I think we can go now. First of all, a very warm welcome to everyone to Birmingham. It is great to see so many of you in person today. I'd also like to thank the many people who are dialing in on the webcast. You're all equally welcome. My name is Ian Stuart, and I've got the privilege of being the CEO for HSBC UK. Now, I was just doing some research about a week ago, and I was thinking, "When was the last time we had people together here?" You might not believe it, but it was the eleventh of June, twenty nineteen. Can't believe it. Three years and a week ago. It feels like yesterday we were on level ten and we did the presentation. I recognize quite a few faces who are here.
I was just trying to capture my thoughts of what's gone on in these last three years. I'm sure you were much better than me in this, but we've definitely had Brexit. We then had a global pandemic. We did all the work on Bounce Back loans, which we'll touch on today. We've had COP26. We've had a lot of issues on supply chains, few issues on geopolitics. Got a war. Now got inflation. We've got a war on talent, and we've got a shareholder challenge. It's been a pretty busy three years. The good news is we're a really resilient team. We remain a confident team, and you're gonna meet many of the team today, so I hope you enjoy.
What I left you with in June 2019, and I did go back and check my notes, and we left you with a message that we really did want to grow HSBC UK. We did that with a degree of confidence, and I hope never arrogance. There's no place for arrogance in this business, but definitely with a degree of confidence. I think that position remains exactly the same today, and we're gonna talk about that over the next few hours. Let me just give you one health warning before I go there. You all know this, but I think it's worth stating it for the record. We are operating in very uncertain times. The Fed increased rates yesterday by 75 basis points. That was the largest increase since 1994. That could put pressure on sterling.
That impacts supply chains for many of our customers. In the last hour, we've got rates up another 25 basis points in the U.K. Now, having said that, it's definitely a tailwind for us, and it's quite a big tailwind. Again, you'll hear about that later today. We still remain in limbo on Brexit. Brexit is a big issue for a lot of our customers, and we're not through that. The best I could say on geopolitics right now is that it's uncertain. That is about as positive as I could be on geopolitics. There's certainly no sign of the war abating in Ukraine. Please, as we go through this, and I do remain very confident about our long-term plans, you've got to see it in the context of what we're operating around.
However, as I've said, we think we've got a really good long-term plan, and I do remain confident about that. I think our growth story holds good, and I'll explain why that is the case. Really importantly, we've got a group who want us to grow. Again, we'll touch on that. I think we're really important for the wider growth aspects, and never underestimate the international angle of HSBC. That's really important for us in the U.K. as well. We've got an amazing commercial and retail book, which is behaving really well, and both are growing. Stuart and Stuart. You'll have to get used to that. That's my first apology for the day. If you get confused on anyone's name, if you just shout out stuart, you're guaranteed to get an answer somewhere, okay? Because there's a lot of us around.
One other point is that we know the U.K. is competitive, and you will see that today. It's a really competitive market. For the avoidance of doubt, in my 43rd year in banking in the U.K., it's always been competitive. It is a really competitive market. We think we're very competitive. I think, as you'll see, we're a pretty competitive team. On the team, we've made quite a few changes to the senior team, but I'm absolutely delighted with the talent we've brought in, and you'll meet many of them today. The level of experience in this team is really deep, and I think we need that right now in the business. I hope you see a bit of passion for the business as well. We are gonna show you some really great stuff today.
When you get into the demos, and we've got six demos to show you'll start to see where the investment is going in the business. On our customers, they have been incredibly resilient in the U.K., They've been through a lot over the last while. We need to deliver better for our customers. We're making improvements, but unless you're really good in the market today, the customer notices that, and they expect us to be very efficient. Work to be done there. We're gonna keep investing in the business. When our CFO, Claire, goes through some of the investments, you'll see material amounts of money has gone into making the U.K. business better. Hopefully, again, as I said, the demos will highlight that. We're also socially aware.
I say to my team all the time, "It's no longer good enough to be a big, safe bank." That is not good enough anymore in the U.K., You've got to be in tune with your local communities, and we've done some incredible things for the communities in which we operate. You have to keep going. You must have a social agenda. I think ours is strong, but again, it's work in progress. Our strategy is very simple. I really, really like our strategy, but you'd expect me to say that, because we wrote it. It's a really good strategy. I could put the strategy in front of my mother, and she would understand it. It's really good, and I think that's really important for us, 'cause we've talked to our people very openly about it all the time.
I know a lot of you are familiar with the strategy. But as we go through in a bit of detail today, I hope you have the same feelings about it. In summary, we're really looking forward to updating you today. We think it's a good story, and hopefully by the time you leave today, and hopefully on a train that's running on time, and for many of you who are Zooming in to us, you'll be confident about the business and as enthusiastic as we are about it as well. Let me just skip through a few slides here. You know the agenda. It's all in your packs. You know about opening up a world of opportunity, and you know me. Let's just go straight to the slides.
I'm not gonna go through all these slides word for word. You've got it in the packs. A couple of bits off of this one. Three points in this slide that I want to mention. We want to capture some of the growth opportunities in the U.K., and we think we're really well positioned to do that. The second point is the international connectivity. Our biggest channel inbound is the US, and our biggest challenge outbound is Asia, and they're both really, really important. Finally on this one, you know, it is competitive, but we feel we've got a really good proposition for the market today. You've all heard of opening up a world of opportunity, and we see this as really important. It's very important for our people, and we talk about it every meeting.
You see the four pillars of our strategy there, and we talk about the pillars in going a little bit deeper. Important too here, I would say, for us right now, is energize for growth. We talk to our customers about our growth plans, and we talk to our people about it. It's really important that we've got a growth agenda because it sets the tone for the bank. At the same time, we have to digitize at scale. The reason we have to do that is because our customers expect nothing less. Unless you've got the tools, customers have got amazing choice, especially in the U.K., They can go elsewhere. I'm not gonna talk about the transition to net zero here. I'll mention it later. That's non-negotiable for us. You know our views globally on the transition to net zero.
Now, society I've touched on, again, you can read the slide. I'm just gonna mention three things on society. We have given thousands of people, it's over 3,000 people now, who don't have a permanent address, a chance to get their lives back on track by giving them a bank account. If you ask the people in HSBC UK what they're most proud of, I would guess most people would say it's we've given people a chance to rebuild their lives. There is no profit in that, none at all, but it sure gives people a chance to put their lives back on track, and our people are very proud of it. On disability, what we've tried to do is we've gone another step further on disability, and that is we've tried to hire people with disabilities.
If you walk into some of our branches, you'll see people with Down syndrome welcoming you into the branch. If you live with disability in your family, you will know how difficult that is to get your disabled child or your disabled relative into work. We're trying to give people a chance to come and work for an amazing bank. Again, our people are super proud about what we're doing there. Just finally, I think through the pandemic, we were incredible. You know, I can remember sitting in the chancellor's office and he says, "You will stay open for business." Well, we all agreed. I took that on us and I said, "We will stay open for business." When Stuart Tait talks later about CMB, he'll talk you through bounce-back loans, et cetera.
I'm really proud what this bank did through the pandemic. I think we behaved very, very well for the greater good. Now, this is probably my favorite part of the presentation, and as you'll find out in a second why, okay. We are really important to the group, more important than we've ever been. If you just look down that right-hand side, you'll start to understand why. This is 2021, and these figures have all improved in Q1. If you just look at what we are as a percentage of the group profits, we're 24% in 2021. We were 27% in Q1 of 2022. We're a ring-fenced bank, remember, so we don't have a big investment bank. You know, WPB, 31% of the group is here in the U.K., okay?
CMB is 43%. If we fail in the U.K., the group has a real problem. We've no intention of letting the group down. Look at our returns. Now, our returns are 13.5%. That's post a very large pension surplus. If you didn't have the pension surplus, that would be 17%. Not only are we providing really good quality revenues and profits for the group, but we're supplying really good returns as well. This tells me we're managing the business well, and without stealing others' thunder later, with a lot of opportunity. This one, probably where I get really proud about the business. Today, if you look at our revenues today, our run rate's way ahead of 2019. Okay? We're outperforming 2019 with a much lower cost base.
Our jaws have got wider and wider. Now, the way I describe this to my people is that we've been on a diet for three years. It's not done us any harm, but we've been on a low-fat diet. Now that we've got our cost base down to what I think is a very sensible level, the jaws are just getting wider. Now, there's a point where you shouldn't push it too far, but we are in really good shape, and I'm delighted that the revenues are growing. I'm delighted that the costs are in check. In 2022, the costs are running at a lower level than 2021. This is a super chart about how this business is growing. Now, this is the nine plus one. This is the detail of our strategy.
I've just taken this slide straight out of a slide I would use at any presentation I would do. As I say, I really do like the direction of travel. I could go through this could take me for hours. I won't. Let me just highlight a few things. You will want to talk about mortgages today, and Stuart will be delighted to talk to you about mortgages today. We will tell you what our ambition is in this space. Today, we've got 3% of the buy- to- let market. When you come back here in maybe 18 months, two years' time, we will not have 3%. We'll have a lot more than 3%. Okay? There's so much opportunity for us to get at. That's gonna be really important. We are gonna give you a demo today on FX.
We are after the FX market. We should be the number one player at FX globally. You watch what happens when we show you the demo. I'm sure you'll be really excited about some of the investments. First Direct is a fantastic story in its own right. Chris, the CEO of First Direct, is with us today. He'll give you an update on that, but we want to double First Direct. Why wouldn't you? It's a fantastic franchise. International. Now, there's a lot to happen in international. I've been talking about the corridors. We think the corridors are gonna start opening up again, probably November, December this year. That's really important for us. We'll start to get a much better flow of business coming in and out later on. It's been good. Do not get me wrong.
It's been good, but we think there's a way to go on that, and we think we're uniquely placed. We think we've got the best opportunity in the U.K. to deal with that, so we feel in good space. We're doing many more partnerships than we ever used to, and that's important for growth as well. This is just important information for context. The number one thing to take away from this is we have got space to grow. I hope in four or five years' time, we've got a lot less space to grow, but today we've got a lot of space to grow, and that is really important for us, and it means that we can build into that space and grow out the business. There isn't rocket science there. It's just a really good opportunity to grow into that space.
Again, trusted brand, strong network, all important, but the key here is we've got space to grow. If you let your customers down, it is so competitive as you know, customers have got a choice. They'll walk away. We've done some really good stuff on customer journeys, but you've got to keep investing in it. If you're not two clicks through, you could lose the customer. We have got to make sure that we inspire loyalty. We've got a very loyal customer base, but we need more of that, and we need more new customers. We've got the systems and capabilities now to take on more customers, so we're not frightened to take on more, and you'll hear about some of the acquisition that we're doing in all our business sectors.
You need to make sure you look after your customers all the way through the journey, and that means investment. Here we are. It's digital first, and some of the digital numbers you'll hear today are impressive. That's our customers choosing. The pandemic's helped that. It's moved our customer behaviors quite rapidly. Really what you're trying to get to is a really smart bank in your back pocket, but you want it 24/7. Just think how you all behave yourselves. You want that 24/7. If something goes wrong, you also want to know there's a human there when it matters. You don't need a human 24/7, but you need them when you want them there. That is critical.
Even if you've got all that, if your journeys are clunky, they don't work very well, then that becomes a problem. Four years ago, our mortgage journey was clunky, really clunky. We're now number one on mortgage journeys. It can be fixed, but you've got to be dedicated to it. This is really important as we go forward with our growth story. Two things quickly on this one, and this is us just being completely transparent here today. You know, you've got to take your team with you. You can see last year we had a dip there. When you're really making difficult decisions around the business, when you're making sure your cost base is right, you sometimes have a dip, and we've had a dip, but we have got a plan to move that back up.
Next week, starting on Monday, I'm out on road shows doing a lot of work with our people just so that they get the same story as you're getting today. It's a lot of work, but we really do want to make sure our people are in good shape and enjoying the journey like we are. Then when we've got our female leaders, we are all about being inclusive, and it's great. We've actually got today, right here today, if you get a minute, we've got our interns here, first day. They're here for eight weeks. The first thing I noticed today, 55 interns in one room, about 100 in the other, is how diverse they are. It's fantastic. You know, it really is good to see them.
As you're gonna see today, probably about 45 of my team are senior women. Okay? They are very, very impressive. This is where we are, and a lot more to do in that. That... We are a very much a diverse organization, both customer-wise and people-wise. Sorry, going back one sec. Beg your pardon. Transition to net zero. This is non-negotiable globally for us. It's really important, but it's also an opportunity. I actually personally feel a little bit uncomfortable talking about it as an opportunity because people expect us to help with the transition, and that's the critical piece. We aren't gonna say to customers, "We're leaving you." We're not gonna do that. If they don't have a transition plan, that conversation is gonna get more difficult as time goes on.
We will work with the transition, and that means we need a lot of innovation, but we're gonna play our part. The trillion that we've talked about, the trillion dollars, we're just on that. Okay? We're just on that as we speak just now. I just checked that number earlier today. We're on that. We've got a huge amount to do here. Let me give you, and especially for people dialing in from overseas, there are 29 million homes in the U.K. that have got to be retrofitted. Today, the average cost of a retrofit is about GBP 25,000. Now, that will come down, but you do the math. You know, 29 million times 25,000 pounds. We need innovative solutions to fund that. It's really important for us. Never mind all the infrastructure, electric cars, et cetera.
It's a massive opportunity for us as a bank. We're excited about the opportunity, but we're more excited about playing our part properly. Just in summary, quick summary slides here. We know it's important to play our part in our society, and the U.K. Is small. I mean, it's a small island crammed with people. We are expected to play our part, and we absolutely will. We delivered a really good performance in 2021, but you could easily explain it by saying, "Do you know what? There was a lot of your accrued impairments. You've written those all back. Have you really got as good a business as you thought you had?" I would say yes, and I think 2022 will show that, and it's off to a very good start. I think we're really well positioned.
We don't have to go out and look for new things. We are really well positioned. It's right in front of us, and we're very focused on getting after those. For those that think this is just too competitive an environment, there's too many players, I understand why you might think that. You know what? I don't think it's been any different in all the time I've been in the U.K. I will pause there and take a few questions. If there's no questions, I'll move on as well. Well, this would be a first. No questions? Yes. Thank you. Let me down.
That's in the front.
In the front. A microphone, you all, 'cause people will not hear you in the front.
Ian, you've talked about the growth at least a couple of times over your intro. You've given us a couple of examples where you think you're kind of lagging or you're not right sized in the U.K. market. Can you give us kind of more of a sense of where those aims are, maybe, you know, maybe broadly by business? I understand we're gonna talk more about kind of things in detail. You know, just to set the picture for us.
Sure. I mean, you will get a lot of detail from Stuart and Stuart. Let me just give you a couple of areas. If you look at unsecured, and when I think about unsecured, I intuitively go to cards. We've got quite a good market share on cards. When you take out Marks & Spencer Bank, our share is actually quite small. We had our own sort of, I would call them restrictive rules in place. You can only have one card in the HSBC Group and all these sort of things. We've managed to get our arms around that. Cards would be definitely an area we think there's opportunity. I think unsecured lending in general is an opportunity for us.
FX, we've been losing market share on FX the last few years. We think Global Wallet will be really important. We will have to cannibalize the book a little bit, which I'm fine with. I think we have to do that to get the growth. In the commercial bank space, and I know Stuart will go into this in some detail, we have got a fantastic commercial banking franchise. We're number one in large corporates. We're number one in MME. If you see what we're doing with Kinetic to make it much easier for customers to join us, that should be the growth engine in the small end for some time to come. It doesn't really matter which part of the business you look at, and I haven't even spoken about wealth yet.
I mean, the wealth market in the U.K. Is so fragmented. We'll give you one statistic today on wealth, what we've done with the opportunity to invest in funds on your phone, and it's a really important start for us. Yeah, I mean, everywhere we look, there's an opportunity. When you get into mortgages, and I will not steal Stuart's thunder, I mean, there's so many different opportunities within the mortgage world for us to expand. We don't even play in some of the key areas. Buy-to-let being case in point. Yes. I'll come to you after. Yeah.
Thank you. Just interested in how you think the U.K. bank sector is viewed from a political point of view at the moment. Obviously, talk creeping in about possible remuneration on central bank reserves being reduced or removed altogether. I'm just wondering, are you viewed as part of the solution or the problem these days? Thanks.
Tom, that's a great question, and
That's just Tom Rayner, your new minister.
Thank you. That was kind of you to introduce, yeah. That's your MBE gone, Tom, by the way. That's what I get for trying to be funny. I think we're in a better place than we were. I think post the pandemic, I think we really leaned in, and we engage with MPs all the time and try and tell them what we are trying to do. In fact, Stuart and I were with ministers from the Department for Business and Trade yesterday. Again, just trying to say how important trade was for this country. I'm under no illusions. I would always say we're walking on thin ice. I mean, politics, as you know, is a very interesting game. I would never take it for granted. We are non-political.
We just try and do the very best thing for our customers. We've had to work very hard in the corridors of power over the last two years. Westminster has been like a second home to me. I wouldn't say it's always easy by any standards. I think we had a conversation about three weeks ago on Bounce Back Loans, 'cause that was getting quite interesting, some of the rhetoric around that. Of course, we've got the data. We know exactly where we are on Bounce Back Loans. Just correcting people around the facts. It's always easier in hindsight, isn't it? I mean, if we went back and did Bounce Back Loans again, we'd probably do it slightly differently. At the time, it was really difficult.
I've got no criticism of the government at all. They made decisions, fast decisions at point in time, and we were there to support that. Yeah, it's always challenging. We have to just go with the flow, but we try and influence it in the best way we can. Yeah. Could you just pass the microphone back, man, please? Thank you.
It is Manus Costello from Autonomous Research. Last time we met, you were talking about current account share of about 12%, and you were saying that that was your natural market share, the way that you viewed it. It's obviously increased. I would assume there are some pandemic-related effects that are going on in there. My question is, now you're over 15%, do you think your natural market share has increased, or do you think that as we normalize, you'll actually cede some of that liability share and the overall opportunity is kind of where it was three years ago?
Well, there's two or three different ways to answer that question. Again, I will not steal Stuart's thunder. He will explain that in a second, there's interesting things going on in the market. Most people have more than one current account. Watch out for the statistics on First Direct because First Direct's really interesting in that most people bank with First Direct. They don't have one part of their banking, they have all their banking. The guys will give you a really good update on that later. I'm not ducking the question, but it wouldn't be fair to steal their thunder for later. Yes, come to you second. Can we get a microphone here, please? Can we pass it back? Thanks. Cutting back on costs, you see. We've only got two microphones in the room, you know?
Afternoon. It's Jason Napier here from UBS. I think most of the investors we talk to are fairly comfortable with the outlook for retail credit risk, collateralization and so on. Can you give us a sense of what the loss content looks like in the commercial and corporate book? Amidst headlines around Northern Ireland and Brexit and trade corridors and all those good things, how you contextualize the tails in the outlook for credit risk in there.
Yeah. Again, I'm not gonna duck the question. I'll give you a couple of headlines, but you're gonna have Julia later, who will give you really good details on it, and Stuart will tell you a few of it as well. At the macro level in the U.K., we are fortunate. We've got a slightly different book at HSBC. It's a slightly more affluent book. And it's interesting 'cause we get asked a lot now, "How is your book behaving?" It's benign. I mean, it's really quiet now. At some point it's got to normalize. It has to. At the moment, it's deathly quiet. Julia, as I say, will give you more details on that.
It's a question I do get asked a lot though, 'cause people are, especially politicians, "Oh, what's actually happening?" Very, very little. But there's been a lot of buildup of cash as you know as well. I mean, I think this morning we're sitting on, I think it's about GBP 110 billion at the Bank of England. That was part of the question earlier, what are you gonna do with this? There's a lot of cash in the system. We're gonna ask a question back here. Can we just pop the microphone back, gentlemen? Thank you.
Thanks so much. Ed Firth from KBW. At a group level, you've obviously been going through this huge restructuring program, and I guess a big chunk of that has been in the U.K. as well. I should know, but I don't know the precise numbers, but I assume you're spending some chunk of that. The guidance is that that's coming to an end now and that actually going forward there's much less restructuring to do. Which, I guess externally seems could be argued to be quite strange because it seems to me there's a lot going on in terms of, you know, what you've been describing to us in terms of digital transformation and all the work you've still got to do.
It would be interesting to get your feedback from the front line. Do you now feel that the bank is getting to the state it needs to be and that actually going forward there is much less restructuring to do? Or was it just big chunks of stuff that are not happening? Or how do you see that from your perspective?
Well, first of all, I think that's a terrific question, and I guess people will tell us if we've got it right. I think the view around the executive table is you can't keep having huge one-offs. It's been disciplined. Even as recently as last week, we were talking various subjects, like, no, the end of 2022, that is it. The other thing as well we're gonna change is that we're not gonna talk about adjusted PBT anymore. It's gonna be reportable. That's it. You know, you're on your. Actually, I like that. I think that's good old-fashioned banking. I'm talking about positive jaws today. I don't hear people talking about jaws anymore. I think it's a great discipline in your bank.
I think on the investment, I mean, we, if you ask any team today, they'd say, "Oh, if only I had even more money to invest." I mean, we're investing the thick end of $1 billion a year in this bank. At some point, you've got to get the balance right with, and giving yourself time to then get the right products in front of the customer and then generate the revenue to pay for it. The view of the group at the moment is, look, we've spent a lot of money. We've got to look after the shareholders. We've got to, you know, get the benefit out of that and push forward. Two years from now, we could say, "Look, we maybe need to do something else." And if everything goes to the cloud, you might change things again.
I think we've got it about right actually. It puts discipline into the bank, and I think there's more discipline on costs in HSBC Group than there's ever been before. Again, not a bad thing in my view. Right. I'll go one, two, and I think we'll probably have to call it there. Yeah. Get a microphone to you. That's. Sorry. I'll come to you next. Okay, then we'll. I'll take a breather.
Thanks. Hi, it's James Irvine here from Soc Gen. Ian, you mentioned that the 3,000 bank accounts for homeless people is one of your proudest achievements. What more do you think you can do on financial inclusion?
Because there are a lot of people who are excluded, who because of a bad credit record or maybe they don't wanna borrow GBP 5,000 for a year, they want GBP 250 for a month. What more do you think you can do in that area?
We would wrap it all up into two words, financial health. The key. That goes through different phases. Financial health for you might be very different financial health for somebody else that you might meet walking back to the station tonight. We have got to play a role on both. Right now, the most important bucket we have got in financial health goes under resilience. Because a lot of people over the next, I would say 12 months, are gonna find it very, very difficult.
We have got to be there to support them. In fact, this morning, you might be aware, you might not, there's a new Dear CEO letter out from the regulator this morning saying, "You must behave through this period." When I read it this morning, I thought, "Well, we're ahead of that." We have to be ahead of that. We've got a part to play. Now, that doesn't mean we can sort everything. I mean, you're pointing at about GBP 250 for three or four months. We're not good at that. We're not set up for that, and it's frustrating sometimes that we can't be more active there. I think we are doing some great things, and we're doing a lot. We try and focus on education.
I think that's been really good, some of the work we've done. We cannot get financial education onto the curriculum, the education curriculum. We have tried. If you've got children in this audience, and test it. I've got four children, and trying to teach them on financials is actually really difficult because it's like, "I'll worry about that when the time comes." Children pick up from the age of four. That's the data we've got. From the age of four on financials, so we should be teaching them in schools much earlier. Just done an agreement with the Scout Association, 'cause we couldn't get through the education curriculum. We're having to be very creative to get to the kids.
It's all about financial health.
Okay. Thank you. There was one more. Yeah, gentleman at the back. Sorry.
Thank you very much. It's Arman Rakel from Barclays. At HSBC Group level, you've got a few home markets. You've got Hong Kong, the U.K., Mexico, the US. I was just interested from your position, is there any observable synergy, from your position of being part of a group structure with so many kind of key markets? I'm thinking primarily about your retail franchises. Is there any overlap or synergy or extra value that the group can derive from holding those?
Yes. I could answer the question in so many different ways. I like with the Ping An debate just now, it's a really big one just now with Ping An. I love being part of a big group. I didn't have it in any other bank, and I've worked in a few banks. This is the first time you see the revenue flows. Inbound, as I said earlier, the biggest inbound for us is in the commercial bank side from the U.S. Outbound is Asia-bound mainly. The Middle East, actually, we've got three really big parts of the bank today. Asia, the Middle East and the U.K. are the three big hubs as it were. They're really important. We work really closely with them. Then there's a lot of global products.
FX, that you'll see later today, that is a global product. Trade is a global product. That's really exciting for us. I didn't even mention the word, and I apologize, I probably should have. One of the great things about this group is collaboration. I mean, it is beyond anything else I've ever seen. People really are delighted to help. I've not been in Hong Kong for a couple of years, but when I go to Hong Kong, I will spend a lot of time with customers out there who are investing in the U.K., and I've got to know the families really well. I was in Dubai earlier this year, and all the talk in Dubai was about Saudi and about inward investments.
Stuart and I are going up to Teesside in a couple of weeks, and we're spending two days working with people who are inward investment into the U.K. Now, you might say, "That's not your job." You know, I see it as absolutely my job. Shaking hands with people saying, "Look, we want to help you as you arrive in the U.K.," that's my job. It's really exciting. I mean. You might just think it's all politics. It's not. There is a lot of money moving into the U.K. at the moment. But don't underestimate how well we work with our colleagues across the group. We were all together last week, and it was great. It is a genuine benefit. Maybe that's an opportunity to just mention Ping An for a second. Very important shareholder to us.
We're hugely respectful of Ping An. We've done a lot of work on this, so you're buying the drinks now. I'm sorry. You're buying the drinks. I mean, it's an expensive one today. That might have been my boss saying, "Don't say too much." No. It's We've done a lot of work on this. Ewen's here today, actually. Ewen Stevenson here. He's in the building. He'll happily talk about it later. It doesn't matter how we cut it, we can't see the value of breaking it, you know. I personally cannot see it. It's worth so much to us that it would be really painful for us. We think best to stick together. There's things we can do.
Of course, there's things we can do, but best to stick together. I'm gonna pause there. Thank you, guys. I'm gonna hand you over to Stuart Tait, who's gonna tell you all about commercial banking, which is a great story in the U.K., t hank you very much. Speak to you later.
Thanks for the applause.
Thanks, Ian.
Thank you.
That's quite a phenomenal performance, Ian. You started with no questions, and then you had to close it off. That's really impressive. While I just pour water, I just wanna say thank you. Thanks for your time. I know you have a choice what you do every day, where you spend it, and you've chosen to spend it with us this afternoon. Especially for those that are dialing in, I think many are in Asia. Having just returned from Asia myself, thanks for giving up your evening, your early evening and quite late evening. It's very much appreciated. I may have met some of you before. Actually, there are one or two faces I recognize, and I would have met you in Hong Kong a few years ago.
I was running the commercial banking business for Asia for the past five years, and I just wanna say, I remember that session very well. It wasn't half a day, I think it was three or four days. There were a lot of discussions, a lot of visits and things, and there were some comments made, either through the Q&A or in the breaks outside, that actually shaped our thinking, and it's not too much of a stretch to say it actually shaped our strategy. I hope we can achieve the same today by talking with you and exchanging views. It's incredibly valuable. I've never worked in the U.K., the question earlier about international, the value of the group. I joined The Hongk ong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in 1984 in Singapore. I've spent my whole career moving around different countries.
This is my first time in this market. I came here six months ago. I have to say, having spent time in Asia, Middle East, North America, group head office, I'm really surprised at the optimism, the opportunity, the pace and intensity that's in our customer base, but also in our employees. I think when you sit in certain parts of the world that are seen as more dynamic, more fast-paced, you believe that's where all the action is. I can assure you it's not. It's here as well. It's been a really good, pleasant, positive surprise, and I am feeding that back to my colleagues in Asia and elsewhere, just so that they know, you know, this is more balanced across the group, the opportunities, than people may sometimes realize.
Very excited to be here, to get my chance at last to work in this market. Excited to be in a growing business, and it is a growing business. Excited to still be at the heart of the bank, because commercial banking is at the heart of the organization. We see two home markets, not several. You can define them how you wish. Hong Kong and the U.K., If you're in a core business in a home market, I'd argue you're not just at the heart of the bank, in fact, you're at the heart of the heart. That's what we're about to talk about. In 2021, commercial banking in the U.K. delivered GBP 2.7 billion of revenue, sterling, and GBP 2.1 billion of profit. The important point here is that revenue, that profit, came across the segments and across the products.
If you think about our clients and the clients of the group, our clients sit in the middle of the spectrum. Have we got technical problems or are we okay? Yep. Oh, sorry, let me move the slide on. There we are. Little bit of context. I saw people looking, I thought something's going wrong. Thank you for that prompt. Our clients sit in the middle of the spectrum of the group. We've got the larger GB clients on one side, retail on the other. By definition, our clients are buyers and users of the products and services of the two other businesses in the group, and they do that internationally. If you put that all together, I think it explains why our strategy, our key goal, is to maximize the revenues across the group's businesses, but also across the geographies.
That execution is supported by the fact that we're both global, geographic, and universal. We have the range of products and services that they need. We can grow and stay with a company all the way. From a startup to a large listed company, we're with them. As they expand geographically, they use more products and services. I think you can only claim to be a true relationship bank if you can take a company from startup right the way to a large corporate. Finally, just as context, there are opportunities here that are new, they're emerging. I really believe in e-commerce and the platform economy, and we're gonna demonstrate some of the things we're doing to tap into that shortly. Sustainable finance, clearly there's strong demand. Thirdly, a little bit like Ian was saying about opportunity, there are headwinds.
It's at times like this that HSBC Group and commercial banking stands apart. If you're running a business, especially if it's international, and you're probably in a global supply chain, even if you're a domestic company, who are you gonna turn to for insight, advice, risk mitigation products? I think we're a very good choice for companies to turn to be able to run their businesses effectively when there are headwinds. That was the context. Just as an overview, commercial banking in the U.K. is clearly a cost-efficient business. In fact, we are best in class among the U.K. banks. We've been investing heavily in technology and in people. The investment is largely done, this particular phase. Now we have to commercialize it.
Our people have to make it available to customers in a way that they use it and we build the transaction counts, for example. We like transaction banking. Most of the investment went into cash and trade. We are number one in transaction banking, but that obviously gives terrific annual fee annuity revenue for us. We're building a digital SME bank. We have about 700,000 SME clients. Clearly, that needs to be digital. It's not just about digitizing things. We're also streamlining and simplifying our procedures. Stuart's very happy. We used to have nearly 70 reasons why our clients would go to a branch. We steered them there. We're down, I think, to about 6 now. We've taken out about 90% of the reason why we used to ask our customers to physically go to a branch.
Technology, and just through simplification, we've removed almost all of that. Some of it is just not required, and that's where we're now at. Many companies will say to us, "I really like your network. I like your range of products and services. Your RMs are terrific. I just wish you were easier to deal with." That's what we've been tackling. Actually, we get a very similar comment from our employees. We like working here. We like the brand. It can be difficult to serve clients the best we know we can. That's where the investment's gone. That's much of the action that we've had underway. If there's a real standout for us beyond the global and the universal aspect, I would say it's the value of an incredible client base.
When people join our companies from other banks, often the reason for joining us or one of the most positive aspects they see at the beginning is this rich, diverse customer base. It's a terrific platform for them to grow and for them to excel. It's a very diverse customer base as well. We cover all the sectors that you would expect. We have domestic customers as well as international. We have very small customers, startups in the commercial bank in HSBC UK. We also have large corporates. FTSE 100 clients, companies are actually in our customer portfolio. Now if you just look at the right-hand side of the diagram, you can see that about two-thirds of our revenue actually comes from the corporate base, from our mid-market and large corporate clients. They are substantially international in their business.
They either have their own overseas offices or they're very active buying and selling internationally. That's a key component, of course, that we focus on. We also recognize that SME clients, the business banking clients, are typically the fastest-growing. The pace of growth, as we've seen, just seems to continually accelerate. Small companies are growing faster than others. I was talking to a company a few weeks ago. In two years, they've gone from startup to GBP 100 million annual revenue online business. It's staggering, the pace. If the timescale for a company to go from a startup to become a very significant business has shrunk, our response to that has been, we need to shrink our organizational structure. Meaning, not so long ago, I can't imagine inviting an investment banking colleague to a startup.
Today, they want access to our SME clients, our business banking clients, our startups. It's terrific to have that sort of collaboration that Ian was talking about, where two parts of this company that couldn't have been further apart not so long ago work hand in hand. We visit those startups and those fast growth companies together. It's producing great results for us in the market. The clients are obviously very happy with that. It's helping pull this very large, diverse group much more closely together. Just on the financial performance, you may want to go through this in more detail. I just wanna say, as you know, we position the loan book prudently. We always have. We'll continue to do that. We raise the deposit before we lend. In 2021, we had net ECL releases.
The real standout for me in there is the fee income, the non-interest income, and that's particularly strong. In 2021, that was driven by capital financing activity. Again, the commercial bank working with global banking colleagues, M&A advisory, ECM, some bond mandates, even some IPOs at that time. It's that collaboration with GBM that comes shining through. Now, if you think back to the earlier slide, we effectively have three segments, business banking, mid-market, and large corporate. The high growth is in the mid-market segment. Seeing those companies grow, our revenues grow substantially. We stood up a team in 2021 on the investment banking side dedicated to mid-market companies.
There's a fairly rich vein of fee there and fairly limited competition because the bulge bracket banks aren't active with those companies of that size, and their needs and demands are often beyond the capability, let's say, of a provincial accounting firm within the U.K., t hat's particularly attractive area for us to play. In fact, our mid-market segment revenues in the first quarter of this year are up by over 20% for the total segment. However, that's all been very positive. There is subdued loan demand in the market. Companies have built up cash. Ian touched upon this. They've been able to repay debt. They may have put some CapEx plans on hold. It has been relatively subdued over the last couple of years.
Trade, the trade finance business, has actually kept it more buoyant, and that's particularly good for us, giving our strength in that area. We have maintained market share, but there was someone presenting just before me and others that would say that's not good enough. We know that. Maintaining market share is not good enough for us. Our intent is to grow it and to work with Julia and the team in credit risk to train our RMs the best we can, identify the winners in the market, and grow the loan book. We do need to do better. However, on a flat loan book, our margins have improved, and we're the best in the market on the net interest margin.
In the first few months of this year, actually, our NIMs have improved. The quality of the book, I would argue, and the pricing is stronger than ever before. As you can see on the right-hand side, a number of initiatives to really get some of the growth going. This isn't the full list of funds. As you might imagine, there are a number of people that have got ideas about various funds that can be set up. We just launched at group level a $1 billion fund for female entrepreneurs, which is getting a lot of attention here in the U.K. and other markets. This gives you an idea of some of the management actions that are underway to drive and stimulate the growth where we see the greatest opportunities. International connectedness. I've lived and breathed it all my career.
I see several clients a week. I don't think I see a single client that doesn't want to talk about international business. I was talking to someone recently about, you know, you might be a farmer in Lancashire and believe you're a very, very domestic business, but suddenly you're seeing fertilizer price, animal feed price going up. You clearly now recognize you're more international than you might have realized, before. The map on the left there is very telling. If you look at the top ten outbound markets, those in red for the U.K. commercial banking business, they're spread across the world. I think there may be a perception that they all would have been in Asia, but the top ten outbound markets for our client base are well spread across Asia, Europe and North America.
We are set up in a way to drive that even further because when a U.K.-based RM works with a U.K. company and a colleague, let's say in Vietnam, a U.K. company does business within Vietnam, the U.K. relationship manager gets recognition for the revenue that's earned in Vietnam. So it drives all the right behavior. In other words, for our relationship managers, it makes no difference to them and their performance whether that revenue is booked here or in another market around the world. That's what our customers expect of us. That's really what we're all about. If I think back to time in Asia, two markets I would call out with great prospects would be India and Australia. Australia is the one, and I'm not Aussie, but Australia is the one that stands out, I think.
It's always in our top 10 markets globally, both inbound and outbound. It may seem geographically remote, but it's phenomenally connected, it's international, and it's simply explained by everything they produce or much of it gets exported and much of what they need is imported. It's a very well-connected international market. On the inbound side, we manage 2,000 relationships of companies based overseas coming into the U.K. Ian said majority of that flow comes from the U.S., not Asia, but from the U.S. Our international business looks both east and west. If you look at the bar chart there on the bottom right, sure, we're in a very strong position for Asia-Pacific. We do win our large share of RFPs, and we recognize that companies may need to award business to, with other banks.
You know, if a company is, let's say, based in the Americas, they may award the Asia business to us and the American business to an American bank. If you look near the bottom of the chart there, you can see we at least hold our own supporting European and American domiciled companies when competing head on against the American and the European banks. That's us, our global model. We're also universal, as I touched on earlier. What we're trying to show here is that we meet the broadest needs of our clients. You can see the universal banking model at work. You can see the diverse sources of revenue that our customers generate for us, their material, and you can see that they're growing, and that's really important. There are new areas, private debt going into companies.
We now work with our asset management colleagues. They have institutional funds in the asset management funds. We may be full on credit exposure to a commercial banking client. We work hand in glove with asset management, and we put funds in together. Another example of cross line of business collaboration for the benefit of our customers. Now, when we had the Asia Investor Week or days, I remember standing over cocktails, and we came to the conclusion that if you were really to summarize the group, or at least commercial banking, we are effectively a cross-border transaction bank. That's how we sort of boiled it right down, if you had to in a nutshell. This is our transaction banking business for the U.K.
We are number one share for cash and for trade, but I would expect us to be further ahead of the competition than you see on the graph. The investments have gone into technology. We have had some reorganizations, and we have to drive a greater gap between us and those close competitors. It's the global presence that allows us to deliver those transaction products effectively on the ground, working with the customer, working with their counterparts that makes the real difference. Technology can go so far, but it's amazing the difference when you're actually in that market, you can handle transactions quicker, you can give insight to what's happening at the other end of the transaction. Customer satisfaction. You'll see straight away on the graph there's two stories here. Of course, we're proud of the top story. That's the corporate space.
Large corporate, mid-market, number one for MPS and improving, moving further ahead of the competition. We don't see that on the business banking and the small business banking side. Red line is small business banking starting to turn the corner. The story here is, as Ian mentioned, during COVID, we did the right thing. We said we'll support small businesses through an extraordinary time, whether they're our customer or not. We stayed open through that period on the bounce-back loans for our existing clients, but also the new clients. That, of course, required significant resource to be shifted from our core business to that activity. That's now complete. The loans are on the book.
The resource has now gone back to our business banking clients, and we would expect to see shortly, because we're making the outbound calls, because we're giving advice to those customers, those scores should start to improve. We're digitizing at scale, and we have to in a scaled business. Scale obviously drives mobile adoption. You can see on the red line there, mobile logins versus desktop, a very different picture between the two of them. Of course, it improves client service, but it's the only way we can grow in a cost-efficient way, and we do have the ambition to scale up. Kinetic, which you'll also see, is a great example of putting in brand-new technology.
It's digital only, it's mobile, and I see that as a large acquisition net for new companies to start doing business with us and that we can grow over the course of their lifetime. The right-hand side is important. Logons are increasing sharply, so they are active, and they are transacting. They haven't just been onboarded. We now have the largest range of loan products through Kinetic on the street in this space. Now we're just starting relatively small loans at the moment, but it's real concrete action. It's ring-fenced, and we will grow the lending activity. Final slide. We have brought sector expertise to our clients. We've largely mimicked what happens in the global banking segment, and we've seen clients really appreciate that.
That's bringing sector expertise not just to them from a central location, but actually it's dispersed around the country. This is locally based sector expertise, which makes an incredible difference for customers of this size. This is how we get into the trusted advisor relationship. Every relationship manager wants to be a trusted advisor, and sector knowledge and insight enables us to do that. It enables us to find the best opportunities. Who are the real winners out there? This includes sustainable finance. Of course, it goes across the industry sectors, but we provided $2.7 billion of sustainable finance last year. We're up 127% last year. Year to date this year, we're up over 5x . We've got an accelerating growth in our sustainable financing. I think that's a good place to close.
We sit at the crossroads of world trade. There's a phrase we used to use, and I think it's good to occasionally resurrect that. If you sit at the crossroads of world trade, maybe commerce is a better phrase, because it's not just about trade finance. We sit at the crossroads of commerce, and it's at times like this when you have global insight of what's happening, but also on-the-ground local insight, and you can put that together, capture it, put it in the hands of the relationship managers, and make it available to our customers. That's how I think we stand out in conditions like this. In summary, for me, three key points. We're executing on our distinct and sustainable competitive advantage, global and universal.
We're utilizing the strength of the franchise on the ground presence, deep local knowledge, and we're really fueling that by identifying and focusing on the key areas of growth opportunity, and by the use of data, we can also focus on the clients that show the greatest upside potential. Thank you. Q&A. Thank you.
Thank you. That was right for America. It sounds like this whole ring-fencing has been quite hard work really because a lot of what you pointed out there is how great the group is, and we get that, we respect that. How does it work in practice, the bringing the group to what is now a definitionally domestic business for you? Like, how do you manage that complexity? Thank you.
That's it, yeah. I'm glad you used the phrase it's definitionally domestic, but if you look at facts, figures I put up there, in practice, it's not. I've never worked in a ring-fenced bank, and I was expecting six months ago to come across a number of operational issues, clunky processes, maybe tripping up occasionally. After six months, I frankly, honestly don't feel from day-to-day business working with clients that I'm in a ring-fenced bank. I haven't had a single conversation with a client where they've said, "I wish you'd ring-fence differently. You don't handle the ring-fence as well as your colleagues." FX transactions flow. We bring in the capital markets team. I, you know, I mean, that is an absolute, genuine, honest answer, which surprised me probably as much as my answer to you does. I don't feel it. Sorry.
Oh, we need the microphone, I think, do we? That one microphone. The lady in the middle. Yep. Maybe I should walk around.
Hi, it's Pearly from KBW. Just going to the point about crossroad of world trade, and obviously I can see that's a very important part of your franchise. With geopolitical events, not just war in Ukraine, but a general more fracturing of, you know, politics between major superpowers and also people realizing the fragility of a just-in-time, highly globalized, highly connected supply chain. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that we'll go back from globalization. I don't think that's an option ever. If there's sort of more inwards traffic, you know, and more inwards investment, and people want to have a more inwards-looking economy, how do you see your business in the context of that? I guess, have you seen it? And if you do see it, what's the impact on your business?
Yeah. I think, actually we spent the last few years talking about supply chains and shifting because, you know, China isn't necessarily the lowest place to manufacture now, and people were looking to move things into Vietnam or Bangladesh. It's incredibly difficult to move a supply chain. You know, people say, "Let's put a new factory up in Bangladesh." It takes years. It's a difficult process. It takes time and it takes money, but it was already underway. There's an acceleration of it, but it's more difficult. Often a single factory is part of an ecosystem. You know, you can't just do it on your own. You have to bring other component manufacturers with you.
If I think back to when I talked about headwinds, it's at times like this that companies turn to us and say, "I'm not sure I can get that chemical from India anymore. I buy it from a middleman. If I don't get that raw material, my very viable business might suddenly be in trouble. Can you, HSBC, help me identify an alternative supplier?" Or what we find is, "I buy from a middleman. I wanna go direct to source. I don't know where that middleman's gonna steer the business. There might not be the loyalty and the relationship.
If I can go direct to source, if you can help me find them, or two or three of them, I think my supply chain is more stable." It's those sort of conversations, we call them opportunities, but that's what customers want to engage and talk to us about. I think we do stand apart in that aspect. Same for sales. I mean, a lot of people, the larger companies, and no doubt the others will follow, they want to sell direct to the consumer. How do I get to the Indonesian consumer? You know, I have to go through traders, middlemen, distributors, and on it goes. I wanna go direct, and that's where the platform economy comes in.
Thank you. Good afternoon. Martin Leitgeb from Goldman Sachs. I was just wondering if you could give us a bit of color in terms of the growth opportunity revenue-wise for the commercial banking business. I think on the retail side, Ian's comment on the ambition for mortgage market share. I think what we will hear later in terms of rate sensitivity. I was just wondering, in terms of commercial banking revenues, how should we think going forward? I was just wondering on the interaction, higher rates, and that growth opportunity. Do you think there's also a flip side of higher rates here, in particular for your commercial banking client side, that this could essentially become, you know, somewhat of a headwind? Thank you.
I think it's a continuation. Thank you for the question. I think it's a continuation of 2021, where we saw growth across the segments, the different client groups, and across the products, and actually across the corridors. Not all of them, the trade corridors. We're liquid. We are a little over $100 billion of deposits and about $65 billion of loans, so we're liquid. We do get benefit from the rate rises, and we've been able to pass on interest margin as well, improved interest margins. I think the book is positioned, obviously, to benefit from the rate rises. I think we're well positioned to operate across the international markets. When you get a shift like the previous question, that's when there's an opportunity to pick up new business.
Of course, we've got to be, and I'm, I don't mean to drift into credit risk 'cause your question was about revenue, but we do need to watch for, and I touched on it earlier, viable businesses, looking at the financials, suddenly not being able to trade in a solvent way, because they can't get key components or maybe they can't get workers. If you translate that into revenue, we do need to be watchful of certain industry sectors that are potentially more stressed than others. There may be a hoarding of certain commodities, for example. I think the outlook is breadth from the revenue sources. Don't see anywhere in particular where that's going to slow down. I'm surprised coming here at the level of corporate activity. Companies are...
They're going from public to private. There's acquisitions. They're bringing in private equity, bringing in our asset management teams. That's all fee-driven. IPOs, very quiet at the moment, so that will for a period of time. I think breadth, and I can't see an area that we would see materially slow down. We haven't seen it up until now.
Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you.
Hello. Omar Keen from Credit Suisse. I've got two questions if I may. The first question I wanted to ask is how do you assess the competitive threat of you know new entrants that are offering particular you know smart software you know or treasury services that you know might start picking apart at you know particular elements of your relationship with your customers? You know, I'm thinking you know some propositions you know like Wise that you know say that they're targeting you know the small business-to-business customers of banks where you know margins in that customer funnel might be a little bit higher. In the context of what you guys said about you know FX market share it would be helpful to get your thoughts on that.
Secondly, just on deposit beta in the commercial bank, that's somewhere where the analyst community has a lot less visibility in terms of trying to figure out what's going on. So can you talk a little bit about your liability pricing strategy in a rising rate environment?
Yeah. Okay, thanks. First question, we do take the competition seriously. I mean, Ian talked earlier about there is no room for arrogance. I think normally we're quite a humble crowd. We don't want to be alarmist, but I think we can all see some of these organizations, these companies, these startups, they'll do something brilliantly. I mean, absolutely brilliantly. It's quite narrow. That might be fine for some companies, particularly smaller companies, particularly at the outset. Our challenge is to bring the benefit of breadth and scope. If you're running a smaller business at the outset, perhaps operating with two or three providers, if you can stitch it together and they're all brilliant, that's terrific.
Is there a point where you're trying to run a company, you're trying to keep your administration down, is there a point where actually it's easier to deal with a smaller number of providers that can maybe offer the same? It might not be as brilliant, you know, it might not be as good as, you know, a collection of the very best of everything. I was with a large listed company last week, and I told them, "I'm meeting you." I said, "What would you be saying to the analysts and the investors today on the positive?" They said, "It's." I'm gonna contradict what I said earlier. They said, "It's the ease of coming to you. Because we already do quite a lot of things with you, when we need to do something new and different, there's almost a gravitational pull.
We just come to you. It's the ease you understand us, you know us. We've already got systems integration. The challenge for us is if we can operate that well in the mid and large corporate sector, how do we bring that experience down to the smaller scale part of the business? That's the challenge, and that's why today we're gonna show you Kinetic and Global Wallet and some of the other digital capabilities. On the deposit book, you asked about pricing. We have passed back on previous rate rises. We've stepped in on occasion, and we've passed on, and we haven't on others. I know the rate rises have gone up today. I don't know the decision, but we've agreed with Ian, the ExCo, the board, effectively a mechanism to guide us how to respond as and when rates move.
There's a framework there. Now, a decision's still made on the day. That's a guiding framework. Is that what we want to do on the day? We recognize as time passes, the pressure to pass on those rates benefit is clearly there. There's an expectation we do it. Of course, we want our customers to be safe, sound, and operating healthily as well. Was that the point of your question, or have I
No.
Missed my understanding of the word beta?
Can I ask perhaps the question another way? What level of interest rates do you think the market for deposits gets a lot more competitive than it is today?
I wouldn't know how to answer that.
Yeah.
Because I think we look at it step by step, and I suppose by historic levels, rates are still very low. We've had a lot of funds sitting on non-interest accounts because, you know, companies may have thought, "What's the point?" Then they become interest rate sensitive, you know, when they can start to see the benefit. I'm sure Stuart, on the retail side, will give maybe a very different answer, maybe a very similar answer. We are beginning to see some cash balances starting to flatten as cash was being built. There are signs of corporates starting to use the cash. Now, whether they're using it to cover operating expenses or whether they believe there's opportunities, not easy to see.
I have to be honest with you, I wouldn't be able to answer where is there a point where pricing has a change in the behavior.
Thank you.
Yep.
We're out of time.
Thank you very much. Thanks for keeping me on track. Thank you. Thanks very much. Stuart.
This is why we deliberately did this. I'm actually called Brian. But we knew we had to try and keep the presentation simple, so we've just renamed ourselves Stuart for the day. Well, actually, I know most of you, so you know I'm not called Brian. My name's Stuart Haire. I lead Wealth and Personal Banking. Three years ago, I led Retail Banking and Wealth Management, which is essentially Wealth and Personal Banking plus Private Bank for anyone who gets confused. Three years ago, I would have stood here and said to you, we have an incredibly compelling franchise.
We have uniquenesses of real strength in our customer base, and I would have said to you, we have a massive market participation opportunity, and we're gonna show some real tight management of costs, but investing where the bank needs to be invested in. Actually, this time around, I'm gonna say the same things to you, but I'm gonna say to you, we've made a lot of progress, and I'm gonna demonstrate that, I think, by the slides that I'm gonna show. Now where we want to take the Wealth and Personal Banking franchise is to develop its sophistication, develop its breadth of offering, develop the complexity of needs that we can serve into our customers.
I know I have no right to do that if I don't get it right for the customers, and so that will remain my number one focus. We've now got a franchise which is a very resilient revenue and profit growth. You'll see that in the 2021 figures. Indeed, if we move forward into those published in Q1, you've seen a significant acceleration in our revenue growth. We're not just growing our revenue by throwing costs into the machine. We're also bringing our costs down, materially restructuring and transforming the business, making consequential decisions like coming out of mortgages in Marks & Spencer or coming out of the current account market, so we can redistribute those costs to support our focusing on our strengths.
We're increasing, and I promised we would, Jason, we would increase the cadence of digital delivery, and I hope not only to talk about that, but you will actually see it. First of all, you'll see it if you're a customer. You're starting to see some of the benefits, but particularly over this summer, there's gonna be some fantastic features and capabilities starting to come out to our customers. Leveraging the question before, leveraging a lot of the capabilities that were built in other parts of the world, notably Hong Kong, where we're actually utilizing the same underlying technology delivery capabilities that Jen will talk about to actually enable capabilities in the U.K. with localization, but it really helps us benefit in terms of bringing things to market.
We have made improvements in customer service, but not enough of my customers would agree with that. A big part of what I need to do is maintain the focus. COVID was a distraction, but it's not acceptable to have a distraction. You can't grow your revenues, your balance sheet, your market share, and not take your customers with you. Candidly, it's a Pyrrhic victory. It won't last. Then finally, and this isn't at the expense of customer service, this is to enable customer service, there are too many things in our organization that customers have to do rather than want to do, and they introduce cost and complexity into the organization. We have been working with technology colleagues, with Jen and team, really to try to, in the same way as Stuart mentioned, really to try to go after that opportunity as well.
Let me talk about the franchise. This looks like a similar slide to the one three years ago. I have updated it, I promise. We've got 14 million active customer relationships, and I'll talk in another slide's time just a little different vignette on that customer view, which I think will surprise many of you, but it's been by deliberate design. Probably the most important chart on this slide is the bottom left there, and that's the opportunity that we have. I'll correct a misapprehension. The 12% you may have seen before might have been a balance led position. The 15.6% is CACI, so it's more of a stock position. That said, we have grown our current account participation quite materially, but that means we've got even more opportunity in the cross-sells.
Now, we've moved our mortgage share since we last talked. We've stayed through the pandemic, roughly flat, across our unsecured range, despite a significant deleveraging in the market, and a supreme quality base. Now we can push on even further, and there's an even better chart on here when we talk about the wealth opportunity. What it also shows is we can continue to deliver very diversified earnings. We are not a one-trick pony. We are not a building society. We are not a savings and loan shop. Increasingly, as we build sophistication into the product range, you'll start to see even more of that diversification of the revenue coming through. We'll talk about that.
I wanted rather than going to the right-hand chart or the left-hand chart here, I want to maybe touch a little bit more on a different view, and I've actually stolen. Who's from Credit Suisse here? I think I've stolen this from you. Flattery. This doesn't surprise me, but it may surprise you. We have focused on re-aging our customer base. There's no special chemicals or cryogenics involved in that, as much as many of our customers would be delighted with that cross sell. What that's been about is deliberate targeting of different segments, both through the First Direct brand, which Chris will talk about, but also through the main brand. We take about 1/3 market share in student current accounts and keep them with us.
We also are deliberately targeting the switcher market, which tends to have a younger and more affluent customer base in terms of transferring in. What you see here is by Monzo with their, I'm not sure they call them customers, I think they call them users, our customer base tends to have a much higher percentage of Millennial and Gen Z. Additional to that, of all the banks, we have the most primary usage. In other words, some people put their salary in, they continue to use our account for their primary usage of that account. They don't then take the primary usage of with one of another provider. Then finally, and maybe this is less surprising, we over-index in the affluence of our customer base.
What's interesting there is the superb choices that First Direct made with regard to its acquisition 30 years ago. You see the affluence of that customer base really coming through as well, which, by the way, also presents opportunity. In terms of the financial performance, it's been robust through the pandemic. We obviously, similar to Stuart, you can see the swing there on the ECL line, which dominates the profit position. What you'll start to see now is that profit position being delivered again, but actually from the revenue growth, where you've already seen over 15% revenue growth in quarter one. I would suggest that arithmetic takes you to similar, if not better as the quarters go on. You also see in there very disciplined cost performance.
It's fair to say that's due to very specific restructuring activity and transformation activity that we've undertaken, choices we've made so we can recycle costs into the areas where we believe we have the greatest value. I'll talk about some of them. They are part of the nine plus one. You've also seen, and we'll see it in the next slide, me delivering on the promise that I made to you three years ago in terms of the market share opportunity that we had in mortgages. We've delivered on that, which has helped grow our assets and also significantly grow our deposits. I would argue it's a strong, robust performance and the accelerators are to come. Let's talk about mortgages, unless you'd rather I skip this slide. I stood here 2019 and I said I would grow the mortgage book. I think we have.
Some might argue we've grown it through price. Actually, some analysis by UBS shows we are not the price leader, despite all the protestations of our competitors. We're upper quartile prices, but actually we've grown that because of superior service, consistency of delivery. At times, we were one of the only providers open through the pandemic to support people in mortgage growth and of course, a fantastic BDM network that supports our ever-burgeoning share of the broker market. That's where our growth's come from. We've moved from 6.7% to 7.5%, and I would guide that, as I always have, to say that we feel our natural share in this space is closer to 10%. What we have seen, though, is a real change in market pricing, and you see that in the bottom left chart, and this is open source.
What you see are the Rangers and Celtic colors and to our Asian friends, they're Glasgow football teams. The blue and the green here, they are the customer rates, and then you see this massive steepening on the swap curves. You can therefore see the compression and at times, the market having to readjust very quickly in terms of pricing. What you're starting to see now is a greater rationality coming into the market. At no times did we lead the market down in those price points. We were reactive. Deliberately in quarter one, quarter two, we stepped off the gas to see, and that had marginal effects on our volumes. What we've done is we've always had that consistent upper quartile position and availability where others have struggled to charge the fantastic opportunity that we have.
Ian spoke of the buy-to-let opportunity. We used to only sell buy- to- let directly. At the turn of this year, we now introduced a vanilla buy-to-let offering into our broker channel. Imagine if we developed that offering with cashback, eventually even into limited companies as we build our experience. It's no coincidence that we bring in a talented CRO who has expertise in this market. We've got plenty of opportunity in our portfolio, but we're not complacent about that. We are a conservative lender, and we want to remain a conservative lender, but we believe it's propositional strength that will take us to continue that market share growth. The areas of proposition, we've talked about buy- to- let, but we also want to support the retrofit opportunity.
We want to look at green mortgages, and we also want to make sure that through our First Direct brands, we also start to offer nuanced products that can really help their customer base. We also have other growth opportunities. We've often in the last three years majored, or you guys have asked questions about mortgages, but I want to convince you about this increasing sophistication of our range. We talk about unsecured. You can see here consumers' rational deleveraging through the pandemic. As they couldn't spend their money, but they were continuing to make money, they naturally paid down the expensive debt. That was across the market. We really didn't lose any market share through that time. What you're starting to see now is the borrowing balances re-incline.
If you look at the credit card chart at the top, you see a marginal improvement in the balance levels. Most of that was transaction balances, but now we're starting to see the borrowing balances return as the economy returns. To some extent, it's natural. You're starting to see the opportunity for people to go on holidays, buy other large items, get back on the heavier transportation, et cetera. You're starting to see that leveraging coming back. We don't have a divine right to win here. We have to invest in proposition that makes our offering more and more relevant. There are three areas of investment that we're making. One is in data and decisioning. Data and decisioning is crucial in this space. You've got to make the right calls. I'm not talking about social media decisioning here.
I'm talking about bread and butter, quality risk-based decisions, taking account of customers' affordability, resilience, net free income, et cetera, and taking the opportunity to grow in that. We've been building many, many more new scorecards that give us lift in terms of the customers that we can accept. We're gonna continue that as we go forward. We also know that we need to develop our digital capabilities. More than any other product in our range, unsecured lending is almost exclusively digital. Therefore, we need to make it easy, intuitive, and simple for that. One product in the range that points to that is the point of sale finance. We'll be launching this month with our M&S Bank, M&S Sparks Pay, which is a point of sale offering, first of all online, but then it will be available at the till.
Having built the capability with a third party, with Jen and team support, D ivido, that's gonna then be extensible as a product offering to take to other retailers. We think there's a fantastic opportunity not just to ride the natural releveraging, but also to start to take share. We're actually starting to see that already with good growth, but again, very strong, even new vintage quality. Wealth. I've talked about wealth, I've talked about the plans, but here again, I would talk to. I think the question was, how does retail benefit from leveraging capability? There is no more advanced wealth economy than Hong Kong. Imagine if I could bring the tools that I've been invested in over many years from Hong Kong to the U.K. and make them relevant for the U.K. Market with the U.K. tax regimes.
That's exactly what we've been working on, leveraging global platforms and building capability here. That means we don't need to go out inorganically and buy capability because actually it's resident within the group, and you can now start to see the benefits. The turn of this year, we launched our first mobile journey, a simple buy journey, taking cash in the mobile app through into funds. In quarter one, we were the number one provider of new wealth accounts, the number one provider. That beat AJ Bell, Hargreaves Lansdown, and all the other banks. Without it being a Kevin Costner film, but if we build it, they will come, particularly if we start telling them, and they start to see the benefit and the performance through the assets that they're moving things into. We've got much, much more to do.
We want people to be able to interact with their funds. We want to look at brokerage platforms. We want to help people with retirement. In there, we've partnered with a fintech, Wealth Wizards, to actually build a retirement offering, which is actually a chatbot that helps talk you through how your retirement planning is going. That wealth journey, you guys will get the chance. Ollie will take you through what we're doing there. It's more than just retail wealth. In bringing together the private bank with the old RBWM, we're starting to look at the continuum, and this has been a conundrum in the U.K. For those customers of investable wealth of GBP 1-10 million, how do you get an economic model to deliver high-touch service but efficiently?
The way you do that is to utilize the same technology, but bring it alongside some of our exceptionally capable people and strong relationship management skills. We're starting to build out that capability for what we call the continuum, so that you can lift. As your wealth grows, you can move yourself into more sophisticated offerings. Finally, in the high-net-worth space, we benefit materially from Asian wealth. The flow corridors of wealth. Asia wealth is not about wealth just in Asia. Asia wealth is about Asian wealth as it transfers around the world, making choices about where, which markets it participates in, and we're uniquely placed, I would argue, for that. Talking of being uniquely placed, international. One in four customers who have internationality about them, either a non-U.K.. National, multicurrency, multi-country, excuse me, or non-resident, come to HSBC.
We've not yet enabled quality journeys for them. We're the natural destination for an international customer, and we're now going to be investing much, much more. You probably heard from Nuno about International 3.0, really making that seamless for international customers because we know it hasn't been in the past. We know that through the work we had to do in global standards, that perhaps it's been too clunky to be able to move from country to country. We're investing in that because we know it's our uniqueness, not just in the U.K., but in other countries as well. We're really gonna work so that we're not one in four of the international customers, we're one in three, and we're delighting them with the service as well. One way to delight them is to give them a proposition which is really quite unique.
Let me tell you a little bit about this global money proposition, because it actually talks a little bit to what in the small business banking space. Imagine I promised you in summer that I would give you a capability that allowed you, from your mobile app as an HSBC customer, to set up multiple wallets within about two or three clicks across 16-18 currencies. Imagine I said you could put money into those wallets at the prevailing FX rates with one of the lowest loads and zero fees. When I say lowest, I'm not talking about comparable to Barclays or the other high street banks, I'm talking about the Revolut and the Wise. You can move from sterling into ringgit. Actually, I'm not sure if we do ringgit. I'd better be careful.
Move from sterling into euros, into sterling, all with a relatively low loading, top of the market loading and no FX fees. Not just that, I give you a card. With that card, you can go on your holiday. You might not even have loaded your euro account, but if you then put that card into, say, a Spanish ATM, we'll move the money at that low loading rate into the euro account, and it'll draw from the euro account. You will be able to spend, take money out of an ATM like a local. You can provision it with a physical card that we won't charge you for, or indeed, it'll be part of your wallet on your Apple Pay. Spend like a local.
We'll also allow you to, if you've got the euro account, you could then go and transmit money and do remittance at that lower FX rate as well. We're not building it's built. We're just now testing it, and it will. Basically, Ian's got it, so it must be real, and it will go live in the summer. That points to digital. That's a digital capability. You do that by a few clicks on your mobile app, and the mobile app is where people bank now. You see that, and even here we're mobile active. We do it every 30 days. If you do the comparisons to the U.K., other U.K. banks, I saw a few of them this week, they do it to 90 days.
If you do our comparison to the 90 days, at 65%, we have mobile active, and we're growing that every single day because we're a mobile-first bank with brilliant human interaction in the moments that matter. Our mobile NPS continues to grow. People love our mobile offering. People increasingly love our mobile offering. There were some things we needed to fix. Our digital security and our reset journey was poor. End of quarter 1 this year, again, fabulous work from Jen and team in technology, we improved that. I would say to parity with our opposition, which is fine. It's the front door of the bank. We need to keep it safe, but we can't make it so clunky. We've worked on that with a digital security platform. We've built other capabilities that we've talked about, buying funds, doing a mobile decision in principle for your mortgage.
Also basic servicing gaps and acquisition gaps to be able to take out an account intuitively and simply. If you've already got a current account, it's about four clicks to get your credit card, it's about five for a personal loan. That shows up then in our product penetrations. Basically, that tells you that unsecured lending is done digitally, except in extremis. What you're increasingly seeing with current accounts is we're making everything go through the happy path. Do we know what the happy path is? It's the one that's easy and intuitive. There are always gonna be circumstances where people have different ID&V. Great example of that is the 4.6 or 4,600 Ukrainian bank accounts that we've opened over the course of the last three months, more than any other bank.
The reason for that is because we want to create accommodative policies for those people who have come to this country under severe distress. All of this is really about taking the existing bank and making it digital. I would argue digitizing the bank is a step beyond that, and you're gonna see this in the breakouts. Imagine you'd an app which started to really personalize the offerings, the capabilities, helped be your coach, helped you, guide you in how you could manage your finances better. Would that not be great in a time where the cost of living is really starting to tighten in on you? That personalization is now there, and we're building out things like transaction enrichment, pots, micro-savings to really help people engage with their finances. It's part of financial education, but it's also the ability to action on it.
It's about building wealth and international capabilities. That mobile wealth offering, continuing to develop that, as well as that FX offering I was telling you about, but making it easy and intuitive to digitally onboard. All of that within one app. Not a spread of apps, all of that within one app. The ability to spend, save, and invest all in one place. Because we believe that starts to drive the customer agenda that I talked about at the start. Here is the customer agenda. You can look at a chart like that in two ways, and I'm afraid for my team, I only look at the bottom piece here. HSBC Red brand is a poor tenth in the market. It's a poor tenth in the market because too many things go wrong, because we've not finished the job on some of the digitization.
For me, this is a source of acknowledgment that we can make progress. You can see the NPS is now at its all-time high, but that the expectations have moved materially on. This will remain our number one focus. How do you turn it around? You turn it around by building emotional equity in the brand, by standing for things that matter to people, such as being a victim of domestic abuse, such as the support we give to the homeless or victims of human trafficking. Also iconic symbols. We signed up this morning Emma Raducanu to be a brand ambassador for us. It's more than that because all of that, if you then have a bad experience or you get treated shabbily on the phone, isn't enough.
What we do additionally need to do is we need to make sure our channels are accessible. What does that mean? You answer the phone and solve the problem. It means your mobile banking has to be up, and it's not complicated to log in or re-register. It means that your branches are available, they have space and capacity to deal with you when you need them, and that our people within them are actually empowered to solve the problems. That the everyday journeys that you need to go on are simple and intuitive and not complex and clunky, and you don't fall out of them. That you build products such as Global Money that actually stand out. When you bring digital and customer together, I would argue there's no better case study than First Direct.
I'll hand over to Chris now to talk about First Direct.
Thanks, Stuart. First of all, an apology. My name isn't Stuart. My name's Chris, and I'm the CEO of FD. I've just got two charts here. I'm gonna do two things. I'm gonna talk to you about First Direct strategy, First Direct 2, and then I'm gonna talk to you about how we're gonna deliver on that strategy. First of all, I'm gonna tell you a little bit of a story. FD famously launched a minute past midnight on the thirteenth of October, 1989, to basically cock a snoot to the world in which everybody banked in a branch. You could ring up and bank, two minutes past midnight on that day.
As part of feeding out on our strategy and understanding our purpose, I talked to the original CEO of FD, a guy called Brian Conlon, from his home in Southern California. Unfortunately, I'm in West Yorkshire at the moment. You know, you can dream. He talked about two things. Midland Bank had launched FD, and they'd launched it because Midland Bank had been a 20% market share bank, and it had gone down to a 15% market share bank. It launched FD to be a 5% market share business for yuppies, for those of you who remember what a yuppie is. It was only ever gonna engage customers, when there were no branches, if it had brilliant customer service, exceptional customer service.
Not customer service that was as good as a bank's, but as good as any business. Now what we're gonna do with the strategy First Direct 2 is deliver on what the founding mothers and fathers of First Direct set out to do, because they delivered that brilliant customer service and they continue, and my team continues to deliver it today, but we never delivered on that scale. We're a 2.2% current account business as we stand today, so we wanna deliver on that scale. Our strategy, First Direct 2, is to double the size of First Direct, maintain the brilliance of that customer service, and manage our cost to flat. Some of the stats here talk to that. Last year, we did 120,000 new current accounts.
At points in time during that year, we were 20-25% of the cash switcher market in the U.K., we've delivered a number which is higher than any number for the last 10 years, and we're doing better this year. We delivered that by turning a 10-day journey into a 15-minute journey in terms of being able to download your FD debit card into your digital wallet and start transacting straightaway. In terms of the customer service, we continue to deliver, and the team continue to deliver that brilliantly. We're at number three in the CMA rankings. In terms of the Institute of Customer Service, we got overtaken by Pets at Home during the pandemic, which I blame on everybody buying a dog, to be honest.
I did the keynote speech at the Institute of Customer Service conference last year. Then in terms of managing costs, you can see that in the bottom stats there. We've seen a 38% reduction over the course of the last three years in the number of calls into FD as we've digitized and allow customers to self-serve. We've seen an increase in the digital logons as a function of that as well. We have 70% of FD's customers are primary bank with us, as Ian Stuart and Stuart have alluded to. 75% of them are digitally active, 65% mobile digitally active, and then 10% of them through a desktop. That through the stats that I've got there is talking to you about how we're delivering the strategy today.
In terms of the channels and the pillars in which we deliver that, we have four: grow, serve, amaze, and our people. In terms of growth, we're going after younger customers to achieve that growth. Why? Because they open and switch current accounts. It's as simple as that. We're changing the nature of our proposition to better support those customers. We've 95% mortgages. We're gonna launch a credit builder credit card to allow our customers to build up that credit. We've launched a regular saver product with a 3.5% interest rate to allow customers to build out that deposit. Building out functionality, which allows younger customers to engage with us. In terms of serve, digital is exactly where we are at.
94% of the customers we've taken on this year, and we've got 12.5% of the cash switcher market so far this year, are digitally active within the first three months of engaging with FD. We continue to see strong growth from people who are engaging to us. We will always and we will continue to offer 24/7, 365 U.K.-based call centers, voice to voice. When you talk to FD, there's no press one, press two, press seven. You talk straight to a customer rep. The first half of this year, we've answered the calls in 11 seconds, and our abandonment rate on calls for the last 22 weeks has been under 5%. We continue to deliver that excellence, regardless of whether you want to engage us digitally or over the phone.
Amaze, and Stuart alluded this, to this with the Red brand as well, and you're gonna see it in the breakouts. Tom and Mel are gonna talk to you about FD Coach, allowing you to budget, allowing you to set pots and goals, allowing you greater insight about your money. As we move people from fast money to slow money, we think there's a real opportunity in FD to not just to be, a bank for people who are managing their money in the student days of their lives, but to take them on the longer journey, to deeper financial services, relationships. Finally, our people. Our people did brilliantly during the pandemic.
We moved all our people out of call centers in West Yorkshire and Leeds and in Hamilton out to work from home, and they've delivered that brilliant service the whole way through, and they've earned the right to the flexibility of where they work. We've given that flexibility to our people. The final thing I'll end with before Stuart and I answer questions is about purpose. We want to be a business of purpose as well as brilliant customer service as well as delivering great commercial returns to be a purpose. We are following through the great work that HSBC are doing, creating connections with Shelter, and we're starting to do secondments from our people to Shelter's helpline in Sheffield, which we've just announced this week.
Creating greater connections around why people come to work as opposed to just what they do. With that, I think over to some questions. Presumably about mortgages, Stuart. We're happy to take. I didn't even get finished. Got hands up.
Thanks. It's Alastair, on Bank of America. Well, it'd be rude not to ask about mortgages, so how do you price them then? Now, I mean, everybody imagines what other banks are doing. You know, Lloyds think their mortgage spreads settle at 75 basis points, and they look at swaps pricing as that. I'm not saying they're right. There's clearly been a lot of. How do you think about it? I mean, you've got all these deposits. You're not actually funding in swaps, really. I mean, you've got cash, but where are you pricing it? Who's charging you what? What's the capital allocation? The risk weight just went up. I mean, you've obviously got the cash and the capital to grow the market shares, be whatever you want.
What are you thinking? What's a good return? Because, you know, there's a yield on cash now. There's a yield on all sorts of things. What's
To answer the question back to front, if I may, first of all, the perceived advantage we have in funding rates, we don't actually price in. We want to make sure that we hurdle based on the swap rate plus a liquidity premium, which is a lot less now.
Margin on top. We will take obviously the cost, but in broker introduced mortgage, there's small expenses and the proc fee to pay, and that's really the cost. The ECL performance has been exceptionally low. You then work that through into a cash flow, and what types of return? Well, it's gotta be above 10% or else Claire won't let me anywhere near it, and Julia has to sign off the credit assumptions that sit within that pricing. That is as simple as we do it. You know, we look at it from the model is complex, but they are the component parts. Any other questions about mortgages? No, any questions at all. Got one here and two in the middle, actually. Maybe bring both mics to the middle, and then I'll come over to the left. Wait.
The gentleman here, I think it was.
Sorry.
Hi, can I ask two questions? One is on international wealth, as you just talked about. I can see why that would be a natural area you wanna compete in given your footprint, et cetera. I just want to ask what are the tax implication of this, because we're at a time where there's a lot of focus on tax evasion, and governments are increasingly trying to make sure they're collecting the right amount of taxes, and the U.K. tax rules are particularly complicated, right, with resident and non-domicile, et cetera. Two things. How do you, A, make sure that you've got a system in place to make sure there is tax compliance?
B, help your customers to navigate this to make sure that they are not accidentally breaching tax rules by taking money out of the U.K. when they're sort of non-domicile and they're not meant to have remittances, et cetera. That's one. Secondly, quickly, I've obviously heard a lot about, you know, your commitment to digital. I mean, with a lot of fintechs, I mean, it's no secret that they are more than happy to white-label their service. I mean, Starling as a service, et cetera. How do you think about building your own versus buying some of the capability? You know, there's obviously not a proven track record for those ones.
Let me answer the first one. International wealth. That's actually the core skill of an international wealth manager. It's to be able to support our clients to move in a responsible way. There are opportunities to move your wealth in a responsible way. We've had an awful lot of Hong Kong money buying properties in London, et cetera. I know our teams are experts in helping to guide people. But we also have other offerings, not that we would talk about here, but we've got the expat offering that can help with some hub, offshore hubbing, et cetera. But that's part of our overall international wealth. I think going into detail, Annabel Spring is incredibly well placed to talk about the global offering there.
The bottom line is we built the expertise in the U.K. over many years, and so therefore that's how we feel comfortable in being able to provide that type of advice. That may or may not answer it. It depends on individual circumstances, et cetera, et cetera. It's an expertise that we've built up over time. On the second question, we will absolutely partner with fintechs where they have advantage, but we also, as I said, partner with our Asian through technology, we have global platforms that give us scale benefits as well. We've partnered with fintechs, for example, we've partnered with Bud in starting to develop some of the offerings. In fact, in the demo, effectively, it's underpinned by some of the Bud functionality. Do I want to go out and build FD again through Starling?
No, I don't. I have no advantage in that. Can I use fintechs to really augment our offering? Absolutely. I talked about Wealth Wizards, which is a fintech. It happens to be housed in LV or Royal London, but actually it's a separate fintech offering. They've been fantastic working with them as well. Divido, we've built our point of sale finance solution for M&S with Divido. Jen will actually talk about a number of our partnerships in the slides in a little while. There is definitely unit economic benefits you can get from working with good partners. Sorry, you sir.
Thanks. It's Manus Costello from Autonomous again. I wanted to ask about First Direct, please. I was interested in the fact that you went back to the roots and you've come up with First Direct 2.0. It feels like it's been an awfully long time coming up with 2.0, given that it's 30 years ago when the strategy was originally presented. If you look at that chart, which I think actually came from Morgan Stanley, Magdalena's research, looking at a footnote to correct the record, you're at the bottom of the age cohort, which has obviously flipped, I would have thought, over the course of that 30 years.
The question I wanna ask is why did that happen, and what have you changed to ensure that that opportunity, which seemed to have slipped through First Direct's hands over the last decade, let's say, is not missed again? What's actually practically changed?
It's a very good question. Again, I wouldn't want to be negative about any kind of previous management decisions here. I think what FD got locked into was trying to find people that looked like the people it had and to use service as a means of recruitment. Service is a fantastic retention tool rather than necessarily a recruitment tool. The number of people who've attrited from FD who are primary banked in the first half of this year has been 5,000. When you get into FD, you stay because of the brilliance of the customer service. I do think this is a complete rethink. Remember back in the day, FD's strategy was to recruit yuppies.
It was to recruit people who had wealth, and so going for an older cohort of people and professional people than now because we want to grow the scale of the organization. I think the world relative to the question about Starling is very much the fintechs have challenged us to be better. We really wanna grow that scale of customer. We know that trying to find people who are in their 40s and 50s is a complete fool's errand. Last year, the first half of last year, 20% of FD's customers that we recruited were under 35. 45% of them are under 35 in the first half of this year. As I said, we're doing higher numbers. We're changing the nature of where we can.
of where we communicate, but we're also changing the nature of our offer. 95% mortgages, the Credit Builder credit card that I talked about, changing the nature of the offer. The pricing that Regular Saver was very specific to allow younger customers to build up a deposit. We're going after younger people, where we talk to them and then what we talk to them about is fundamental, really.
Two questions on this side. I'll check. Okay.
Yep.
Thank you. Omar Keen at Credit Suisse. I just had a question about the Global Money proposition, and I just wondered if you could elaborate on that a little bit, given sometimes the devil can be in the detail of these things. If it is a truly competitive proposition with what you know Wise and Revolut might offer, then you know it does imply that there might be some kind of self-cannibalization of revenues, which might be easier in a higher interest rate environment. You know you can take actions that can sort of maximize customer loyalty over a very long time. Could you just add a little bit of detail there? Thank you.
You've actually answered. It's a great question and actually a great answer you've given in the question. Yeah, we have to cannibalize, because if not now, then it will eventually happen. The single most complained about product that, or offering that we have by seniors in this bank is our FX offering for consumers. I think the U.K. market has allowed too large a margin for too long. To guide you on the economics, to give you a bit more specifics, if we were to reduce the margins by two-thirds but treble the usage, then you're roughly net neutral in terms of your revenue performance. We know even just in our own base, even in our own customer base, even in our own ExCo, the amount of people that use these offerings.
If we give them no reason to use it, and we actually offer a better zero fee loading on the FX, or the lowest loading on the FX and zero fees, you don't even need a fee to get the card, which other fintechs do, then we think we will more than win back that, and also start to become an acquisition tool for us because it will start to offer something. Candidly, in the switcher market, just know people are giving out cash incentives. If you offer a product like this, will it not start to win back audience for HSBC? It may well, I'm looking at the cameras in case there's any competitors looking, it may well stimulate their action as well. Does that answer the question?
Yeah. I think that's super clear. Thank you.
You'll get a chance to play with it, with Nathan your break in Gen section. Two more. I'll take one there. You've not asked one, so I think it's only polite. I've got three. Can I? I'll do them quickly.
Thank you very much. Just a quick question on the buy-to-let ambition. You've mentioned that you want to grow your market share to 5% from 3% and I guess also expanding to the professional buy-to-let segments that you're not present in. Could you please just give us a little more detail around the regions in the U.K. That you're thinking about expanding your buy-to-let proposition in, if any? Then how do you think about cost of risk in buy-to-let, especially moving from the amateur to the professional segment?
Perfect. This is about developing our sophistication. What I'd say with regard to first of all. Well, actually, let me start by answering about the flow. Yes, stock-wise, we'd want to go from three to five in relatively short order. That means we need to take about 10% flow, which is what we're doing in the residential. That's exactly where we want to be. Actually, we're not far off it now as we've opened up the broker market, and that's not in any of the more sophisticated offerings like professional landlord or, sorry, a sophisticated landlord or a professional landlord or limited company. Effectively, it's a different underwrite. You're learning as you go about that underwriting, bringing skills into the organization, bringing underwriting skills, looking at the type of data, et cetera, what types of frauds get occurred in there.
You don't wanna go super fast and make some mistakes, but we're now on a nice curve where we're actually starting to get flow of 8%-10% coming through. Just by the vanilla offering that we have just now, the potential to get there. As we build that flow and we build that expertise, we talk to the brokers, what do they expect. We look at what the competitors do, and we look at the different policies that they have. They tend to not be restrictive by region in the U.K., there might be some regions we're a little bit more cautious about because of our internal house view on house prices. But we also have a high amount of cover.
You know, your LTV cover on a buy-to-let product is always much, much higher than you would have where someone would go and live for themselves. The underwrite tends to be about, you know, the rental yield. Therefore, you're looking at the demand also in that market. Tends not to be, but you tend to end up being a symptom of the local economics rather than having choices about regional concentration. I guess I've sort of maybe alluded to the answer on the more developed, sophisticated offerings. Go one at a time and build our capability and our expertise rather than trying to do them all at the same time.
Just a super quick follow-up. Sorry, if I may. Why wouldn't you buy any of the current competitors in the market?
Because I don't need to, number one. Second reason is I don't want to buy their historic mistakes. I have a fantastic organic growth opportunity in front of me. If you buy anything, you're integrating systems, you're integrating historic complexity into your books. I don't need to. We'll never say never. Ian Stuart will probably point to that at the end. If there was a fantastic opportunity that had, you know, great financials and fitted and moved us forward, we'd consider it. It's not an act. We're not out there pursuing an inorganic opportunity. I promised two questions. Can we pick up in the break? Is that okay? We'll finish on this one, if that's okay.
Hi. Grace Dargan, Barclays. Actually, just building on the buy-to-let. Maybe over the long term, how do you see your weighting then between vanilla and the sophisticated or professional landlord? I guess they're both quite different markets. I'd say the sophisticated professional landlord market offering at the moment, the major players tend to have quite strong relationships with landlords and brokers. How would you look to compete with that?
We will be, over the next few years, much higher participation in the less sophisticated end. Bear in mind the expertise that's housed in front of you with Stuart Tait, and the relationships that we have there. That's why we're both called Stewart, 'cause of the seamless integration of our two businesses. The reality there is we have good relationships with those that build out professional landlord capabilities. Now we've not developed that yet, and we'd be very careful in developing that, and we would work with our Chief Risk Officer, who may well talk about this space because she's got experience there, just to make sure that we are doing it carefully. I would guide you that we will, as we have done with mortgages, you know, we were relatively low LTV, we got more comfortable, we moved up.
We've moved into buy-to-let. We're getting more comfortable. We'll do more there. All with a view to carefully managing prudently the risk and only lending where we've got expertise. I think that's us. Thank you all very much.
Just to say there's two or three more questions as a wrap up. Two things. 5-minute break now, but you can stretch your legs as you go around the demos. But anybody not stretched their legs now, do so. Come back at 3:05 P.M. Secondly, our suggested train back is 7:10 P.M. There's a 8:10 P.M. train. Both tickets are valid on both. It means we leave here about 6:45 P.M., so we leave about 15 minutes early, we get you home a bit earlier. Okay. That's the suggested train. You don't need to worry about trains. Okay.
All right, everyone, I think we're ready to start. Good afternoon, and welcome back. I hope you've had some time to get some caffeine and take a good break, 'cause I've got about 50 slides to go through. All right, you ready? Actually, I'm just kidding. I'm Jennifer Streible, and I am the HSBC UK Chief Operating Officer. Just in case you can't place my accent, I am a transplant from the U.S. I'm a native Chicagoan with about 30 years of banking experience, and I spent the last four years in New York City as the U.S. Chief Operating Officer. Just maybe to go back to your question about the international customers and the connectivity, I am that international retail customer. I have my U.S. accounts. I have my U.K. accounts.
In a matter of a few clicks, I can link them together through Global View, and I can transfer currency seamlessly. How do I do that? Through the power of technology. That's what we're here to talk about and how technology can help support the business ambitions you've heard from Ian Stuart squared, and Chris. Digitization underpins all that we do. It's essential not only to the reshaping of our physical networks, but it's critical to the delivery of our customer outcomes. For the next 10 minutes, there are a couple of key messages I would like you to take away. Number one, HSBC UK is focused on streamlining and simplifying all that we do. We deploy technology solutions that are safe and resilient. We leverage key partnerships that help evolve innovative capabilities faster and cheaper.
Through our activities and our supply chain, we can drive down carbon emissions to help support our net zero ambition. We are here to serve our customers. From a technology perspective, we think about that with three core commitments. Number one, we want to deliver customer experience that is easy and safe. We drive solutions that support business priorities and create value for customers that is market differentiating. We've got some great examples to show you in the demos. Now, Stuart talked about Global Money. Imagine being able to send, spend, and convert currency into multiple currency all across the world via one account. It's a fantastic proposition, and I know it because I'm a Global Money customer. Why? Because the U.S. was the first market to roll it out, so I have the ability to not only test it, but use it as an active customer.
Three, we enable capabilities through innovative solutions. Now, while in HSBC, we look to build smart, scalable solutions, we know we haven't cornered the market on innovation. We look to leverage partnerships to deploy solutions at scale, speed, and at a lower cost. Now, to drive this digitization and simplification, where do you start, and how do you know it's working? Well, our colleagues and our customers tell us where our processes and procedures make it difficult to do business with us. There's a couple of areas I'd like to highlight. When you apply for a banking product, you want to be able to self-serve when you want, where you want. Your digital registration becomes a critical component in that journey when selecting your banking products.
Well, since we've simplified that registration journey, our Net Promoter Score has increased 27 points. Why? Because that journey allows for seamless straight-through processing with immediate access to your banking products. Now, we've also simplified our account material, specifically terms and conditions. I know you all get them, and you all read every page, every word. My legal colleagues told me to say that, right? We've actually simplified our content by over 50%, and we've made the language simpler so that people understand the products that they're buying easier. As Chris mentioned in First Direct, we've worked on their onboarding journey, and we've improved and simplified that journey from 10 days to 15 minutes. As a result, First Direct has seen a 24% increase in new account acquisitions. Stuart also talked about commercial and Kinetic. Kinetic has an app score or an app rating of 4.8.
Simpler is better. Now, it's great to have new products and features that are easy to use. If we do not protect our customers' money and data, it really doesn't matter. HSBC is a safe bank. How do we know that? I just told you. Actually, HSBC has been rated number one for online security by Which? In our industry, fraud and scams are running rampant, and it's incumbent upon us to protect our customers. What have we done about it? We've increased our customer warnings in our app pages, and we've added more customer care markers for our most vulnerable, which passes additional data to our fraud decision engines when evaluating transactions that are being made from their accounts. We've also enhanced our ID verification capabilities through biometrics, and we've also launched our first fraud awareness app for businesses.
It helps give the business owners information around fraud trends, app scams, as well as current information to help them protect their business and their customer. On resiliency, if you want to bank anywhere at any time, your systems must be available. In this area, we focus heavily on accelerating our adoption of public and private cloud, which allows us to address capacity constraints as the business grows, increasing our processing speed and analytic capabilities. The use of cloud also allows for easier integration with our partners and improved resiliency of our applications. Now, to continue to drive these solutions, HSBC UK must continue to invest in technology. We will see a 20% increase in technology spend as a share of our total costs over a four year period. We will fund this through cost reduction initiatives and reinvesting back in the business through technology.
Now, while specific investment in the U.K. is critically important, we are also seeing increasing benefits from our global capabilities, particularly in cyber and the use of global platforms, such as our digital security platform and our mobile platform. Through the use of shared technologies, the economies of scale can be achieved through ease and speed of deployment and improved execution from shared learnings from other markets. Now, all these activities I've described are all part of executing a multi-year technology strategy to ensure our bank is fit for the future. Our technology strategy, which is integrated within the HSBC UK strategy, focuses on four key pillars, and it's focused on modernizing our architecture as well as our operating models. When we think about speed, we think about focusing on improving our time to market and staying ahead of the competition.
By streamlining journeys, reducing and consolidating platforms, demising legacy applications, we can actually increase our speed three times faster than it is today. Through scale, the adoption of global platforms allows for faster and easier adoption of new products and services and ensures similar experiences for our customers as they bank around the world. Resilience, making our services more secure and available so that if there is an issue, we can actually recover faster. People, a significant core component of all that we do, having the right people with the right skill sets in the right places. As we evolve our way of working into more of an agile construct, it is critically important we have the right skill sets and people closest to our customer-facing teams.
In addition, technology is advancing, and we need to invigorate our technology culture by bringing in some of the best and brightest of our U.K. graduates into our technology centers. Starting in the fall of 2022, we will welcome 85 new technology grads into Sheffield to help advance our technology capabilities. Now, easy and simple tools are not just important for our external customers. It's important for our colleagues as well. We've deployed Microsoft Teams and Office 365. Why do we think that's significant? Because getting over 200,000 colleagues on one tool will only increase our ability to innovate and drive change faster for our organization. Now, leveraging partnerships. As we enhance technology solutions, HSBC UK will continue to leverage partnerships to complement our core technology and enhance the speed of which we can deliver services to our customers.
We recognize that we don't need to reinvent the wheel, especially when there's best-in-class solutions out in the marketplace. It's how we leverage that expertise and integrate that into our core capabilities when we look to deliver customer outcomes. In the security space, we leverage solutions to protect our customers from external threats. We leverage our relationship with BioCatch. BioCatch allows us to learn how people interact with their mobile phone and their browser, how fast you type, how quickly you move your mouse. It's not as if I'm watching you through the camera, but I may be. Actually, their models, once we have a good sound prediction model, we can actually determine if it's really you trying to attempt to access your accounts.
With cloud data and analytics, we have multiple cloud relationships, such as with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, and we leverage their strengths based on their capabilities. For Google, as an example, we use them for data analytics and machine learning. We use multiple relationships because we want to balance our concentration and continuity risk. Also reducing our cost to serve as we deploy our solutions to our customers. From banking access, and Stuart brought this up, we leverage relationships like Divido in linking our retail interfaces with our banking products so that we can allow and make faster credit decisions for our customers. Now, deploying new solutions that are easy to use and secure is definitely a key component of what technology does.
We also recognize that we play a critical role, as well as our supply chain, in how we reduce our carbon footprint in support of our transition to net zero. There are many ways that we contribute to that. We focus on renewable energy, reducing energy consumption, as well as paper consumption, and through reducing carbon emissions within our supply chain. In renewable energy, the construction of our wind farm has commenced earlier this year and will start to generate power in Q1 of 2023. In reducing energy consumption, we've proactively replaced old high-consumption assets with more efficient ones, like replacing boilers with heat pumps, as well as replacing our light bulbs with energy-efficient LEDs across most of our UK office portfolio. Reducing paper. Banks like to produce a lot of paper. Digitizing information helps improve the planet.
Through several initiatives, we've reduced over 34 million envelopes that would have gone to the post. That avoids over 487,000 tons of carbon emissions. In our supply chain, we've asked our major suppliers to sign up for our carbon disclosure program. This is a reporting program that actually evaluates and rates companies on their disclosures. To date, we've had over 50% of our major suppliers sign up. I've told you a lot, and I've asked you to take away four things from my presentation. HSBC UK is focused on streamlining and simplifying all that we do. We deploy technology solutions that are safe and resilient. We leverage key partnerships to enable innovative capabilities faster and cheaper. Through our activities and our supply chain, we can drive down carbon emissions to help support our net zero ambitions.
I'm going to stop talking, and I'm going to show you. We have several demonstrations that you will walk through featuring our innovative products and services. What you will see is that these products and services are easy to use, they are innovative and market differentiating, and globally scalable, which makes it faster to deploy around the world and ensures a similar customer experience when people travel and bank around the world. For the next 90 minutes, you will see six demonstrations across both retail and commercial. Each demonstration will last approximately 12 minutes, and we'll give you time to answer questions during those demonstrations. You should have a colored lanyard which will indicate which group you're in, and we do have an HSBC representative that will help shepherd you through the demos.
I will walk around in case you have any additional questions from this presentation, but I do know we have time for questions at the end. I wish you best of luck, and enjoy the demonstrations. Thank you.
Red group with me, we're going down one floor. There's tea, coffee, and water outside, so help yourselves either now or during the demonstration as you walk around. Okay?
Good to go, Jess? Yeah. Right. Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the demonstrations. We are now in the home straight. You have myself, Julia Dunn, Chief Risk Officer for HSBC UK, and then Claire is going to talk to you. She is the CFO for HSBC UK. You've heard from all my colleagues about all the amazing opportunities that HSBC UK has in front of them. I have one message, and only one message that I'd like you to take away, and that is we will embrace those opportunities, but only where we can do that safely and sustainably. I joined the bank 12 months ago. 18 months ago, I was Group CRO for the second-largest mortgage lender within the U.K.
I've made probably the most difficult decision of my career, deciding to take up the fabulous opportunities that HSBC has in front of them. Not only am I a Chief Risk Officer, I'm also a former regulator. I spent 12 years at the regulator, so I'm a sort of glass half full person. I did some pretty significant due diligence on HSBC UK, and I thought I would share it with you and tell you what I found, because I think it is important for you when you look at HSBC UK to look at these three areas. First of all, I found a well-diversified, high-quality loan portfolio. You've heard it from both the Stuarts. Low-risk retail secured portfolio with both portfolios performing well even during COVID. Secondly, what I saw was significant headroom in our risk appetite.
I'm not used to a sea of green in risk appetite, but everywhere I looked, I saw capacity within the risk appetite and overall a low risk, sensible risk appetite. I saw robust and effective governance, both at ExCo level, at the risk management level, and importantly, at the ring-fenced board and group level. I took over a highly experienced, well-qualified risk team, many of whom have lived through the great financial crisis and also had performed well during COVID. Let me talk a bit more about our two portfolios. On the left-hand side, you will see our retail portfolio. Just look at the red portion. 91% mortgages, all secured, written at stressed rates. If you look at the rate, 80% of that is on fixed.
Over 50% of those fixed rates are two years out. If you look at the smaller proportions, both credit cards and personal loans are performing better than market. On the right-hand side, you see our commercial portfolio. What do you see? You see a well diversified portfolio across a broad range of sectors with no single name concentrations and low NPL stable. Now, I could pass over this next slide, but given that there have been significant amount of questions already around mortgages, I do want to take a bit of time to talk about it from a risk perspective. If you look at the top left and the average LTVs, if you look at it either on the stock figures or the flow figures, you see that HSBC UK is at the lower end, i.e., more risk-averse.
It becomes particularly interesting when you look at the bottom left, which is our proportion of buy-to-let. You've heard Ian talk about it, you've heard Stuart talk about it. From my perspective, I grew a buy-to-let book from GBP 20 billion to GBP 40 billion, and also at the same time reduced delinquencies by half. We are at 3% looking to go to 5%. If you look at our major peers and look at where they are, 6-7x higher than we are. We talked about our plain vanilla proposition in the buy-to-let market and how we would safely grow into portfolio landlords and limited companies.
There was an excellent question asked, "Well, aren't you going up the risk curve when you go into portfolio lending and limited companies?" I would say it depends how you do portfolio landlords and limited companies, provided you continue to keep your strict risk criteria. I'm not a big believer in top slicing. I am a big believer in having maximum LTVs. I am a big believer in using stress rates and not fiddling about like some of our competitors do, and sticking to the strict ICRs. I welcome the PRA regulations in 2016. I think they provide a good stable foundation for this market. If you look at the top right, these are our delinquencies and arrears rate. 0.4% versus 0.7% and absolutely stable.
Let's look at our book as a whole and the credit quality distribution of our book, and this is the combined book, both the retail and the corporate. 76% strong and good. Someone asked about NPLs. You see we have 2% credit impaired at the other end. There remains significant headroom to our internal risk appetite, and the overall risk profile is supportive of the growth strategy. If I summarize our overview of credit risk. Our portfolios performed well during the COVID-19 pandemic. If you start with a higher quality retail book, what we saw was deposits and savings growing, and the financial health of our customers on average on the retail side improved during COVID.
On the wholesale side, and we did have questions earlier, we did see stretch in certain portfolios, particularly in the London hotel portfolio and on the retail side. The London hotel portfolio as international travel has bounced back. We have seen occupancy rates and room rates go back to pre-pandemic levels. Room rates, we have seen a significant increase. For those of you staying in hotels, you will probably have seen that. We were asked about our first order impact to Russia and Ukraine, both on the retail side and on the commercial side. It is very, very limited and immaterial. We are really watchful of the second and third order impacts. You know, I filled my car up at the weekend. It's the first time.
It's a hybrid car, and it cost me more than GBP 100. We are seeing the impact of fuel rises coming through, but we are expecting some lag on that. We proactively put into our affordability calculators the fiscal changes, i.e., the NI changes, the energy costs. We have not used the ONS data. We've used our own transactional data, which is higher, to ensure that it's fully taken account of in our affordability calculators. We've done that across both unsecured and secured. Others are relying on the stress rate. We are not. We are taking a risk-averse approach. We're particularly looking at the commercial sectors affected, agriculture, food, industrial conglomerates, and automotive. As you will all know, you cannot look at these sectors in isolation. Take, for instance, the agriculture sector.
If you're an arable farmer today, actually grain prices have gone up and fertilizer prices are coming down. They are passing on the prices through to their customers and they are a winner. Vice versa, if you're a livestock farmer, particularly in the pig industry, you're struggling because of the issues around CO2 and abattoirs and your food costs have gone up. It's the same when you look at food and for those of you who deal with supermarkets, what you see is absolutely as expected, a move from the higher end supermarkets more towards the middle end and the discounters are seeing increased activity. It's also important to note whether as supermarkets, they hedge their fuel costs, particularly if they're reliant on freezer and frozen foods.
The economic outlook is uncertain. I don't need to tell any of you that. What I can say is that we will continue to monitor it, really closely. I spent time with both our commercial and our retail teams this week. We are not seeing at the moment any delinquencies coming through. You know, the portfolios I showed you the arrears levels, they're absolutely stable. I can't sit in front of you today and say that they won't come through. You know, we don't know what will happen in October, but what I do know is that it is likely to affect the very small proportion or the low end of our our book on the retail side, and it will be very sector specific on the commercial side.
I talked about the four C's of risk, conflict, credit, COVID, and climate. I could mention a number of others. The key now is that you have your most highly experienced risk teams there to meet the risks as they arise. It's really important that you continue to look at your early warning indicators, use stress testing, use scenario analysis, and importantly, take action where needed. Going back to what I said at the beginning, we have a highly experienced and skilled risk team within HSBC UK. Let me stop there and go back to the one message that I wanted you all to take away. Yes, there are plenty of opportunities, and HSBC UK absolutely will embrace them. We will embrace them, and we will embrace them safely and sustainably. Thank you all very much.
Thanks, Julia. Okay, now it's the numbers bit. Julia had one thing she wanted you to take away from today. I've got three: growth, costs, and dividends. On growth, you'll have heard from the many, many Stuarts earlier that we have got a lot of ambition to grow. Yes, we do, Stuart. That we can grow safely within our own risk appetite. We've also got the financial resources to support that growth. Our balance sheet is very much geared to a rates up environment, and that's already playing through, and you'll have seen that in our performance March year to date. On costs, we've got a track record now of good cost discipline, and we're going to maintain that.
At the same time, what that does is it gives us the capacity to keep investing in technology and digitization, some of the stuff that Jen took you through earlier. Finally, on dividends, we have become an important contributor of dividends to the group. We paid GBP 1.1 billion in respect of our 2021 performance, and there's more to come. Moving on. There are a lot of numbers on this slide. The key things I'd like you to take away are, firstly, our 2022 revenue is already above pre-COVID levels. That's down to two things, the continued growth in our balance sheet and also the rising rate environment. On costs, you can see a reducing trend year- on- year from 2019 in through to Q1 2022.
If you put those two together, what you'll see is returns well above our cost of capital. This is a bit of a simplistic chart, but very much as a ring-fenced bank. The vast majority, about 98% of our revenue, comes from the two big franchises, CMB and WPB. We've got a small tail of revenue from GBM, which is client FX revenues. Our headline 2021 revenue growth was up 3% year-on-year. We had a bit of an accounting oddity within that, which is M&S Bank profit share, where when you release ECLs, you pay it away through your fee income line. Underlying revenue up 5% year-on-year. What was pleasing in that was that we got good growth across both businesses and across net interest income and fee income.
Very much so, three-quarters roughly of our revenue comes from net interest income. If we have a look then at the balance sheet and how that stacks up. First off, and I know we talked about this earlier, we have a GBP 280 billion deposit base. That is a source of competitive advantage for us, but we don't take it for granted. We know we've got to keep investing in some of the stuff that you saw earlier around digitization and great customer journeys to maintain that stickiness of those customers and those deposits with us. On lending, we've had GBP 3 billion of growth from December 2021 to March 2022. That came across mortgages and CMB through lending and trade finance.
Our unsecured balances were flat from December 2021 to March 2022, but that's largely down to seasonality on credit cards, where you get this sort of natural payoff in Q1. Overall, though, as you can see from the chart, credit card spend way back above pre-COVID levels, although our interest-bearing balances are still behind because our customers have built up those deposits and savings during COVID. In terms of where the growth's coming from, you heard it earlier from Stuart. The mortgages, we do have pockets where we have a lot of space to grow on things like buy- to- let, cashback mortgages, places where we haven't yet operated. On commercial, as Stuart Tait said, it's around e-commerce, it's around sustainable finance, very much in line with our own journey to help our customers transition to net zero.
We're also focusing on where we have the right to win, which is international. NIM. I think this is the slide some of you are interested in, so let me have a go. If we look at the margin dynamics from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022, we had a big pickup in margin. Basically a few dynamics going on there. First off, deposits. What we're seeing is a lower pass-through than our planning assumption, which is 50% roughly. We're also seeing some dynamics the other way, largely on this asset compression on mortgages where it is a highly competitive market. Net-net, still NIM up positively. As Stuart Tait referred to earlier, we've also seen a pickup in CMB margins as well. Most of the CMB loans are SONIA priced, so they're not sensitive directly to changes in rates.
I've put a chart on the table here about NII sensitivity. I've highlighted the 100 basis points parallel shift up. After today's Bank of England move, you can see that we're operating well within that territory now. That's GBP 958 million of additional revenue. You should see that play through our results this year and into next. I know I keep going on about costs, but I do love them. Well, I love taking them out. Between December 2019 and December 2021, we've taken costs out by GBP 270 million or 7%. As more and more of our customers are interacting with us digitally, that's enabled us to take out over 5,000 FTEs and over 110 branches, and we announced 70 more this year.
At the same time, we are investing in technology and in digitizing at scale. I would say, though, and I think Ian referenced it earlier, we're not done on costs because we know the more efficient we get, the more efficient our competitors are getting. We also know the more efficient we get, the more capacity that gives us to keep investing back into technology and digitization. We're also very, very much committed to helping the group deliver on its cost commitment for next year of 0%-2% cost growth. Don't want to sign us up to anything, but we very much want to be aimed towards the bottom end of that range. If we look at the balance sheet, as a ring-fenced bank, we have a fairly simple, straightforward balance sheet. Customer loans and advances funded by customer deposits.
We have minimal use of wholesale funding, largely because we don't need it. However, it is diversification of funding sources, and it gives us some tools in our armory. You can see from the chart here that we enjoy among the lowest funding costs of our peer banks, and again, that is a source of competitive advantage for us. Moving on to capital. Our CET ratio at Q1 2022 was 13.6% versus a reg min of 10.6. Now, obviously, we also hold a prudent management buffer above that reg min number. We're also building capital ahead of the countercyclical buffer coming back on towards the back end of this year. However, even with those factors, it still leaves us room to grow. It still leaves us room to continue to pay progressive dividends.
We said GBP 1.1 billion in relation to 2021 performance. We paid a further GBP 175 million in relation to Q1 2022, and we continue at that pace. The other thing I've included on the slide here was quite an important regulatory change from 1 January 2022, where we took a GBP 7 billion uplift in RWAs. This was largely on mortgages. Two things, the new PRA 10% mortgage floor and also IRB repair this change in the definition of default. That took our average mortgage risk weighted assets up to about 11%. That said, mortgages are still, versus other products, still a relatively low-risk capital-light product. That's why we like them. Finally, on outlook. I'd start by saying, for those of you into trigonometry, the arrows are precise. Not precise, they're directional.
In terms of the dynamics of the P&L and balance sheet, look, as Julia said, and I know Ian covered it earlier too, we are living in interesting times, and we're not blind to that. In the 2.5 years since I've been at HSBC, we've gone from Brexit to COVID to war in Europe, inflation, cost of living, maybe stagflation. We know we've got to manage all that as a bank, and we've got to deliver good returns as we do that. However, as you've seen, our balance sheet is prudently positioned facing into all of this, and we're also geared to that rates up environment, which gives us headroom to operate within. We have the resource to grow safely. On costs, we've got to absorb inflation, no option, so we've got to keep getting on and doing that.
We've got to keep transforming. As Ian referred to earlier, this year is the last year of CTA. We have spent GBP 800 million cumulatively between 2020 and 2022 on CTA. That goes away. On the other hand, it does give us a big cost-saving tailwind this year and into next year because that is helping us transform the bank. One of you asked a great question earlier about, how do we do that? How do we just ignore that happened? It is about cost discipline and cost management. If I bring it to life, a great example would be branch closures, where maybe in the past, we might have exited ahead of a lease expiring. You take a big break cost. You go on the expiration date, no cost.
It's things like that that we can be very thoughtful about, we can be smart about, and just manage that number well. When we put it all together, we do expect to generate very healthy returns over the coming years. We expect to pay a dividend to Group in the range of Group has communicated to its shareholders that 40%-55% ratio, ideally around 50. That may go up and down from one year to the next, but that's the range that we're targeting to operate within. I hope that was helpful, and I'm gonna invite Julia back onto the stage here to help me with any questions. Please put the hard ones her way. Sorry, gentleman in the front row. Maybe we'll go to the gentleman behind you.
Thank you. Alvaro Serrano from Morgan Stanley. Maybe two questions from me. We've touched on it during the other sessions on sort of deposit beta, really. As you look forward with, obviously, with higher rates, at what point do you think we can start to see a change of mix in some of these deposits? Because presumably during COVID, a lot of your affluent customer bank, a lot of excess liquidity is built in there. It's not necessarily transactional accounts. At what point do you think you could see this change of mix? Are you seeing it, and how do you factor that in your budget? Relate to that, I don't know if you can give us any sort of details on the structural hedge.
I realize you've mentioned there's a natural hedge, but including natural hedge, I don't know if you can give us some details on-
Yeah.
on the notional of the total and duration, et cetera. Thank you.
On deposit mix, and Stuart here can help me out here if needed. We're not seeing anything at the minute in terms of a migration of customer balances out of, say, instant access or non-interest bearing current accounts into higher paying balances. That's not to say that, you know, that might occur over time as customers want a higher return. What we would really like those customers to do, though, in that circumstance, rather than take a different deposit, is take one of our really great wealth products. You would have seen earlier that we've now got funds on mobile and things like that. It is about not just having deposit products as an option for customers, but also wealth products which convert to fee income for us rather than net interest income. No.
At the minute, I'd say in summary, we're seeing nothing. In terms of that planning assumption, it's a very broad brush planning assumption in terms of a 50% deposit beta. You'll see that that's not what's actually happening year to date. You can see that from our pricing tables for us and other competitors. Within that NII sensitivity, there is room to maneuver when you do the detailed math within that in terms of if we do have some migration of customers out of lower paying products into higher paying products, because we are operating really comfortably within that guidance at the moment.
Sorry, one follow-up. Sorry.
Yeah.
Yeah. Relate to the fee product, because if you're having sort of effectively excess liquidity in your deposits that cost you zero, with rates going very quickly to 2% or 3% wherever they land, it's actually probably more profitable to have the deposit than investment fund. At what point you make that decision, sort of you manage one product versus the other, given the rate environment is changing very quickly.
Look, I mean, it's a great question, and obviously we need to balance all of these factors. I like us to make more money, but I want it to be sustainable. It's a bit like the example Stuart here gave earlier of, you know, Google money. Why might we give away some margin if we think it's a sustainable forward revenue pool? Look, it's a great point, and we will need to balance all of those considerations, profitability for the bank, but also, meeting customer needs. Your second question was on how we manage the structural hedge. Yeah. Basically what happens, and it was on one of the slides there in terms of the rough math of how we do it. Roughly what happens is we first look at the economic hedges, the natural hedges within our balance sheet.
The key ones being about GBP 100 billion of fixed rate mortgages, about GBP 20 billion of other fixed rate lending, and then offsetting that we have share capital and equity. That's around about twenty billion. The rest is our non-interest-bearing current accounts of about GBP 130 billion. You're into a net hedge position of about GBP 30 billion on the long end of the curve that we pass to Markets Treasury. That's hedged at about an average five-year tenor. Now there are some nuances within that. There are some products that we hedge over, say, up to two years, but they don't really meaningfully move that number. I think the good number to think about is a net GBP 30 billion hedge receive fix that we pass to Markets Treasury.
Thank you very much.
Sorry, could you pass it to the gentleman behind you, please? Yeah.
Hi, thanks. It's James Irvine here from Société Générale. I think this is a question for Julia. It's about your approach to stressing mortgage borrowers for interest rate rises. You know, that's one thing when base rates were ten basis points, but money markets suggest that base rate could be over 3% reasonably soon. Are you then going to be adding on another big stress to whatever level the mortgage rates are at that point? I mean, that feels like it's gonna cut off a lot of new business if you're really sticking to that.
Yes. I think it's a great question. You'll be aware that we automatically have to stress under the PRA rules at 3% above SVR. You will know that SVR has been significantly in excess of the base rate. What we're seeing is the SVR and the base rate becoming more aligned. Your question is whether we're double counting on the 3% stress rate and the affordability that I talked about earlier. At the moment we don't believe that we necessarily are. We are monitoring it really carefully. It isn't having a significant impact on our front book, but we will continue to monitor it, and we will continue to make the adjustments as we see them.
If we're seeing things come through, either on the transactional data, we, for instance, we saw the government support package. We will feed all of that through at the same time. As we see things, we will put them through. It's a great question.
Thanks.
Maybe let Richard guide them 'cause I'm not going in the right order. Yeah.
Thanks, Richard. It's Tom Rayner from Numis. Back onto the margin stuff. I mean, I think you've got about GBP 85 billion of surplus deposits at the moment. That's on the slide. I don't know how much of that sits at the Bank of England currently, but there's obviously growing pressure, it seems, on the government to think about how it remunerates or how the Bank of England remunerates those reserves. I mean, what do you think the risks are that you move to maybe a tiered system or even the remuneration gets removed completely? I know that's fairly controversial, but I don't think is impossible in this environment. If we were to move to something like that, how would that sort of impact your planning assumptions? Thank you.
Look, it's a great question. I think we'd need to understand what, in that circumstance, what those tiering rates would be. Just to clarify, the amount we have deposited in Bank of England is about GBP 100 billion. And it currently earns base rate. That's one of the key drivers of the NII sensitivity.
Okay. Thank you.
And then, uh-
It's Alastair. I'm gonna ask you the opposite of Tom. In the hope that the U.K. is not yet a banana republic. Maybe we're headed that way. The $958 million, I can't look away. I'm just looking at that number. It's more than 958 at the moment because the deposit pass-through is less than 50%, meaningfully less based on what you're paying me on the savings account. The market's pricing another 200 basis points by the end of the year. We've done 100, we've got another 200. I know it's hard to be confident, but things can change. Wouldn't I take 958 times one and some 1.2 or 1.3 and then triple it?
I mean, how wrong is that as a starting point? Because you've got sort of $3 billion of pre-provision profit. It's that's the biggest number of the day, right?
It's a great question. If I try and do the really dumb math on the 958.
I'd love to just quietly.
No. I'm gonna go even worse than that. Just very simplistic on the key drivers of that on the balance sheet. If I ignore cost of funds, liquidity premium, anything like that at all. You know the hedge that we do to market treasury is a small amount. It's $30 billion. That rolls off, you know, 20% per annum, so you can figure out the repricing on that. So set that to one side. The key drivers of that interest rate sensitivity are basically, we've got the $1 billion or $100 billion of cash on deposit with Bank of England earning base rate, and then we've got variable rate loans. We said the fixed rate were 120, so the variable rate's $80 billion.
We've got managed rate deposits, including yours, Alastair, of $150 billion. 100 basis points parallel shift up in rates. You know, you've got your $100 billion of cash, you've got the $80 billion of variable rate lending, and then you've got the 50% pass-through on the $150 billion of managed rate deposits. The dumb math on that gets you to plus $1 billion versus our plus $958 million. Now, you can then go through the other bits of our balance sheet and take that from our stat accounts, and you'll see what we're paying out on TFSME, TLAC, all of that sort of good stuff. That's kind of directionally how that math works.
Now, the things that could go wrong in terms of, you know, can we get GBP 3 billion of extra revenue if rates go to 3%? Deposit pass-through at 50% seems okay today. Can that be maintained? The key thing for me is mortgage margins, because within all of that NII sensitivity, we assume we can maintain asset margins on variable rate lending and on mortgages. You can see, you'll have seen it from our pricing, from competitors' pricing, that margins were very high, arguably. It was unusually high at the front end of 2021 ahead of stamp duty ending because there was a big rush for customers to move house or buy houses. That margin was maybe roughly, you know, over 150 basis points, and it's come right down today.
That won't have a big impact on our book this year because it's basically, you know, the new business that comes on this year or reprices off the back. If that were to sustain, that would drag down margins going forward. Then offsetting that, you're sitting on this big deposit book, a variable rate or managed rate book, and it's, you know, what is the pass-through on that? What we're seeing at the minute is the net of those two is creating a big upside for us. Obviously, it's something we'll need to be very thoughtful and manage over time.
She's not giving you advice on your own savings.
Hi. It's Rodney with Deutsche Bank. Can I ask what the composition of your non-interest income is? What does a high nominal GDP growth, low real growth outlook look like for the non-interest income line?
High GDP, low growth. I mean, there's a whole mix of stuff in there, and I think you can see some of it from the investor deck. You'll see some of it from our statutory accounts. The two Stuarts are probably well placed to talk to you about that. Actually, Stuart, do you want to?
Blue mic.
Go on.
Blue mic.
I'll talk about the WPB components. Higher GDP growth, you'll have interchange benefits. Obviously, that would start to flow through. You're also, as we grow our assets under management, then you have the wealth element within that. Now, that's not linked to higher GDP, lower nominal GDP. The third element is the FX, and we've talked about our FX story, whereby we will narrow the margins but up the volumes. That's the primary sources of the fee revenue in the WPB line. I could hand to Stuart, but ultimately, that depends a lot on the economic activity, whether there's gonna be IPOs, whether there's gonna be huge amounts of markets activity, et cetera. That depends on the type of recovery and the type of economic sort of outlook as we look forward.
Yeah. I think on wealth there's a couple of dynamics there, too. One is what we're trying to do to basically democratize wealth, so get more wealth products into the hands of ordinary customers on their mobile. Like me, they're great products. They're very simple and intuitive. The other piece is market sentiment, 'cause I think what we're seeing is that clients are at risk off at the minute. There are some puts and takes in that. Structurally, we need to deploy more wealth products into the hands of more customers.
If we look at just inflation on its own and ignore what you're doing as a business from the retail and wealth perspective, it's a positive for your non-interest income line.
Right. Yeah.
Presumably, we're about to hear a negative side from the commercial.
Let's go. You would get more in the interchange line. Obviously, if you have the higher wealth activity, that's less related specifically to inflation. Ultimately, you get more activity generally. Yes, on the WPB side.
Which is sort of where I was gonna pick up. I think on Mike. If I understand the question correctly, if there's higher GDP growth.
High inflation, low growth.
Yeah
looking at here.
Okay. Certain clients can pass on the high inflation. If there's a cost of goods, they can pass that on. Others can't. I think historically, we've always felt larger companies have got the power. They can pass that cost on. I think it's changed now. Just on some of the comments I made earlier. If you're a supplier of key components, chemical, electronic component, whatever it might be, I think power might have shifted to those companies, may be very small, may be very niche. They can pass it on. What we saw over the last year or so when there was disruption in supply chains, you see a different dynamic in the relationship between buyer and seller. They seem far more willing to come together and resolve together who's gonna carry that cost. Maybe it was an air shipment instead of a sea shipment.
Are we gonna split it? Are you gonna take a certain cost side? I think there's more negotiation and there's a shift in the power if there is, you know, those effects coming through.
Thank you.
Okay. I'm gonna suggest that we move into the final Q&A. I know we'll probably run the same questions, but I'm conscious we're gonna try and feed you before you get on trains, et cetera. We don't want you complaining of not being fed. Please put your hands together for Claire and Julia here for that. Thanks very much.
I will hand over.
Yeah. Perfect. You go, Claire. Is that okay? Thanks. Just my notes here. We'll carry on with the question. I wanna try and get the questions answered. Can I just go back out? I think the gentleman there. Can we get a microphone? Just let's go along the line there, and I'll come back to you in a second. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
Thanks very much. Actually, I've got a question for Julia, who's running away. I'll maybe grab her before she's gone. Yeah. I mean, I'm really struggling at the moment because every bank I speak to tells me there's no credit problems at all. Yet, a look at your share prices for the sector tells us there's a massive problem. If I look at things like GDP growth, I've never seen it falling at the sort of rates we're seeing it falling today. I guess my question is, if you-- when you stress the book and look at the book, let's just assume there is a problem. You know, where should we be seeing that problem? Where are we gonna see the first indicators? And I guess within that, at what rate?
We can talk about rates go up 3, 4, 5%, but it's ludicrous. I mean, if rates go to 5%, you know, the economy is gonna fall on its back. At what level is it—what is that cutoff point that we should start to say to clients, "Look, you know, if rates, if rate expectations go to 3.5," do we then say, "Look, that is a big problem now for the sector"? Or is it five, or is it six? What is that level would be really good to hear. Thanks.
What I said to you is we are not seeing anything at the moment, and absolutely we're not. I'm very happy afterwards to go through with you all the research and the portfolio management that we are looking at.
Sorry. Go ahead.
Yeah, no.
We have taken some FEG overlay as we call it, forward economic guidance overlay. It was originally a COVID provision. It's converted now to an inflation provision, so we are carrying about $450 million of provision on our balance sheet that is an overlay for economic scenarios. I think where we'll see it in our book is in retail there's very much a squeeze. You know, there's a small cohort of clients. We'd be looking at people who are, say, fixed income workers, gig economy, that kind of thing. Customers that we know are on Universal Credit. We do have some of those customers in our book. We've already taken a provision overlay against that. Very much they would be.
You know, our book overall is affluent, performs really well, but it's just getting into those pockets where we would see some customers really stressing if things get worse.
Yes. For me, I think it is at the lower end of the retail book, Universal Credit, squeezed affordability, and higher LTVs, et cetera. On the commercial book, it's going the sectors and having to look at it on a sector-by-sector basis, and particularly looking at it at the SME. Whilst noting, we haven't talked about government lending and BBLS, much of that is government backed because it has been through the BBLS scheme.
We'd also look at the short-dated receivables finance book. You know, people paying on a short-dated payable, and that's a really good early barometer for us.
Just one other bit. Just, I want to go to this question really quick, but it would depend on your view on unemployment as well. I mean, I'm probably the oldest person in the room, so I remember the late 1970s, 1980s. Unemployment was very high, so it's a very different set of dynamics that we're playing with now. Look, we hear you. We hear you.
At what rate do you think we then start to really get into difficult? I mean, clearly if rates go to 10%, that's a problem. Well, it's all hypothetical, isn't it?
Depends what you think rates are gonna go to. Alastair thinks it might go to 3%. I think that's a brave shout saying they'll go to 3%. We could talk for hours about maybes and what-ifs. I can't-
At what level would it be a problem, is what I'm saying. I can make my own views to where it's gonna go, but I'm just what I'm not clear of is, from any bank really, is what level is the problem level?
I wouldn't correlate the problem level necessarily to where the base rate's at. I would put it more into where inflation goes. Ultimately, inflation's gonna constrain the cash flows, both of individuals, SMEs, and then playing up into the corporate through the supply chain. I think if you were to sustain a 10% inflation level over a period of two years, you're starting to really eat into the affordability of individuals. For those that have debt, and we're a bank that has less customers who have low, net cash flow, so we'd be less exposed, but we would be exposed as well. It's inflation that's gonna drive it.
Perhaps the duration as well rather than.
The duration of it. Duration of inflation. I like that.
Just on that, I won't go into the detail. We have a lot of conversations as an executive team about do we buy into the figures that you're seeing banded around just now, that inflation's gonna fall back very quickly in 2023. That's a view. That's just a view. Look, I want to take the next question beside you. Thank you.
Thanks. It's Arman Rakel from Barclays. Two if I could. Sorry if I've missed it, and I can probably work it out, but what ROE are you currently generating? What ROE can we expect you to generate in the next couple of years if interest rates were to normalize around two, north of 2%?
We gave you in the slides, and sorry, let me just get back to it.
Think that might not look.
There's two different ROEs that we look at, which is a bit complicated. One is pension adjusted and one is headline. We have a big pension surplus as a bank, and that's dilutive of our ROE. You can see basically for the full year, we were on a reported ROTE of 13.5 and adjusted to 14.7. For Q1 of this year it was adjusted to 19.6. Now, I'd say that was inflated by a couple of things. The key thing it was inflated by was deferred tax adjustments, so the change in the banking surcharge. That basically gave us a bit of a funny anomaly. You can see there that sort of mid to high teens range.
Yeah. I guess normalizing for loan losses and deferred tax recharges.
Yeah
in a higher interest rate environment-
Yeah
It's a kind of mid-teens ROE that we can expect.
Well, I'll let you do the math on it, but it.
Cool.
Give me the drivers.
The second one was coming back to your point around mortgage margins. Just interested into what extent deposit pass-through is related to mortgage margins. The tailwind that you're enjoying on the deposit side, does that allow you as a business to compete more aggressively on the asset side? I guess is it a reasonable inference that as deposit rates rise and deposit margins contract, asset margins should widen from here?
I'll pick up that on the first thing, and I'll be corrected by Claire. The reality is that we don't price for a cross-subsidization. In other words, you're pricing always to create hard-billing mortgages above the 10% capital cost. We've seen times where the market has behaved irrationally, just by the speed of the swap rates going up over Q4, Q1, and therefore at times you might have had a few GBP written under that 10%, but we've never sought to lead the market on that. However, if you look at it more structurally, undoubtedly, there is more money being made through the increased interest rates.
Delivering through the deposit products and less money because the pricing is narrower through the mortgage products. There is at a structural level, your NII composition is now shifting more towards deposits than it was assets. To your question as to whether if deposits came back down with the asset price and come back up, that's where you're trying to create as balanced a balance sheet as you can, and ultimately, you would have some of that hedged, natural hedged benefit. However, it's a very competitive market and people have different funding structures, and so you have different impacts at any one point in time. What I would say is the outlook for the net interest margin continues to be positive, and as interest rates go up, that maintains that positive trajectory.
If interest rates start to come down, depending on how people have structured out their balance sheet, that will not necessarily come down as steeply as it came back up.
I think the other thing that I would add is, you know, 10% is rock bottom ROTE on mortgages. You know, that's kind of your bank's cost of capital. For us to be well above that, mortgages need to be well above that. It's kind of what we live with in the short run while the market is behaving a bit oddly versus where we want to get that to over time.
Thank you. Yeah, sorry. Let's go down to you. If you just pass the microphone forward, and then I'll come to you in a second, Joseph, and I'll go there. Okay, that's the next. Please.
Thank you. Jason Napier from UBS. Two questions. Julia, I think you'll probably kick us off, certainly. The first is you mentioned that you're operating below the risk appetite that management have set, and that sounds like a good thing in this environment. But one of the issues we struggle with as an investment market is to measure risk appetite and what kind of embedded risk is in the loan book now. We kind of work on the assumption that the financial crisis caused everyone to reassess how much risk you wanna run, and it's fallen. The question is, how do you measure it, and how's that changed over time, the risk in the book?
The second question, you mentioned you spend a lot of time in Westminster, and presumably some of the questions you're being asked is what's going on in the real economy. In the commercial book, before somebody defaults, what do you know about how things are going for the average commercial customer?
Do you want to cover the?
Happy to
the commercial side
Sure, yep
...side of it? On risk appetite, you don't expect risk appetite to change. You expect risk appetite to remain the same through the cycle, and our risk appetite has remained the same. Of course, it was tightened post the Great Financial Crisis. What I am seeing here is a very sensible, robust risk appetite, but a very low risk and risk-averse approach that hasn't used the capacity within that risk appetite. What I am not seeing is a racy risk appetite in any way. I think it is at the same level as our peers, if not slightly more risk-averse than our peers. What I am seeing, which is different, is the capacity. That feeds through when you see some of the numbers, when you see the delinquencies, et cetera.
They are well below, and that is, you know, I'd love to say that is all about excellent credit risk underwriting. We have a very good credit risk team, but it's also because we've been risk-averse.
Stu, why don't you take the second one over here?
Yeah, on individual clients, in terms of early warning signs, I mean, the vast majority of our book and, of course, where the largest exposures are, we've got relationship manager. The key role of the relationship manager is to be really close to the management and not just the management, but visit the premises, visit the factory, look at the inventory, whatever it might be. Also to have their ear to the ground, their antenna up, what's happening within that industry, within that region. Are people trading with them? Are we seeing people stopping trading with a particular company through our own data and analytics? Can we see that suddenly there's a drop-off in payments, drop-off in a certain counterparty? It's that general awareness, but that's not to say there aren't surprises.
I think one of the surprises that's come up recently is inventory mismanagement. Some companies have overstocked, some have understocked, and I think I've mentioned it two or three times today. Who has key items for their viable business that suddenly they can't get access to? That's where we need to help them. It's a very broad ears to the ground, quite, you know, relationship approach.
I'll go get Joseph's question, and I'll go there. That, I think I'll have to do this, right. Joseph, sorry.
Hi, yes, thank you. It's Joseph Dickerson from Jefferies. Just going back to this point on the capacity that Julia mentioned and risk appetite. Have you looked at, say, over a three year view or any years, if that capacity was utilized, what the profit opportunity is?
Yes.
Big to you.
You know, I should really pass it to my risk and business experts. We can get frustrated ourselves, and that frustration might turn into being good news in the next year, 18 months. We do want to nudge it. In fact, when Julia arrived, I remember Julia saying to me, "Ian, we've got to start taking some risk in some places." It's built, it was kind of built in. It's endemic in the business. I mean, you can see that in the numbers. You can see that in the balance sheet. I wouldn't want to put a number on it because then you could say, well, you take bad risk because you could dive into somewhere where it's not your field of expertise. Yeah.
For me, in the WPB business, risk isn't actually a constraining factor. If you look at the mortgage book, can you see a route to easily $200 billion plus yes?
You see to the market share gains without having to adapt the risk appetite materially, maybe marginally more than the 5% we're guiding on buy- to- let, and maybe take that up as long as we're comfortable with that. On unsecured, recognizing the economic outlook and therefore only staying largely within our own base and where we're comfortable lending, you can easily see if we are 5% with HSBC credit card books, why can't we be at 10%-15%? You can see the capacity that you can deliver out of that. Really there, the constraints are about demand, how much you can write in a year and the capacity to deliver it, and therefore also the amount that you can land into a technology environment of change without, you know, causing crippling disruption.
I don't genuinely sit here against the opportunities we laid out. I don't see a constraint. My constraint is not based on risk appetite, so therefore the answer to your question is the embedded capacity is not about filling up the risk appetite. It's about the speed of delivery against the market share opportunity.
I think it's also.
Pardon. Sorry, Julia, go ahead.
I come from a building society. I was the group CRO at the largest building society. It was a risk-averse, safe building society. I was not used to having that much capacity, you know. When the risk appetite, and you will know this, is pretty common on the credit risk side across the major lenders. You know, on mortgages, it's higher LTV, it's buy- to- let. It's the more specialist propositions done properly and done safely. That's where the margin is.
We'll look, it's the last question, I think, in order of time. Please, you've got the microphone.
Thanks. It's John Cronin at Goodbody. Just come back to the mortgages point and mortgage market share. You expressed the ambition earlier to get to a stock share of broadly around 10%, which is your natural share. Clearly from a flow perspective, that's where you're running. But is there anything you can say in terms of timeframes we should be thinking about in terms of getting to that stock share and how that dovetails with pricing strategies? I suppose what I'm thinking about particularly there is like your references earlier to both ROAE and return on risk-weighted assets being in a good spot at the moment.
Like, are there certain price points, be it from a mortgage spread perspective or a returns on risk-weighted assets perspective that you could point us to where you'd be willing to ramp up flow share beyond today's levels?
John, thank you. I can actually point to the counterfactual. We've taken volume out of our productive capacity in Q1 and Q2 because the pricing wasn't there for us, so we chose not to actively participate as much as we could. We had capacity in the operation. We could have taken more, even when we saw some of our competitors didn't have that capacity. We work under guardrails. Those guardrails guide us as to where our minimums are. Ultimately, the speed to deliver of the 10% will come from the market opportunity. Last year was a fantastic market, GBP 290 billion of gross lending in the U.K. market. This year it looks like it's gonna be GBP 265.
If we continue to take 10%, we'll never get to 10%, so we can definitely see opportunity, particularly as we expand our range into 12%-15% per annum. If you started doing the math on that, you could easily see it by 2026. The pricing has to be there to be able to support it.
If the pricing was there, you would ramp up and go beyond just upper quarter.
We've always guided that. You know, we want to move towards our natural share. We've got the productive capacity both in terms of capital and funding to do it. We've got the processing speed to be able to do it. We're learning about new asset classes such as buy- to- let, where we can. As soon as we learn them, we've shown in the last three years, once we got comfortable with brokers, we went big on brokers and we'll continue to work like that.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Well, thank you. Thanks so much for that. I want to wrap up and I'll just take a couple of minutes, so I need the screen. Sorry. That was a polite way of saying, "Would you mind moving on?" It will just take two minutes to wrap up. First of all, thank you very much for joining us today and thanks very much to people on the webcast as well. We know you're busy people, so to come and indulge us all day today has been great and I hope you've enjoyed it and I hope you've learned some new things about us as well.
I was just gonna go, sort of rattle through these points, but actually I've taken some notes today, so I'd rather just work from my notes. You can read these things and I'll maybe close in a couple, in a second. Just in my bits that I've picked up from some of the questions, I'll just start with, CMB. There's always a lot of questions on WPB. I hope you get that CMB is really important to us, really important franchise. When you're number one in the market in large corporate and MME, we're playing a really important role in helping the U.K. recover from the pandemic. If you need any more information on CMB, I'm sure Stuart would be delighted to speak to you on that.
The next thing was, I know that there was a good session on First Direct. First Direct 2.0. Somebody asked today, "It's taking you 30 years to do 2.0." I thought that was a really good point. It's taken us too long, but we're delighted with the progress. Chris, thanks for the presentation. It's a really exciting franchise. I sat in the FX, the Global Money presentation today. I think everyone I spoke to has really enjoyed Global Money. We're super excited about it, and I promise you will have the tool in your wallet before you go on holiday in August, okay? Stuart, you told me July. We have to get it out there 'cause we need our customers to use it, so watch this space. It's great.
On the tech side, tech's much more important than critical. Okay? It's much more important than critical. It's fundamental. If we don't get our technology right, be it safe, and Jen gave you an update, it has to be safe. Our customers want safety. It has to be fast, it has to be reliable, and it has to be easy.
If we don't deliver that over the next couple of years, we'll lose share. We have to get that done. It's way more important than critical. It's fundamental to our business. I thought Julia gave a very good update on risk. We're very transparent about capacity and scope to grow, but in a really smart way. Julia has been a fantastic hire for HSBC UK. We're good. We've got good liquidity, as you all know. We've got plenty liquidity, and we've got strong capital. If the market's right, we'll push on. We will absolutely push on. But don't forget the four Cs. I think there was a desire to get a little bit more transparency.
There's this view that HSBC do not give you the transparency, and Claire gave you a lot of information today. In fact, we had a conversation about two hours ago, saying, "Look, I think we should give a little bit more today." I think you're armed with an awful lot of information now when you go back to wherever you're going tonight. You've got a lot of information about how we are gonna perform, fingers crossed, over the next year to 18 months. I hope you've got that and you feel good about that. The points I was gonna, you know, just close on very quickly. Great performance 2021. 2022's continued. I think we're really well positioned. We've worked hard to get into that position, but we're well positioned. Very clear strategy.
Big role to play in society, and I think we're going to be really, really important to the group. A final point is to say a thank you to my team today. I think you've been exceptional today. A bank's only as good as the people that are running it, I can assure you. To the people who presented today and all of the work that's gone on behind the scenes, and there's a lot of people in the room done a ton of work on that, can I just say a heartfelt thank you. I think you've done a really good job in presenting our position today to the people here. Last thing is food and drinks on level 10. Don't miss your train. Okay? You won't thank me if you miss your train.
If you need any more information, please come back to us. I hope you've enjoyed the day. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much.