That share buyback program, the impact of it. This therefore shows you the ongoing growth pathway throughout the cycle. This rounds off the presentation for 2021 regarding the financials of our bank. Really sound, as I said earlier. Thank you for your attention, and I will give the floor now straight away to Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, who will detail out the major thrust of our strategic plan, GTS 2025.
Hello, everybody. This is Mr. Bonnafé. I'll focus on the presentation of GTS 2025. G for growth, T for technology, and S for sustainability.
They're the three main thrusts that we cover in our plan. Growth, because our group managed to maintain great diversification, and we've grasped lots of opportunities for business development, and we've achieved growth. Technology, we want to do it in the future, too, of course. Technology, because it's using technology platforms, information systems that we will succeed in the future. They're really important in our arrangements with 190,000 employees. We've a lot of IT people in there helping us out to achieve our technology targets. Of course, we're talking about human resources, too, and we want to achieve sustainability. That's the S here. We've got to take care of our clients, our counterparties, the people working for us and everybody.
Sustainability is important because the world we're living in and the way the world has developed up to now in the last few years, while we've seen some, let's say, disorder, even imbalances, we could say disequilibrium. We've got to rectify the situation of the world. Banks play a preponderant role. They're not in charge of the ecological transition, but we're important players that can help us all to achieve our goals. We deploy certain ambitions. We've got action plans so as to help us to achieve our sustainability goals. With a low-carbon economy by 2050. That's our aim. It'll all take time, but we need to have short-term milestones that we can commit to firmly, clearly, so as to measure our progress as we go along in this transition pathway. BNP Paribas has a model that's fairly distinctive.
It's weathered a lot of storms, a lot of crises up to now, and it gets through the different cycles very well. We're really client-focused. We're a service entity, after all. We're here to service our clients, service the economy, serve the economy. You know, that's what a bank is all about. You've got to serve your customers and support those who want to develop. We've got a model that's integrated to all of our business lines, all our geographies, all of our teams play together as a team, and we're at the service of our customers. We haven't got many people dispersed in different environments, each doing their own thing in their own corner. No, it's an integrated structure. Diversified, too. As I said already, lots of geographies, lots of business lines.
When the cycles are more difficult, you can at least have some of your portfolio that's functioning better perhaps than others. That gives us a possibility of weathering storms in the different cycles. It gives us time to adapt at least. At scale, in the business lines we're involved in, that we've invested heavily in, we are front-ranking players. Growth enables us to. We can achieve growth at marginal cost. That makes us more efficient. We can scale up. We're a Euro leader here in Europe. That gives us a unique positioning at the service, as I say, of a customer franchise that is very sound. Here we have an overview, a snapshot photo. It's like our ID card, I would say, in the group. CIB, of course, Corporate & Institutional Banking.
CPBS, Commercial Personal Banking & Services. It's commercial banking for corporates and individuals, private individuals as well, and personal banking that is, and services. IPS, which is more revolving around savings. CIB is about 1/3 of the whole lot. CPBS is bigger, actually. A third for commercial banking, 1/6 for the specialized business lines, and IPS is the 1/6, the remaining 1/6 . If you add up those fractions, it gives you 100%. It gives you the whole bank. It's very balanced. I mean, all the business lines also work together hand-in-hand. When one business line becomes less well-performing, it's reviewed. We have a close look at it. Sometimes we haven't invested enough in it, so we invest more in it.
Sometimes we change the organization in the group because the relations may change, interactions may need to change, and sometimes we need to give more independence to certain parts of our group. Overall, all told, this is our ID card. This is our gene map of a sort. This is what was built up at the time of the merger between BNP and Paribas in 2000. Then we, of course, added on other major allies. In the meantime, Fortis Bank in Belgium, BNL in Italy, Polish bank, Turkish bank. This model remains valid. It's our DNA in BNP Paribas. Our strategic ambitions, we've seen those, growth, technology, and sustainability. Showed up of course by development and engagement of our people. Information system is the technical platform we work with, but obviously we need people to do all of this.
We need our people to service our clients.
These are the four bricks, as it were, in the 2025 plan. It's a bit synthetic. These are the main essential items. We talked about leadership position, aligned strategically to serve clients and partners, and the full contribution of the operational integrated model. Technology and industrialization at the heart of the model, the deployment of sustainable finance and CSR on a global scale. I think over the last few years, we've done a great deal in this area. We need to ramp up even further in terms of quantity and quality. We need to become real industrials in this area. By the end, at the end of the day, in so far as the transition is concerned, we need to align all of our portfolios and all of our activities so as to make it possible to reach a low-carbon economy.
We're not the only ones involved in this, a lot are working on this. The development of the potential and commitment of our employees. The objectives are what? It's quite simple. It's the usual, to promote disciplined organic growth, to gain market share at a marginal cost. We are moving forward, and by discovering new environments, new dimensions, but cautiously. We're doing banking. It's an activity that is, has some risk. We want strong organic growth, but disciplined. We need to gain market share. You don't have organic growth otherwise, but at a marginal cost. In other words, when you have powerful platforms that are well-designed, the additional growth is done at a marginal cost that's growing less fast than the top line, the revenue and the income, which makes it possible to invest even more and to accelerate development even more.
Creating and developing new opportunities. We are in a very open world where the banking universe is often challenged by new arrivals, and they often have new technologies and new business, develop new business context, and we need to be able to have these good ideas as well, and we do this quite often. We need to be able to ramp up and do what others are doing and to invest in these types of technologies. We could talk about the Nickel account, which we started five years ago, the online banking, which is a big success, and it is. We have the right platform to set up frictionless payments. We can refer to CIB, which acquired the MDM platform. There are a lot of areas where we are shining and developing our own innovations in many areas.
We're aggregating innovations and technologies that come from outside. We are an open company from that point of view. We spend a part of our time during every day looking at what's going on elsewhere to see what could interest us, and there are many things going on. We're in a period where every day there are news to keep watch on, and there's more and more competition to generate economies of scale, of substantial stature. It's costly, but in terms of control and supervision and quality and of the whole organization. We can talk about risk profiles and anti-money laundering and financial security. We can talk about a lot of things, and all of that costs more and more money. We can talk about cybersecurity. To invest properly at the right level, you always need to be a bit more competitive.
The future of the company is also keeping our ability to invest in our security, to invest in security, so as we can develop at the lowest possible risk. Now, if I start with CPBS, Commercial Personal Banking & Services, I'm gonna do a very, short summary here. The essential aspect of this that will serve to guide us is the recommendation of our customers and our employees. A few years ago, we could be happy when our customers' satisfaction was enough. In the industry we're in the company we're working in, a great deal of things are derived from social networking. We need to be recommended on the social networks. We need to be carried by our customers and our staff and to be recommended. That is an absolutely central objective now.
To succeed in that, we need operational model that will be industrialized and resilient. A lot of what is being done in CPBS are platforms, and the platforms need to be fluid, they need to be accessible, and they need to respond to us in just a few clicks to the real questions that are asked in order to provide the service that's required. We need simplified products and services. That's the eternal quest of a bank. The services is always a time to blow up, and the idea is to keep it simple. Needs change. We need to be aware of the fact that everybody doesn't change in the same way in the environment today.
The relationship of the digital world is not the same depending on the generation targeted and the sector and the culture, and the companies we operate in. We need to leave to the bank the choice of our customers. For private individuals, often there's a question of accessibility. There could be physical difficulties or accessibility in the sense of digital or not. Not everybody can manipulate platforms with as much ease. The less negative aspect of COVID was to force everybody to be at ease working at a distance. Despite the progress that has been realized, we are not all at the same level, and we need to pay attention to that 'cause the bank has to provide a universal service to everyone, and we cannot, notably in the Private Banking and small SMB Banking, we cannot.
We have to adapt to them, to our clients. That's an important dimension of this aspect. In total, if we do all of that right, we will be able to accelerate this strong, profitable growth in our specialized business. We'll reinforce our leading positions in corporate and Private Banking segments in Europe. We'll be able to, little by little, align our arrangements with segments that have better performance. To better understand these businesses and to align the organization means to serve them better, these particular customers, and efficiency continues to reduce costs and to fund new initiatives. Much for CPBS, and I'm aware that this is really just a summary. There's a lot more. EPS is all about savings, investment, and protection services. This involves everyone. It involves the whole universe of preparing retirement.
In France today, the general assembly is taking place in French. In this country, as is the case in many countries in Europe, there's a whole question of long-term investments, sustainable investments, which we summarize by talking about retirement, but it's a broad thing. It's a long-term investment. There are universes that have been able to handle this better than continental Europeans. The bank was ideally positioned to lend a hand, whether it be in insurance, in Private Banking, wealth management, asset managers, or real estate services, which is an essential asset in terms of managing one's portfolio. We need to accelerate our strategic focus.
We need to capture growth in private assets, and we need to strengthen our leadership in CSR, whether it be BNP Paribas products or the products available in Private Banking and the way we're investing more generally in the insurance business or the way we are proposing offers. All of this has to be extremely in line with our CSR policies, notably in the sense of the transition towards a low-carbon world. The four key levers are the same: to make the most of the integrated model, to accelerate on digital data and AI, to continue to adapt working methods. Remote working, thanks to COVID and the adjustment and management and techniques to that. There are lots of traps as well, or pitfalls.
Obviously, we need to continue to optimize the operating model. It's quite a nice menu for IPS, Investment & Protection Services, which is essential in the group. It's not really just banking, but it goes along with what we are at BNP Paribas, with the necessity for accompanying our customers wherever they need us. Now, let's go on to Corporate & Institutional Banking, CIB. I'm going to talk about the progress of this platform, which was considerable over the past few years, even over the last 10 years. We have, under the leadership of Yann Gérardin, who is the Director, who has transformed everything that was founded on specialties into a truly integrated platform based on technology that is turned towards customers, customer-centric, with a priority for sustainable finance, which is well ensconced.
It is a CIB platform which has become the number one platform in Europe, one of the first worldwide. The idea, generally speaking, is to continue to keep on keeping on, to be systematic, and to be organized, disciplined, to better serve effectively our counterparties, which can be very demanding. We're talking of the biggest corporate clients in the world. Here, we're talking about the biggest financial institutions. The competition is rife, it is severe. American banks have invented these businesses. It's normal that they'd be among the top ones worldwide. We have a good position in Europe. We're number three in Europe. There are two Americans ahead of us in Europe. We could exceed the level of one of those, so there would be only the one that's at the top in Europe.
It would be kind of normal because we know it's gonna be very competitive. That's the ambition of CIB, to continue to make progress while controlling our risks. These are very complex platforms, so it has to be properly controlled with the idea of sustainable development. Within these areas, we have created a lot of tools that'll make it possible to get our balance sheet to improve and to get it aligned with what, in the future, will be the low-carbon situation that we wish to accompany. There we are. That's a summary. Obviously, CIB in one side is something that's hard to do, but philosophically, that's what we do. It is a bank, basically, that is actually quite close to the customers to serve big counterparts.
You had to have a very intimate knowledge of these corporate clients, and that's what brings us closer to all the other banking activities. The bank is, above all, the idea of proximity with a very good knowledge of the customer, whichever, whatever customer it is. Now, getting back to technology and industrialization, I've almost said it all. If I want to pull out a few bricks to show them to you, there's the cloud. We started many years ago with a private cloud for ourselves. We are currently developing with IBM to open that up, increasingly. That'll give us more industrial efficacy in terms of IT, and it's something that will also give us a lot of security. It's an approach that is a bit different from the so-called public cloud approach, and that's what will prevail over time. It's a huge competitive advantage.
It's not only in terms of security. Artificial intelligence, data, robotics, use cases, this is every day at BNP Paribas, that we need to do that a bit better and a bit more. That's true in all businesses. There's no business that is better positioned or less well-positioned out of them all. You need to be strong in AI and robotics. Another question is the APIzation, use of APIs. The bank speaks to you very often via these applications. They're very different depending on the services provided and the business lines, but they correspond because they're customized depending on the business and the counterparties. You need to be more efficient in this area because basically, the level of all counterparties, of all our customers, we have ramped up their expectations.
They can consume banking better thanks to apps and so that you can keep more time, I would say quality time, with our staff for having conversations that are intended to concentrate on our value-added activities. Technology and digital is necessary for that. The conversation with in trust with a counterparty, it's the same thing. One makes it possible to provide what's expected, to make things fluid, effective. It makes it possible to give even more time to the conversations that are singular and important with banking customers, from the bank to the customer. I'm gonna stop there on technology. I've cited one figure, 36,000 out of 190 staff. It's massive in terms of the actual people involved in the global market. The business is one point. It's 1/2 the staff are IT people.
Now the objectives. A plan is much more than objectives or figures. It's a trajectory. It's how you get there. The figures or measurement of where we stand or that we intend to attain in a small number of years. We're talking about four years, by 2025. Four years. Indeed, we're listed, so as a listed company, we have objectives. The growth you can have when you talk about NBI, Net Banking Income, the ambition is more than 3.5% per year every year. Some might say that that's modest. In truth, in an economy that is European and the underlying economy is more about 2%-3%, 2%, so 3.5% is twice the expected rate for the economy as a whole. The jaws effect.
Basically, that's when your expenses rise less fast than your income. If NBI goes up 3 points, we don't want the rest to go up, the cost to go up more than 2 points. That'll make it so that we can provide additional capacity to invest in innovations in the middle term and the long term. The cost of risk, we've anticipated on the order of 40 basis points on outstanding amounts, which provides a growth in net income group share of 7%, which is high level given the underlying economy and who we are and the basis upon which the 7% is applied. Return on tangible equity greater than 11% by 2025. That's our target. CET1 12% once Basel has been fully finalized.
A distribution rate of 60% with a minimum of 50% in cash. That would be the usual dividend that's paid out with a complement of 10%, which would correspond to a share buyback program, which we do every year. These are our basic yardsticks for the year, the four upcoming years. The first quarter in 2022 locates us very much above these measures, but it's only one quarter. In the first year of a plan that's over four years. There are 16 quarters, so the first quarter is moving forward very nicely. One point about Bank of the West, this is an asset for various reasons that became less strategic. In reality, there's a consolidation that's being done in the U.S. for regional banks, a consolidation of regional banks.
We could reinvest massively in the U.S. in a regional bank to grow that activity significantly there, or to sell this asset at the best possible time, at the best possible price, to be able to reinvest in all of our other activities the results of that sale. At the session, there'll be $16.3 billion. That'll be EUR 6.3 billion, EUR 11 billion of free capital. There are 170 basis points. Just extraordinary as for share buyback program to compensate for the expected dilution of the EPS in the months following the completion of the transaction.
That's roughly EUR 4 billion, and all the rest of that profit will be kept in the company to accelerate our development in a certain number of areas that we call bolt-on, the organic and very disciplined external growth in businesses that we control the best of the new business model and the technology and additional organic growth that we could fund with this additional capital that would be available. The closing is expected by the end of the year. We're working on that because we have to handle the handover from our group to the Bank of Montreal, including switching over IT systems, and that is something that needs to be done carefully. The buyer got a very good price. He also had a good compatibility with Bank of the West.
We believe that future bank in the U.S. will be a real merger. For our colleagues that are with us in the BNP Paribas for many years, the future is ensured for them. The next platform born in the U.S. from the Bank of Montreal with the Bank of the West will be a bank, a regional bank of great power, in great shape, and that over time will keep up at the head of the pack with the competitors. We sold a few years ago, another bank, which did very well since it was sold. We proceeded with a good sale by BNP Paribas. We have to be interested in what the team's become, what becomes of the teams in the bank once it's sold.
I think for Bank of the West, it will be just as it was for the group. It'll be a great opportunity. I'm gonna stop now and hand over to Laurence Pessez to present our CSR policy and the transition.
Thank you, Jean-Laurent Bonnafé. Hello, everybody. Yes, we'll continue talking about the plan, and we'll screen the slides. Yes, that's the one. Thank you. That's the one I wanted to talk about first. We'll look at the S part of the GTS 2025 strategic plan. Now, the fact is, corporate, social, and environmental responsibility and sustainability in general, these are a key feature in our plan, and that shows how strategic the importance of these subjects is.
Your bank is really embracing these topics, has been for the last 10 years, and we've a leadership position, and the challenge for us is to scale up, is to go to industrial scale with all of our efforts.
All of these issues must systematically be factored into the decision-making processes of the bank. Right now, there are 400 people working on these topics full-time, and I think I can say that absolutely all the business lines, all the subsidiaries, all the corporate functions are involved and are fostering this transformation. Now, the objective is to support all of our customers in moving to the transition towards a sustainable economy, and this support is key. It won't be the bank that will do the transition. It's each of our clients, individual, retail customers, personal customers, institutionals, corporates, and we're here to encourage them, facilitate things for them, give them the means to achieve this transformation as quickly as possible and to make it a fair and inclusive transition at the same time. It's a broad-ranging topic, of course, as you can see here.
Since 2016, we've decided to actively contribute to the sustainability goals. You see the multicolored logo of sustainable development with 17 main focuses, but we've decided to particularly focus on five major areas. For themes, we have a climate transition to zero carbon, biodiversity, the fight against exclusion, the circular economy, the change in consumption patterns, and then a cross-cutting area, which is everything we can propose by way of value proposition to our clients in terms of savings and investments that will be sustainable too. As every year, we want to share with you the way in which we're perceived by the people looking at us, especially the non-financial rating agencies you see here. We're always well-placed in these rankings, and that's still the case, of course.
We've been going upwards the whole time, even though demands are becoming higher as well. We're part of certain rankings. For the last eight years, we've been in the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World. We also were named Best Bank in the World for Sustainable Finance in 2021, and also we're considered to be the top employer in Europe in eight countries of the group for the ninth year running. Now, among the highlights of the year that I'd like to dwell on a little bit, we see for a start that we're succeeding in exiting from the value chain of coal and thermal energy. We want to be totally out of that in 2030 in Europe and the OECD countries, and 10 years later, all over the world.
We've only got about 8% of coal in the energy mix that we finance, as opposed to 10.4% at the end of 2020. We've confirmed our strong positions in terms of sustainable finance internationally. Be it the structuring and distribution of sustainable bonds for our clients or the market of loans indexed to environmental and social criteria. On the bottom of the left of the screen here, you see that we've maintained and bolstered our actions in favor of people who need support and help, be it micro-borrowers who were hard hit by the pandemic in 2021. Also, refugees in Europe in whose favor the total amount of our support is EUR 17 million since 2015, and also more recently, of course, in favor of Ukraine.
A topic I won't go into further 'cause Jean Lemierre has already talked about this at the start of our meeting. The floor, Laurence Pessez. I'll resume on the subject of our internal functioning. I will mention two achievements. Firstly, the updating of our code of conduct in the group guiding the behavior of our people, our employees, that was enriched in 2021 with new themes. Secondly, the signature with the social partners of an agreement sustaining the possibility, enduringly therefore, of working from home, remote working in general in BNP Paribas SA and its subsidiaries in France. We also created the Low Carbon Transition Group, which ultimately will comprise 250 professionals. In terms of financing of renewable energy sources, we've exceeded our objective.
We stand at EUR 18.6 billion at the end of 2021, and our ambition is to achieve EUR 30 billion in 2025. That's an increase of 70% compared with 2020. Also, we're maintaining our position in the top three positions worldwide regarding green bonds. Sustainable finance is therefore one of the pillars of our plan. That's GTS 2025. We've defined three priority strands to support our clients in this transition. Firstly, we want to govern our businesses so as to come to a net-zero economy by 2050, in line with the commitment we gave in 2021. In terms of financing that we extend, but also in terms of managing the savings of our clients.
To achieve this is the second strand. We've got to mobilize all of the skills of the group so as to support our customers, be they large clients, SMEs, large corporations, or personal investors. Help them all to achieve a low-carbon, zero-carbon economy, ultimately. We want to be a privileged partner of our clients in this transition. Therefore, we've got to adapt our management tools and our processes, our databases, and especially, as a bank is all about people, men and women, we've got to reinforce and circulate widely our culture concerning sustainable finance around the world. I won't go back into the five major themes that we have set up as a priority that I mentioned earlier, but I do want to underscore that to measure our progress, we've set ourselves commercial objectives that are ambitious and robust.
Between now and 2025, there'll be EUR 350 billion worth of sustainable financing. We will be managing the monies of our clients as per the best possible European standards in this area. Now, to come into the heart of the matter here regarding the alignment of our portfolio so as to help to finance the net- zero economy by 2050. What you see here on the screen sets down clearly what I meant by managing our lending businesses earlier when I mentioned that we want to help to finance a zero-carbon economy by 2050. Concretely, this means bringing down our greenhouse gas emissions associated with our financing efforts, therefore, in the sectors that make the biggest contribution to global warming, transportation, fossil fuels, but also, farming and real estate.
In 2021, and at the start of 2022, we engaged in an exercise on the generation of power, also oil and gas, and the automotive industry. We decided to focus particularly on these segments of industry, even though it's under 10% of our lending. They account for a lot of the greenhouse gas emissions globally. We won't go into the details of the methodology that's enabled us to define the trajectories to bring down the emissions, but you will find all of the explanations in a report that we published on the 3rd of May last. There's a lot of information on the screen here, but there are three main things to be borne in mind.
Firstly, our aim is to reduce the CO2 intensity of our emissions in our portfolio by at least 30% for power generation, 10% for oil and gas, including production and refining, and 25% for automotive transportation. Also, we chose to set objectives for 2025, intermediate objectives. 2025, that's around the corner. Most of our peers have opted for 2030 as the timeframe. Our intent is to act as of now on this. Secondly, as well as the reduction of the CO2 intensity, we've set ourselves objectives that are operational objectives in the same areas of activity that I've just mentioned. We want to increase the share of renewable energies in the energy mix that we finance. It should be greater than 66% in 2025, and reduce the share of coal in the energy mix that we finance.
Less than 5% it should be at in 2025. We want to have more than 25% of electric vehicles in the automotive mix that we finance, as opposed to 4% right now. We've tightened up our criteria for the financing of non-conventional oil and gas sources, and also we are restricting.
Sorry, Laurence, there's somebody. Monsieur Lemierre speaking. Please could you calm down, sir, he's saying. Please could you calm down? Please remain calm and listen. We won't evacuate you. Let everybody remain calm. Respect the presentation and the dialogue with the shareholders, between the shareholders and the bank. Your point of view has been expressed. We've heard you. We've heard your points. I would ask everybody to please remain calm.
Overall, what's important, as Laurence said, is that our objectives regarding reduction are in line with the most ambitious plans set down in regard to net- zero carbon. This is because we are dynamically managing our portfolio in these areas. We started doing that quite a while back now. These objectives are ambitious, and we're maintaining them in spite of the crisis, the energy crisis, and the geopolitical situation that we're living in right now. I've taken some time to explain our process so as to achieve carbon neutrality. This is our top priority, and now I present briefly our actions on our four main themes. Sustainable investments, for a start. I mentioned EUR 300 billion of Assets Under Management aligned with the best standards in Europe.
Our ambition is to be the benchmark player in Europe for savings, sustainable savings and investment with the involvement of all of our specialized business lines in this area. We're continuing to propose innovative funds to our clients that will help their savings to assume meaning. Sustainable investments should exceed 90% by 2025 in our Assets Under Management. Our natural equity and biodiversity, that's part and parcel of the fight to abate climate change, of course. We want to devote EUR 4 billion worth of financing to companies who help to contribute to biodiversity. We want to pursue our activities in abating deforestation, especially in the Amazon region. Social inclusion, this is an area where the group is very active in terms of financing social enterprises, EUR 2 billion worth at the end of 2021.
Female entrepreneurship, EUR 3.3 billion in France in 2021. Corporate philanthropy, EUR 200 million by the end of 2025 is our objective here. We want to reach out to 6 million beneficiaries of the Nickel accounts and microfinance accounts. That also is our aim. Another topic of growing interest, a main theme for ourselves, is the circular economy. There are many people in the group working on this already. By a joint venture we set up between 3 Step IT and BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions. In terms of recycling of IT hardware, also BNP Paribas Personal Finance is involved in Evollis, and BNP Paribas has been involved with Back Market through Cardif. Thank you for your attention. I will give the floor now to Jean Lemierre. A round of applause.
Thank you, Laurence Pessez, for your presentation, and thank you to everybody for listening. It's very important for us to present what the group wishes to do, what its objectives are. It's important for you to know the details and appreciate the efforts we've been putting in. It's now my turn to present some items concerning corporate governance. I wouldn't like to dwell on this for too long. Firstly, the board. The board of directors is made up of 15 members. We have, at this AGM, to re-elect or appoint four members of the board. The first, we have Jean-Laurent Bonnafé. He needs no introduction. He's a director and chief executive officer, of course. He is our chief executive officer of BNP Paribas Group. He's the first candidate. The second person is Marion Guillou. You should see her picture here on the screen.
She's with us, too, in the room. You know her contribution, her, the exceptional contribution she's been making to us in terms of risk management in particular, regulations, climate, CSR, and technology. Finally, the Board wishes to ask you to re-elect Michel Tilmant to our Board. You know him well, too. He's a person with a lot of accrued experience, and he's made very important contributions to us in terms of banking, finance, monitoring of regulations, risk management, markets, and in general, the governance of a large banking group. These are his areas of specialized competency. The next candidate I will mention in a minute. I'd like to first of all thank a board member who will be leaving us. It is Wouter Devriendt.
I would just like to point out his term of office is now expiring, and we thank you for your contributions, and we will ask you to elect Madame... Ms. Lieve Logghe to the Board. You see her picture on the screen. Her areas of particular competency are financial matters, for a start. She is the CFO of an important group, has been for a long time. She knows all about the business world, of course, internationally too. She's been in charge of change management in terms of CSR, and has indeed a lot of skills to bring to the board, if you will, elect her to our board. If you vote these candidates into the Board, the Board will then look like this.
Five nationalities, nine Independent Board Members, seven women, a lady representative of employee shareholders, and two Board Members elected by the employees, whom you know. I want to introduce you to them again. You know them, and they're with us here today as well.
The team of Board Members are extremely competent and complementary, and a position compliant with the recommendations in terms of governance. A few indications about the breakdown of the committees. The Risk Committee is currently presided over by Mr. Tilmant. If you agree, Mr. Tilmant will stay a Board Member, but he will no longer Chair the Risk Committee. He is called to be an independent according to the regulations, but he will continue to provide his contribution to the work engaged in by the Risk Committee. The Presidents of the Risk Committee will be taken over by Monique Cohen, who is currently Chair of the Governance Committee. Monique will take over the Risk Committee. The Chair of the Governance Committee will be taken by Mr. Jacques de Larosière, and the breakdown will be the same as the current composition.
I'm insisting on the fact that several Members of the Board are members of several committees in order to provide the proper coordination of work between committees. Lastly, Madame Lieve Logghe, if you will become a member of the accounts committee of the board. Having proposed the modifications in the breakdown and the makeup of the Board Committees, I need to deal with the questions having to do with compensation. You have here the fixed annual compensation for 2022 of the Members of the Board. There is no modification with respect to last year, except for Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, but I'm going to explain why. The compensation, Mr. Bonnafé, is a fixed compensation and a variable part, as is the case for all boards of directors. The variable part is compliant.
The fixed portion of Jean-Laurent's compensation was set according to the way in which we look at the change in compensation, and that was set since 2011. In 2011, because the total amount is stable since 2011, and formally, the fixed portion has been stable since 2016. At the time this mandate is renewed by Jean-Laurent, the compensation committee proceeded to examining the fixed amount of salary for Jean-Laurent compared to the compensation of other directors of comparable banks in Europe, which, as you know, are much higher. The relationship between BNP Paribas and other banks in fixed salaries, it was half or even one-third of the pay of the other bank managers. The board looked at how the compensation had changed for Jean-Laurent over that period compared to the compensation of staff of BNP Paribas SA. The conclusion was clear.
We looked at the benchmark to understand what was going on, and we observed that Jean-Laurent Bonnafé's compensation was on the lower end of the benchmark, but he was really much losing ground year after year compared to the compensation of other people in the group. We proposed an increase of 18% to make up for this during the period in question. Be that as it may, after the catch-up, the compensation of Jean-Laurent Bonnafé would still be in the low range of fixed pay for comparable banks. The second item about corporate officer pay is a variable and a part as well, where we propose to increase the relative portion of the CSR portion by 10%, up to 15% then, and the rest of the structure of the compensation items will stay the same.
This is to mark really how attached the group is to questions having to do with CSR. Now, about variable annual compensation for 2021. You know the criteria. They're the same as for previous years. We have not modified anything, and you have here the results of the determination of these criteria in 2021. You can see that they reached or even exceeded for two of them, as the ceilings that are fixed are applied, and the performance of the group is good. The system is working. You will see in that reflected in compensation with the application of the ceilings as provided for. The application of pay in 2021, the strict application of all of the criteria, including the two other Corporate Officers, General Director Delegate Yann Gérardin and Thierry Laborde.
You see the results quantified of the application of these criteria, and the ceiling of 120% is applied as well. I think that you can read this presentation without many comments on my part, given the notes, which provides the results in 2021 for the corporate officers and Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, Philippe Bordenave for part of the year only. In 2021, he was a corporate officer for part of the year in 2021. Yann Gérardin and Thierry Laborde, you can see the results on the screen, the maximum, the ceiling. The maximum attributable of the ceiling and the conditional long-term payment of PRLT, which is much longer term. You can see the application of the criteria and the way in which in 2021, and the way in which the PRLT will be revalued.
I wanted you to look very carefully without any comment, the two green points which give the conditions according to which the long-term plan is attributed. The conditions, as you know, with respect to the past, are very strictly and rigorously applied. No modification in those rules. Here you have the multiples of remuneration. This is an important point that we're looking at attentively. You can see in the different, compensations, these corporate officers. I just wanted to give two quick comments about the multiples of compensation, both in terms of the average and the median. These are constant. It is constant and moderate.
You can see that the BNP Paribas Group has a compensation policy for corporate officers that leads to multiples that I would qualify by moderate and in any case, much more moderate than in other, most other groups, including banking groups. Here is a table that is of great importance for shareholders, which is the total compensation paid in 2020 and 2021 for each person involved. The light green line and the blue line are very important. They show changes in pay really received. I'd like to attract your attention to the pay of Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, for whom there is a huge stability in the actual pay.
Lastly, I'd like to conclude with a brief presentation of a resolution that is being submitted to you, which has to do with the remuneration paid to Directors, Corporate Officers, for which the Board suggests a change in the envelope, which corresponds to a package of increase since the last increase, which in fact was set in 2016, with one single variation in 2021, due to the appointment of a director representing employee shareholders. It's an increase in the number of directors during the period, which is reasonable, which makes it possible to change and increase the payment of Board Members in compliance with the general evolution in salaries. I'd like to thank you for your attention. I know that you've listened attentively, and thank you for that, despite the interference. I'm very happy.
You've expressed yourself very clearly.
I'm going to ask you if you have can be polite. It's no longer General Management here. I'm going to be speaking. I'm a Statutory Auditor. I'm not a member of the company, and the Statutory Auditor has a very important role to play, and I'm perfectly neutral about whatever it is you're defending. If you understand what the governance is about, please let me speak.
Let the Statutory Auditor speak. It's a very important role for shareholders and for society as a whole. Mr. Morot. Mr. Morot is our Statutory Auditor from PwC.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, shareholders. On behalf of the Board of Statutory Auditors, I'm going to present to you the conclusions of the reports on the consolidated financial statements and the annual financial statements for fiscal year 2021. These accounts were approved by your Board of Directors on February 27th, 2022.
As a reminder, we perform our procedures throughout the year, in particular by reviewing the quarterly and half-yearly financial statements and the annual financial statements. Our work, which took place in the context of the health and economic crises, covered all significant entities included in the group's scope of consolidation, the bank itself, and its subsidiaries in France and abroad. It's harder than that to stop a statutory auditor from speaking. The objective of our audit is to obtain reasonable assurance about the fairness and the regularity of the financial statements and about the fact that they give a true and fair view of the results and the financial situation of the group and are free of material misstatements.
Our reports include, as required by the regulations since 2017, a description of the areas of risk or materiality that, in our professional judgment, are most significant to the audit of the financial statements, and you can see that they are displayed on screen. There are five of these consolidated statements. The assessment of credit risk, the evaluation of impairments on customer loan portfolios, evaluation of financial instruments, impairment of goodwill, general IT controls, and lastly, the estimation of insurance technical services. For each of these risks, our report describes the risks identified and the response provided by the Board of Statutory Auditors. You were there, you heard it. The scope of our work and our conclusions are presented in a report submitted to the audit committee.
Based on our audit and the review of these key points, we have issued an unqualified opinion on both the annual financial statements of the bank under French standards and the consolidated financial statements of the group under IFRS accounting standards. With respect to our special report on regulated agreements, we indicate in the first part of our report that we have not been advised of any new agreement to be submitted for the approval of the Shareholders' Meeting this year. The second part, the continuation of the non-competition agreement entered into between Mr. Jean-Laurent Bonnafé and BNP Paribas and authorized by the Shareholders' Meeting of May 26th, 2016.
Lastly, we issued three special reports on Resolutions 21, 22, and 23 of the extraordinary part of this meeting concerning an authorization to be given to the board of directors to issue shares or securities with maintenance and/or cancellation of preferential subscription rights. Resolution 27 of the extraordinary part of this meeting concerns an authorization to be given to the board of directors to issue the shares or securities reserved for members of a given company savings plan. Lastly, Resolution 28 of the extraordinary part of this meeting concerning an authorization to be given to the Board of Directors to reduce the share capital by up to 10%. We have no comments to make on these reports. Ladies and gentlemen, shareholders, Mr. Chair, thank you very much.
Mr. Morot, thank you for your conclusions and your valiant behavior, and I thank our colleagues for your work as well. Perhaps now you'll be listening to what I'm gonna be saying about the written questions that were asked. You're not interested in the questions either? You might have asked some of those questions. Don't you want to hear the answers? We're going to try to have a Q&A session and a dialogue, which is extraordinarily important, and I have no doubt that there will be some people frustrated, that we will not be able to take all of the questions, and that all of the answers will not necessarily be fully audible or properly understood. I'm very sorry for that in advance, but we are doing the best we can to answer your questions given the circumstances.
First of all, there are questions that were asked in writing. You're not interested in the questions? You might have submitted them. There are questions that were asked in writing. I wanted to say. I'd like to say who wrote, asked them, and the purpose of the question and the responses to these questions because they were asked in writing, and these are on the site of the bank. If you wish to look at them, you can. The written question were asked by the Responsible Investment Forum having to do with problems of ESG and human resources by Mr. Christian Gaschet to have explanations about certain resolutions and the functioning of the circle of shareholders and nominative. The Initiative for Citizen Oriented Shareholdership for social policy and environmental policy of the bank. Mr.
Armando Calogero having to do with BNL, the bank that BNP Paribas manages in Italy. Reclaim Finance for questions of an environmental nature. BankTrack having to do with human rights. The Friends of the Earth concerning climate, all of the questions, all of the responses are on the site of BNP Paribas. Thanks to the authors of these questions too, and thanks for consulting the answers given on the site. You can have your answers that way. I'm gonna open the floor to questions between ourselves. I have several questions that came in in writing. I'd like to thank those who have sent them in that way. They're very important. There are also some microphones, roving microphones, and those who wish to ask question may do so. I'd like...
I would give obviously recommendations that the questions be asked with sobriety in terms of the time and the context to enable answers to be made and to be able to handle as many questions as possible. To permit the organization of these questions on the mic, I'd like to raise one question that was written to me, sent to me in writing to start things off. It has to do with a point which is a question for you, Jean-Laurent, which is what is the impact of the changes observed and probable of the changes in interest rate, both in the banking activity and also more particularly, there are several questions about this, having to do with your real estate loan portfolio. That we need to have appropriate resources over the long haul.
As you know, the economic recovery that followed the second phase of the epidemic led to a form of inflation, marked inflation. The central banks and the Fed first, then the European Central Bank later on, probably started to bring up interest rates. The rates are going up. They're going up fairly quickly if you look at the 10-year French OAT, the fungible government bond. It was very negative just a year ago, minus 40 or 50 basis points, and now stands at around 150 basis points. This phenomenon is known to bankers, not the first time that the rates started to go up. We're going to continue supporting our clients. There is no particular issue in the balance sheet. The loans that have been extended at fixed rates in the past are backed very well. No issue there.
Future mortgage loans will have to reflect this upswing in interest rates, of course. Probably, property prices will be adjusted slowly but surely, 'cause otherwise, people who want to buy a home won't be able to buy the property they want, the home, the house or apartment they want to buy. Just to keep it simple on mortgage loans, it's a bit more technical in detail, of course, if you go into all the details. By and large, these rates that are going up, it's something that the bank is able to manage. It's something that probably will produce higher revenues for the bank because of the higher valuation of deposits. Conversely, the fact is inflation will inflate cost too, but the fact is this should not prevent us from achieving the objectives of our plan, on the contrary.
We recently reasserted our plan objectives when the first signs of this rapid upswing of rates started to appear. That's what I can say in summary o n this point. Thank you.
Jean-Laurent.
The consequences of the non-military policy on our fellow citizens, I thought might be of interest to everybody in the audience, but apparently I was too optimistic. Okay, the person at microphone number two. There's a gentleman who has a question at microphone number two. Thank you.
My name is Jean-Pierre Sicoli. I'm a Private Individual Investor. I've appreciated coming to this turbulent AGM. We are the eighth-largest weighting in the CAC 40 index. It's a bit bigger for me in my portfolio, but I believe a lot in BNP Paribas, and I've heard positive messages this morning. I'd like to talk about the quality of service, 'cause I'm not just a shareholder, I'm also a client of many of your different brands, BNP Paribas, Hello bank!, Cardif, and so on. Regarding quality of service, how do you measure quality of service?
On a personal basis, I'm overall very satisfied, extremely satisfied right now at the quality of service I obtain. I know that in the BNP Paribas network, the quality of service can fluctuate quite a lot. It can be excellent, and sometimes it can be bad, even very bad. The people I talked to about this, like branch managers, have said that there are reasons for this, no doubt, but perhaps you will be able to give me something of an answer on this.
Thank you, sir, for your question, says Jean-Laurent Bonnafé. No, no, nevertheless, Pascal Fèvre is at your disposition. I'd just like to say that Pascal Fèvre can give you all the information you need. What I mentioned briefly in my presentation was the fact.
Was the way in which we try to factor in customer satisfaction. It's the thing we monitor quite a lot. We measure their recommendation or referral rate. The indicators we had up to a few years ago weren't very efficient. Now we've adopted the NPS, the Net Promoter Score. That is customers who recommend you as a bank to their friends and family. We measure the NPS and by measuring that dynamically, you know you're making progress if it's going up. You've got to take care of the details, essentially. We're in an area where you've got to provide a fre e-flowing service almost instantaneously. Sometimes the detail is what the devil is in the detail, as they say. It's what irritates people.
Your point is really in the center stage of the issues we try to address as part of our strategy. It's actually in one of the slides I mentioned for CPBS. That is customer referrals. We measure this in all our segments, in all of our geographies to see how we're doing. That is on our client side and on our employee side as well. We measure the employee score as well. A lady with a question.
Yes. My name is Camille Étienne. Thank you. You mentioned commitments regarding coal-fired plants, but I have a precise question. You're among the frontrunners in Europe as supporting companies that utilize fossil fuels, and you're number two in terms of supporting TotalEnergies.
There are members of BNP Paribas, there are two members in BNP Paribas' board of directors who are also involved in TotalEnergies, and there's an $8 billion loan that's been extended to them in April 2022. I think fossil fuels should be left in the ground of planet Earth. It's all about our future, your future and my future. TotalEnergies, you're a shareholder of. May I cont inue asking my questions, as the lady somebody's interrupted. Total will be presenting its climate plan, but its climate is only in the name. They have the EACOP plant in Uganda and so on in there.
If you want your commitments to be credible, are you going to vote against the climate plan of TotalEnergies that's continuing to go against the grain in terms of what we should be doing to abate climate change problems? What will be your vote in TotalEnergies? That is my question to you here today. Thank you.
I will answer. Off-topic! No answer! It's the rule. Questions are asked, we answer questions, because if not. Well, I'll try and answer the question. The question that's been asked, I will answer. Two points. You mentioned the $8 billion line that was set up for Total recently. This is a line that has nothing to do with financing of any sort of project.
This line contributes to the liquidity of the energy market, the upswing in energy prices, be it oil or gas or electricity. In the European system that we're living in, there are a lot of margin calls. This is a bit technical, I know. Therefore, companies that are in those markets have to be able to respond regarding those margin calls. In periods of crisis, when the upswing is very rapid for energy prices, the formula that's been given to guarantee liquidity in the market is to do with making sure that the supply will be guaranteed to all of our citizens in a free-flowing manner. That line is set up to make sure that system works. It's not a line that is intended to finance a project. No.
Obviously, it's granted to Total, but in no way does it contribute to producing or setting up or developing or envisaging the development of new projects. Just want to spell that out. It's a general interest line because along with other lines that were set up for other, utilities and, energy players, the idea is the banks help the, electricity, gas, and oil market to function. Now, we're not a shareholder in the Total group, and we don't vote on resolutions in the AGM in Total. So that's quite simple. We're not a shareholder of the Total company. I think you're referring perhaps to, securities that are held, managed by the asset manager of BNP Paribas, that is BNP Paribas Asset Management. The choice of the managers as managers is their choice.
They've got different ways of doing things in different segments of industry, and we as BNP Paribas are not shareholders of TotalEnergies, and we do not vote at the AGMs of TotalEnergies on the resolutions put to their AGMs.
Thank you, says Jean Lemierre. We'll give the floor to microphone number four now. I think we move on to another question, says Monsieur Lemierre. Perhaps a written one, because you're not allowing people in the room to take the floor. There's too much noise. It's not very polite, but it's what you're doing. Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, here's a question that we received in writing. It came in writing regarding our strategy concerning Ukraine and Russia. A written question.
I didn't hear the question, says Mr. Bonnafé.
Well, it seems there's a question, a written question that's come to us on our activities in Russia and Ukraine. Regarding Russia, our activities are of a very modest size for different reasons, as a country where we had actually reduced our business activities over the last 10 years. Our exposures are fairly modest, about EUR 1 billion worth, and we're adapting those business activities to take account of the new situation. We're kind of discontinuing some businesses so as to be in line with the different embargoes and restrictions that are currently imposed on banking activities. That's for Russia, very marginal activity, which is kind of mothballed. Now, for Ukraine, as Jean said, we have a bank, 350 offices, 5,000 people working for us there.
We are pursuing our business in what's most essential in terms of retail banking, mainly means of payment, electronic money, ATMs, keeping people's accounts. It's a way of supporting Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, their economy, their families, and our people working there too, in this very difficult situation. We all hope that this unfortunate conflict will end as soon as possible. We can imagine there will be a ceasefire at some stage. As a business there, we're trying to provide the essential services that we can provide, means of payments, deposit activities, ATMs, remote payments from abroad for Ukrainians who have left their country.
Of course, we're supporting the families of our employees and making available to them some way of living outside of their own home, to leave the east of the country to move to the west, for example, or leave the country to go to Poland. For some of them, we've even found posts, jobs within the BNP Paribas Group around Europe. We're paying particular attention to the people working for us, our colleagues in Ukraine. The Ukrainian economy at the moment is going through a period of exceedingly serious crisis. For Russia, our presence there is very modest. In the past, we'd already wound down a lot of our business activities, and we have come into compliance with all of the sanctions and embargoes. We have essentially, as I say, mothballed o ur business in Russia for the moment.
Thank you. Number four. Microphone number four now, please.
Hello, everybody. Sorry, my French isn't great, but I'll do my best as the speaker. I hope I'll be clear enough. This is a question from ShareAction. We've seen the publication of analysis reports regarding the climate by BNP Paribas and the publication of new objectives regarding the reduction of the intensity of CO2 emissions financed in different segments of industry. Now, in 2021, the International Energy Agency published a roadmap to achieve zero emission as an objective for 2050, between now and 2050. This roadmap shows that it's all feasible, but it's not compatible with the utilization of new oil and gas deposits in the future. The International Energy Agency has issued an encouragement to business players involved in industry.
The encouragements and orientations given by the International Energy Agency do not encompass the banking sector. There is some noise from the audience. Regarding ShareAction, BNP Paribas. Sorry, there's some noise from the audience. Mr. Lemierre, would you mind calming down? He's saying. Madam, have you got a question? A precise question? Yes. BNP Paribas. Excuse me, can I make my point? May I ask my question? Says the lady who is asking her question. My question then. Well, different questions. Is BNP Paribas updating its policy to in terms of the expansion of oil and gas activities in line with the guidelines set down by the International Energy Agency. And also, are you updating your objective so as to cover capital market activities so as to faithfully reflect your financing objectives and align to the best practices in this area?
Thank you.
Laurence Pessez, you have the floor for the answers of Madame Laurence Pessez.
Thank you, madam, for your question. To apologize for the noise. Usually questions can be asked a bit more serenely. Anyway, I have understood what you're driving at. Obviously, you're talking about how wide is our alignment. For the moment, we're just encompassing lending. The thing is, for the moment, there's only one methodology that's been developed, and we have to develop it. It is the PACTA methodology. It covers only loans for the moment. However, there are certain working groups working on this, under PCAF and under the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, too, working on this precise topic to try and adapt all of this to the capital markets as well. We do hope that this work will be completed before the end of this year.
As soon as a methodology that's robust and that's commonly shared becomes available for the capital markets, we of course, have planned to widen the scope of our own alignment exercise to cover lending and capital markets activities, too. That was one part of your question. The other part of your question concerned expansions. Well, we all agree that the International Energy Agency scenario is normative. That is one that says how things should unfold. It's not a projection that takes account of the current situation, economically or geopolitically. The scenario of the International Energy Agency says to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, a drop in demand in oil and gas by 20% will be necessary between 2020 and 2025.
In that context, outside of existing oil and gas fields and deposits, that will be continued to be financed, otherwise, the drop in the supply side will be too abrupt. It won't be necessary to exploit new fields. There is more and more demand. It's going upwards these days, and that makes this exercise more difficult. Energy producers have to do two things. They've got to maintain the supply of oil and gas at a level that's sufficient to satisfy the demand that's going up and not create an abrupt economic and social impact. At the same time, they've got to invest very actively in renewable energy sources to decarbonize our economy. Our objective is to support them, to flank the records in these two dimensions.
As we said, a reduction in our loan exposure of 25% by 2025 is what we're aiming at. That's for exploration and production of oil. It's 25%. That's more ambitious than the net- zero scenario that provides for a reduction in the oil offering of 9% by 2025. What we're doing via this commitment is sending out a signal that we've got to reduce production. Therefore, we've got to reduce the new projects. In the same way, when we tighten up our policy on oil and gas as non-conventional, you know, the threshold going from - 30% to - 10%, the reserves are future production, after all. This is the process to send out a signal to our clients that you've got to produce less and develop less on the upstream side.
In parallel, we're acting on demand as well, on bringing down demand by the creation of the Low-Carbon Transition Group, the aim of which is to help all of our industrial clients to decarbonize their activities. All products and services that we make available to retail customers, for example, will help them to improve the energy efficiency of their homes and consume less energy. The idea is to foster also sustainable mobility. This is a two-pronged approach that we've got to engage in the world we're living in right now.
Thank you. Yes, we've heard you. I'll give the floor to microphone number two now if you like.
Hello, Mr. Chairman, says the person at microphone number two. I've got two wishes for the next AGM in May of next year. The first one is a visual point.
The slides that you presented are not easy to read, so hopefully they'll be in bigger characters the next time. Also, you should change mic because your mic is a bit noisy this time. Anyway, I have a question, if I may. I'd like to thank you for supporting our teams in BNP Paribas in Ukraine and thank you for pruning down your activities in the aggressor country, that's Russia. When I came to this AGM, I received a pamphlet that recalled for me that there are other countries that for 70 years are nibbling away parts of their neighbor, Palestine. In that pamphlet, there were questions raised, and I'd like to have your opinion on that, because I don't know what the bank's businesses are in Israel. Here's my question. What about new financing to companies involved in illegal settlements?
What's the bank's stance on that, illegal settlements? Did you hear the question?
Well enough. Yes, I think we managed to hear your question, fortunately. Laurence will actually answer the question.
This situation is one we're looking at seriously and watchfully. It's a complicated situation, of course. What we're asked now is to not finance 150 large international corporations that are active in tourism, transportation, telecommunications. Therefore, we can guarantee you that in these circumstances, just like in other circumstances of the same nature, we enforce strictly our code of conduct and all of our policies concerning the commitments and engagements we've given in the conditions that are required.
Thank you, Laurence. There's another person at microphone number one with a question.
Hello, Mr. Chairman.
I'm a shareholder with a question for our CEO, but I've got, well, three questions, really, if I may. You didn't talk much about Nickel and FLOA. Recent acquisitions, Nickel and FLOA, I'd like to hear a bit more about them in detail. Are you going to go to the U.S.? So Nickel and FLOA, and are you going to go to the U.S.? Also, there are lots of people, young people, who complain that they can't find loans these days from their bank to purchase their home. Would-be home buyers. I'd like to know your stance about helping first-time home buyers. Thirdly, you signed an agreement regarding forests, the preservation of forests. I'd like to know a bit more about that, please. Why did you sell off the bank you sold in the U.S.?
Why did you sell it?
Thank you. Jean-Laurent. Well, on Nickel and FLOA, well, I talked about them recently when I had an opportunity in public. Nickel, the objective is to achieve a level of 2 million customers. Sorry, there's some noise in the room. We started off with Nickel, setting ourselves an objective of 5 million customers. We have now gone through the 2 million mark. We've gone to Spain, for example. The context was the Belgium also. Sorry, there's noise in the room. It's hard for the interpreter to interpret. We have gone to Belgium, too. Of course, the context was the acquisition of the bpost Bank. FLOA is a buy now, pay later split payment, and the acquisition was closed at the very start of the year.
We're going to develop this buy now, pay later, proposition in France and elsewhere in Europe. In a few years' time, it should be a fine success. Regarding home loans for young people, young homebuyers, our policy is very competitive in the marketplace. Of course, when you buy your home, you need some stable income, of course, to get a loan. Recently, the Banque de France changed its criteria a bit. It set up some new restrictions for loans. We try to help young people, especially students too, with student loans. We're a rather open-minded bank to help young people in general, in that period of their lives. Otherwise, your other question may be Laurence or somebody else could answer your question.
What you mentioned was a foundation set up in the U.S. so as to foster the integration of young people and foster inclusion. It's starting off in Europe and in France, and that's the focus of the partnership we signed with that foundation. Bank of the West in the United States. Well, it's fairly simple. The regional banks in the U.S. for a long time remained of just intermediate size. There's consolidation going on in the market there. There are investment needs to be met. Banks are amalgamating or merging for that reason, and we're divesting that asset. If we hadn't divested it, we'd have had to buy an equivalent asset.
The valuation of the banking project is the proceeds we might have obtained from the divestment seem to be better than being part of the consolidation activity going on the U.S. market. The bulk of those sums will be plowed back into the group's development, mainly in Europe. That's a quick answer to your question, to give you some color about the context, just in summary.
Thank you, says Mr. Jean Lemierre. I'll take microphone number three now. There's a question at microphone number three.
Thank you, sir. I'm a client of BNP Paribas for the last half-century. I've been a shareholder for a quarter of a century. I'm happy to be a shareholder. I see there are some dynamic young shareholders here that are probably happy to be shareholders too.
As a client, I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that you've closed down a lot of local branches. I understand why, but are you aware that the personalized relationship with retail customers, personal customers, has gone downhill quite a bit? When you go to a local branch, often it's trainees or people starting off in their careers who don't know all of the things that they need to know to answer our questions, and you can't do everything online either. You know, there's sometimes very individual questions you can't address online, and you can't address in the branch because of lack of detailed skills.
Even though Mr. Jean-Laurent Bonnafé said that the customer relationship, local customer relationship is very important, that has gone down for personal customers, and there are more and more unhappy personal customers out there.
It's a complicated question in more ways than one. We can't derive a general impression from a personal impression. The feedback we're getting doesn't say exactly the same thing. I can only recommend that you get into contact, or Pascal will get in contact with you to understand why over a long period you consider that your relationship is degraded. We try to observe, but it's not infallible. It's a service business, and the balance between what you can do remotely and what needs to be treated, handled face-to-face has to be sought. I'm not sure what the episodes were that led you to have this lack of quality, a perception of lack of quality on your part.
What I said earlier is really at the heart of our concerns in the relationship in branches. It does exist, but it has to be quality of quality. The objective has never been to get rid of that contact or to make it worse, to push customers to, you know, deal with us remotely. That's not at all the way we work. Our customers consume our banking the way they want. Sometimes some people are 100% remote, some are 100% in the branch offices. The truth is that we're moving more towards remote, that's a fact. In the branches, they're more and more handling higher value-added connections. It could be funding, savings, more rarely dealing with daily banking. It's kind of a general comment, but I confirm that we are paying careful care.
The indicators that we have don't say the same thing, but I'd be interested in finding out when the time comes to hear back from Pascal Fèvre about your relationship and the way it can change. It perhaps it's evolved in a way that is not up to scratch for you. I understand.
Thank you, Jean. I have a question, two questions that were asked in writing. For respect for the people that asked the question in writing, I think it's good to answer them. Here's a question for you, Laurence, that has to do with CIB revenue income. Saying that the stock market activity made it possible for CIB to produce beaucoup de income and commission. How will this be compensated for if the stock market doesn't work as well?
Well, the equity market is only a fraction of CIB's activities. It's a very diversified activity. There are a lot of different businesses in CIB. The stock market more generally is when it goes down, there's less traffic, there's less transactions. There are fewer transactions or deals. At the same time, often that corresponds to a situation where customers and counterparts, you know, the big institutional or corporates or even average size or medium-size companies want to be better protected in terms of interest rates, in terms of currency and raw materials. There's in these circumstances, there are always other services that can be useful and available and made available to the clientele, even if in our activities together, there's a cyclical kind of thing.
There are snapback reactions where other activities can pick up further. Let's not be concerned about CIB as a whole. Don't be concerned about CIB in inflows or profit as a whole compared to other businesses which would, you know, might work better at some times than others.
Thank you, Jean-Laurent Bonnafé. I'd like to take question number three.
[Foreign language] . I'm going back to FLOA Bank as a customer. In fact, I have two concerns with FLOA Bank. Perhaps you'd be interested that they haven't been solved because customer service doesn't answer. The cashback promised is not respected. The second problem, I did 600 transactions, but by mistake, one transaction was a credit at the interest rate was higher than the usury rate.
I'd like to know whether that's possible. Thank you. Is there somebody from FLOA Bank in the room for customers?
Pascal Fèvre will take your details, and we'll deal with your particular situation. Thank you for your question. Pascal Fèvre will get into contact with you.
Bon. I suggest that given we've had a lot of questions already. There are written questions and oral questions. I'd like to thank everyone who asked the questions of our speakers, who answered the questions as well. I hope that it was audible. There are a few questions still. We're gonna take those and respond to those in writing. I think it's the time has come to move on to vote on resolutions. Given the way things are going, I think it's a good idea. I don't see many questions anyway. Thanks again for the questions. We're going to move on to the votes. Guylaine.
[Foreign language]
Since most of you have already practiced this system many times, I'm going to proceed with the explanation very quickly. In your remote, you have 13 controls. You only use green, yellow, and red. Thus, as you can see, the green one corresponds to yes, yellow is abstention, and red is against. For each of these resolutions, you will indicate your choice by pressing strongly on only one button for abstain or no. The vote will occur after reading each resolution. Mr. Chair will say, "The vote is open," at the right time. You have the time, the countdown, roughly 12 seconds. It appears on the time. Once the countdown is finished, Mr. Chair will say, "The vote is closed," and you will no longer be able to vote.
The results will be displayed on the screen a few seconds after the vote is closed. So that we can avoid any interferences, I'd like to ask you to turn off your portable telephones during the voting process.
Thank you, Guylaine Liévain. You were very clear. As our shareholders are very loyal and the voting system is the same as before, I think you know how to use the voting remotes. Thank you for your attention. The quorum has been attained 66.03%, and it represents 842,967 shares, so we may validly deliberate. First Resolution, first part.
Approval.
Approval of the parent company financial statements for 2021. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 99.99% approval. Thank you.
[Foreign language]
Second Resolution.
Approval.
Approval of the consolidated financial statements for 2021. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 99.85%. Thank you. Third Resolution.
Approbation.
Appropriation of net income for the year ended 31 December, 2021 and dividend distribution. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 99.82%. Thank you. Fourth Resolution.
Special report of the statutory auditors on related-party agreements and commitments falling within the scope of articles L. 225-38 and subsequent of the French Commercial Code. The vote is open.
The vote is closed. 99.98% in favor. Fifth Resolution. Authorization for BNP Paribas to buy back its own shares. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 98.29% for. Sixth Resolution. Reappointment of Mr. Jean-Laurent Bonnafé as a Director. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 99.76%. Renewal of the term of office of a Director, Mrs. Marion Guillou, as a Board Member. This is Resolution number seven. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 99.76%. Marion, congratulations. Eighth Resolution. Renewal of the term of office of a Director, Mr. Michel Tilmant. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 98.62%. Congratulations. Ninth Resolution. Appointment of a director, Mrs. Lieve Logghe as a Director. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 99.88%.
Congratulations and welcome. 10th Resolution. Vote on the components of the compensation policy attributable to directors. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 99.40%. Thank you. 11th Resolution. Vote on the components of the remuneration policy attributable to the Chairman of the Board of Directors. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 94.85%. Thank you. 12th. Vote on the components of the remuneration policy attributable to the Chief Executive Officer and to the Chief Operating Officers. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 87.63%. Third Resolution. Vote on disclosures relating to compensation paid in 2021 or awarded in respect of the 2021 financial year to all directors and corporate officers. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 97.15%. Thank you. Resolution is adopted. 14th Resolution.
Vote on the components of the compensation paid in 2021 or awarded in respect of the 2021 financial year to Mr. Jean Lemierre, Chairman of the Board of Directors. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 94.88%. Thank you. 15th Resolution, vote on components of the compensation paid in 2021 or awarded in respect of the 2021 financial year to Mr. Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, the Chief Executive Officer. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 93.50%. The Resolution is passed. Thank you. Resolution 16, vote on the components of the remuneration paid in 2021 or awarded in respect of the 2021 financial year to Mr. Philippe Bordenave, Chief Operating Officer until 18 May 2021. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 92.67%. Thank you. This Resolution is adopted.
Resolution 17, vote on the components of the remuneration paid in 2021 or awarded in respect of the 2021 financial year to Mr. Yann Gérardin, Chief Operating Officer from May 18, 2021. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 93.62%. Thank you. Adopted. Resolution 18, vote on the components of the remuneration paid in 2021 or awarded in respect of 2021 financial year to Mr. Thierry Laborde, Chief Operating Officer, starting on 18 May 2021. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 95.31%. Thank you. Resolution is adopted. Resolution 19, advisory note on the overall amount of remuneration of any kind paid during 2021 to executive officers in certain categories of staff. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 99.29% in favor. Thank you.
The last resolution in the Ordinary Meeting is the 21st Resolution. Delegation of authority to the Board of Directors to increase the share capital. The vote is open. Setting of a total annual compensation of members of the Board of Directors. The vote is closed. 99.52%. Thank you. Resolution adopted. Moving on to the extraordinary part. There are a lot of resolutions in this Assembly. I'm aware of it, but it's important for the life of the company. 21st Resolution, delegation of authority to the Board of Directors to increase the share capital, maintaining preferential subscription rights. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 94.03%. The resolution is carried for 2/3 of the votes. 22nd, delegation of authority to the Board of Directors to increase the share capital with the removal of preferential subscription rights. The vote is open.
The vote is closed. 93.22%. Thank you. The Resolution is adopted. 23rd Resolution, delegation of authority to the board of directors to increase the share capital without preferential subscription rights for existing shareholders in the limit of 10% of the share capital. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 95.69% in favor. Thank you. Adopted. 24th Resolution. Overall limit on authorizations to issue shares with the removal of, or without preferential subscription rights for existing shareholders. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 99.67%. The vote is carried. 25th. Delegation of authority to the board of directors to increase the share capital by capitalization of reserves or earnings, share premiums, or additional paid-in capital. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 99.61% for. Resolution is adopted. 26th resolution.
Overall limit on authorizations to issue shares with or without, or with the removal of preferential subscription rights for existing shareholders. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 96.29%. The Resolution is passed. 27th Resolution. Delegation of authority to the board of directors to conduct transactions reserved for members of the BNP Paribas Group company savings plan with the removal of preferential subscription rights. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 96.80% in favor. The Resolution is adopted. The last, next to last one, 28th Resolution. Authorization for the board of directors to reduce the share capital by canceling shares. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 99.98%. Resolution is adopted. 29th Resolution and last. Authority to complete legal formalities. The vote is open. The vote is closed. 99.99%. The Resolution is passed.
This last Resolution concludes our General Meeting. I'd like to thank you for your loyalty, your presence here today, and for the dialogue with you. It's very important for the Board of Directors to have that dialogue, and I know it's very important for our General Management as well. As you've seen, the group BNP Paribas attaches a great deal of importance to the presentation and explanation of what we are doing, what we wish to do, the reasons behind decisions that are taken. This as transparently as possible. The dialogue is important, and mutual respect is also important. I'd like to remind you, these are values that we are deeply attached to.
I'd like to thank all of the shareholders who are still with us, having accompanied us throughout this general assembly, and to have, with a bit of noise, listened to, various people.