Okay, we will now resume the second part of our briefing. So on Q2, we reported today that we had another solid quarter with second quarter net profit of SGD 2.8 billion, up 4% from a year ago. Return on equity was 18.2%, and this took our first half net profit to a record. So we have Sok Hui and Piyush with us. Without further ado, Sok Hui, please.
Thanks, Sok.
Sure.
Hey, good afternoon, good evening, everyone.
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We delivered another strong performance in the second quarter with net profit rising 4% from a year ago to SGD 2.80 billion and ROE at 18.2%. This brought first half total income and net profit to new highs. For the second quarter, total income increased 9% from a year ago to SGD 5.48 billion, with the commercial book increasing 9% to SGD 5.30 billion. The growth was broad-based. Net interest income was higher as the balance sheet grew and net interest margin expanded 2 basis points to 2.83%. Net interest income reached a new high and Treasury customer sales remained strong. Markets trading income also grew 6%. Expenses were 12% higher with Citi Taiwan accounting for 5 percentage points. The cost-to-income ratio was 40%. For the first half, net profit was up 9% to SGD 5.76 billion.
Total income increased 11% to SGD 11.0 billion as fee income and treasury customer sales reached new highs, and commercial book net interest margin expanded by 5 basis points. Expenses rose 11% with Citi Taiwan accounting for 5 percentage points. They were little changed compared to the previous half. The cost-to-income ratio was 39%. Asset quality remained sound. The NPL ratio was unchanged from the previous quarter at 1.1%. Specific allowances remained low at 8 basis points of loans for the second quarter, bringing the first half to 9 basis points. Allowance coverage was at 129% and 227% after considering collateral. Capital was healthy with CET1 ratio at 14.8%. Liquidity remained ample with LCR and NSFR well above regulatory requirements. The Board declared a dividend of SGD 0.54 per share for the second quarter. Next slide. Compared to a year ago, net profit was 4% higher as total income grew 9%.
Commercial book income increased 9% to SGD 5.30 billion. The growth was broad-based. Net interest income rose 5% or SGD 188 million -SGD 3.77 billion as net interest margin improved 2 basis points and loans grew. Fee income rose 27% or SGD 225 million -SGD 1.05 billion, with double-digit growth in Wealth Management, cards, and loan-related fees. Treasury customer sales and other income remained strong, increasing 3% or SGD 14 million -SGD 478 million. Markets trading income also rose by 6% or SGD 10 million -SGD 187 million. Expenses were 12% or SGD 241 million higher at SGD 2.17 billion, with Citi Taiwan accounting for 5 percentage points of the increase. Profit before allowances increased 6% to SGD 3.31 billion. Specific allowances remained low at SGD 97 million or 8 basis points of loans. General allowances of SGD 51 million were taken compared to a write-back a year ago. Next slide.
Compared to the previous quarter's record, net profit was 5% lower as total income was little changed and expenses rose 4%. Commercial book total income was stable. Net interest income increased 3% or SGD 122 million as net interest margin expanded 6 basis points led by fixed-rate asset repricing. Fee income rose slightly to a new high. These gains were offset by a 23% or SGD 143 million decline in commercial book other non-interest income. Excluding non-recurring gains, commercial book other non-interest income was 15% lower than the previous quarter. Markets trading income fell 24% or SGD 59 million. Expenses rose 4% or SGD 93 million led by higher staff costs. Profit before allowances were 5% lower. Total allowances were 10% or SGD 13 million higher from a low base. Next slide. For the first half, net profit increased 9% as total income rose 11%. Both were at new highs.
Commercial book total income grew 11%. Net interest income grew 6% or SGD 451 million- SGD 7.42 billion as net interest margin expanded 5 basis points from higher interest rates. Fee income rose 25% or SGD 417 million to a record SGD 2.09 billion led by growth in Wealth Management fees, card fees, and loan-related fees. Treasury customer sales and other income increased 23% or SGD 203 million -SGD 1.10 billion. Excluding non-recurring gains, it was up 12%. Markets trading income was little changed at SGD 433 million. Expenses grew 11% or SGD 438 million -SGD 4.25 billion. Citi Taiwan accounted for 5 percentage points of the increase. The cost-to-income ratio was 39%. Profit before allowances was 10% higher at SGD 6.79 billion. Specific allowances remained low at SGD 210 million or 9 basis points of loans, similar to the 8 basis points a year ago. General allowances of SGD 73 million were taken. Next slide.
Compared to the previous quarter, commercial book net interest income increased 3% to SGD 3.77 billion. Net interest margin improved 6 basis points to 2.83% led by fixed-rate asset repricing. Compared to a year ago, commercial book net interest income rose 5% as net interest margin improved 2 basis points and loans and deposits were higher. Markets trading net interest income continued to be negative this quarter due to products with inherent accounting asymmetry, where income is taken in the non-interest income line and funding cost is taken in the net interest income line. These activities are accretive to income but dilutive to net interest margin at the GFM level. Combining the commercial book and the markets trading, the group's net interest income grew 3% from the previous quarter to SGD 3.59 billion, while net interest margin was unchanged at 2.14%.
Compared to a year ago, group net interest income was 5% higher as growth in loans and deposits was partially offset by a 2 basis point contraction in net interest margin. For the first half, commercial book net interest income increased 6% to SGD 7.42 billion from a 5 basis point expansion in net interest margin to 2.80%. The group's total net interest income was 6% higher, driven by loan and deposit growth and stable net interest margin of 2.14%. Next slide. Gross loans were stable in constant currency terms during the quarter at SGD 431 billion as increases in trade and Wealth Management loans were offset by a decline in non-trade corporate loans. While there was good demand for non-trade corporate loans, this was offset by idiosyncratic repayments, including some due to asset sales by clients. Over the first half, loans grew 1% or SGD 5 billion.
The growth was led by trade and non-trade corporate loans, both of which grew by SGD 3 billion. Next slide. During the quarter, deposits were stable in constant currency terms as CASA and fixed deposit flows stabilized. CASA declined SGD 2 billion, 1/3 of the first quarter's pace, and 1/5 a year ago. Amidst the slower loan growth, we continue to profitably deploy surplus deposits to high-quality liquid assets. These assets consume limited capital and boost liquidity ratios. LCR of 148% and NSFR of 116% were well above regulatory requirements. Next slide. Second quarter gross fee income rose 27% from a year ago to SGD 1.26 billion. Excluding Citi Taiwan, which has consolidated in third quarter 2023, gross fee income grew 17%, unchanged from growth the previous two quarters. This quarter's growth was led by Wealth Management fees, which rose 37% to SGD 518 million.
Excluding Citi, they increased 25%, driven by a shift from deposits to investments and bancassurance , and by expanded assets under management. Assets under management grew 24% year-on-year to a new high of SGD 396 billion, with Citi contributing 10 percentage points to the increase. We had SGD 3 billion of net new money inflows in the second quarter, bringing the total to SGD 9 billion for the first half. Gross inflows remained strong during the quarter, but outflows were higher due to client diversification into real assets and more competitive deposit rates offered by other banks. Card fees increased 32% to SGD 313 million from higher spending and the inclusion of Citi. Excluding Citi, Card fees rose 9%. Loan-related fees also saw significant growth, rising 40% to SGD 186 million due to an increased number of deals.
Transaction service fees were 3% higher at SGD 228 million, while investment banking fees fell 39% to SGD 19 million. For the first half, gross fee income rose 26% to a record of SGD 2.54 billion. Next slide. First half commercial book non-interest income, which is boxed up in red, rose 24% from a year ago to SGD 3.19 billion. The growth was driven by fee income and Treasury customer sales, which both reached new highs. There were also non-recurring gains on FX hedges for our overseas operations, accounting for around SGD 100 million or 4 percentage points of the increase. For the second quarter, commercial book non-interest income was 19% higher than a year ago at SGD 1.53 billion. Fee income was at a record, while Treasury customer sales were over 20% higher. Compared to the previous quarter and excluding non-recurring gains, commercial book non-interest income was 5% lower.
Combining commercial book and markets trading, total non-interest income was SGD 3.94 billion for the first half, 20% higher than a year ago. For the second quarter, it was SGD 1.89 billion, 17% higher than a year ago. Next. First half expenses rose 11% from a year ago to SGD 4.25 billion, with Citi Taiwan accounting for 5 percentage points of the increase. Compared to the previous half, expenses were little changed. The cost-to-income ratio was at 39%. Second quarter expenses were 12% higher than a year ago at SGD 2.17 billion, with Citi Taiwan accounting for 5 percentage points of the increase. Compared to the previous quarter, expenses rose 4% led by higher staff costs. The cost-to-income ratio was at 40%. Next slide. Asset quality remained resilient. Non-performing assets fell 3% from the previous quarter to SGD 5.08 billion as new non-performing asset formation was more than offset by repayments and write-offs.
A few new NPAs in the first quarter were settled in the second quarter. As such, first half new NPAs were less than the sum of the first and second quarters. The NPL ratio was unchanged at 1.1%. Next slide. Second quarter specific allowances remained low at SGD 97 million or 8 basis points of loans. First half specific allowances amounted to SGD 212 million or 9 basis points of loans, similar to the 8 basis points a year ago. Next slide. General allowances of SGD 51 million were taken in the second quarter and SGD 73 million for the first half. Total allowance reserves stood at SGD 6.55 billion, with SGD 2.57 billion in specific allowance reserves and SGD 3.98 billion in general allowance reserves. Allowance coverage stood at 129% and at 227% after considering collateral. Next. The CET1 ratio rose 0.1 percentage points from the previous quarter to 14.8%.
The leverage ratio of 6.5% was more than twice the regulatory minimum of 3%. Next. The Board declared a quarterly dividend of SGD 0.54 per share for the second quarter. This brings the first half dividend to SGD 1.08 per share, 32% higher than a year ago. The payout ratio for the first half was 53%. Based on yesterday's closing share price, and assuming that dividends are held at SGD 0.54 per quarter, the annualized dividend yield is 6.6%. In summary, we delivered another strong set of results for the second quarter, bringing first half earnings to a new high with ROE at 18.8%. While recent market volatility and ongoing geopolitical tensions have resulted in heightened uncertainty, we have built resilience against the risks of an economic slowdown and lower interest rates.
Our high general allowance reserves, our reduced interest rate sensitivity, our strong capital position, and ample liquidity will position us to continue supporting customers and delivering shareholder returns. Thank you for your attention. I'll now pass you over to Piyush.
Thanks, Sok Hui. So let me again, I have two slides. Let us give you some insights on the quarter and then some thoughts about the outlook as you go forward. So first, as Sok Hui pointed out, our NIM stayed unchanged at 2.14%, which is very strong, which is very good. And that's really driven by the commercial book, where the fixed asset repricing came in quite handy. As you know, we'd indicated earlier with about $40 billion of fixed asset repricing to flow through this year, of which $27 billion was in the first half of the year. So we repriced that.
In that repricing, you get a pickup of about 180 basis points. That's quite helpful for the commercial book NIM. On top of that, we also took the opportunity to add a lot more duration, add a lot more fixed-rate assets. Actually, we put on $40 billion of fixed-rate assets instead of just $27 billion. We added another, you know, $12 billion-$13 billion more. Our total fixed asset book is now $190 billion. All of that helped drive the commercial book NIM and the NII. Now, this obviously offset a little bit because Treasury Markets, the funding costs are still a drag. More specifically, we continue to take money in Treasury Markets as relatively affordable money and deploy it in low-risk placements. These are accretive to income, but they dilute the NIM.
They're not the same NIM as everything else, but they're really low-risk assets. And so they actually help our income improve. We balanced those two out. The commercial book improvement and the markets' trading drag, we still got a flat NIM. And I think that was one big agenda, one big item for this quarter. The second was loans. Our loan growth is actually looking like it's stable. We didn't get loan growth. But in reality, if you look at the underlying, we continue to get a lot of new loans booked. And you can make out, make that out from our loan fees. Our loan fees at $180 million were the same as the first quarter. And these are at least $30 million-$40 million more than a typical quarter. So we continue to see a strong, healthy pipeline of loans.
But we lost some loan volume for what Sok Hui described as idiosyncratic reasons. You know, a couple of our clients did some large portfolio sales of assets, and then they paid us down. And so that resulted in not being able to show any loan growth on the balance sheet, but the pipeline was quite good. The fee income was really the standout. Our total fee income, Wealth Management was up, as again, Sok Hui pointed out. It looks like it's 37-odd%, but that includes Citi. If we exclude Citi, it's 25%. The first quarter excluding Citi was 21-odd%. So if you average for the half year, it's like 22%, 23% fee income growth in Wealth Management, which is extraordinary. Cards is very strong. If I back out Citi, it's still 9-odd% growth in the cards. And loans, I already said, SGD 180 million of loan fees.
So the fee income lines have been very strong. Wealth momentum continues. We continue to see inflows of new money. We continue to see clients shift from deposits to investment. We went up by another percentage point to 55% investments out of AUMs for the quarter. Card spending is continuing to be relatively robust. Relatively comfortable with the momentum we have on this line. Cost-income ratio continues to be fairly steady. The last callout is asset quality has been quite healthy. We're not seeing signs of stress and strain generally in the system. The real estate portfolio in China, Hong Kong continues to be a little bit troubled, but as I mentioned before, we're mostly secure. We don't have large, you know, vulnerable positions. There is some migration impact that shows up in our general provisions.
But by and large, the asset quality has continued to be good. Our specific provisions are low. We had some 9 basis points in specific provisions for the quarter. There is, even on the consumer side, the cards delinquencies that indicated the first quarter delinquencies were picking up, actually they've leveled off. And so our actions on collections and card management have paid off. We're not seeing further deterioration in the second quarter. Unsecured lending is still creeping up in a couple of markets, in Hong Kong in particular and India, but it's not material in the big scheme of things. So overall, asset quality continues to be quite good at this point in time. If you look at the outlooks of where we are, you know, the market volatility, the tension, you know, obviously in the last couple of days, there've been a lot of heightened uncertainty.
So it's kind of hard to say how many cuts there will be, what's going to happen. But I did want to point out that we have built resiliency against potential economic slowdown and lower interest rates. What do I mean by that? First, for economic slowdown, as you know, we've got general provisions of almost $4 billion. Our models come up with a number which are much lower, $1.7 billion-$1.8 billion. So we have over $2 billion of general provisions, which are what we call overlays. Those have been in place now for some time, in fact, past COVID, and we haven't touched those. So we do have a reasonable amount of dry powder to help us absorb any unexpected risks from a recession or a sharp slowdown. Second, on interest rates, to go back to what I said, you know, we've built duration in the book.
We've added over the last couple of years, almost $65 billion of fixed-rate assets. We have about $190 billion now of fixed-rate assets. And that makes a big difference to the interest rate sensitivity of our book. So if you look at the next point, I'll tell you that on the way up, we had guided at one stage that the interest rate sensitivity we had was $18 million-$20 million per basis point, which means that if Fed fund rate went up by 100 basis points, you should expect to see $1.82 billion impact on our top line. And if you look back, that's what you saw. As rates climbed up, our bottom line has gone up from $6 billion to well over $10 billion, a lot of it driven by rates.
But what we've also done over the last year or two is prepared ourselves for a new environment. One, because obviously a lot of our CASA balances have gone into fixed deposits, and therefore they are less sensitive on the way down. But mostly because we've added duration. We've got a duration of three, three and a half years in the book, and that's actually been quite helpful. So at this point in time, on the way down, our interest rate sensitivity is only about $4 million, which means that if the Fed cuts rates by 100 basis points, we should expect to lose about $400 million in income top line on a full-year basis. Now, that shows that our book is a lot more resilient as you go forward, both to credit challenges as well as to income challenges.
The commercial book, non-interest income, as I mentioned earlier, momentum is good. The wealth business is very good. Cards are good. Lending is good. Only investment banking has been slow. Fixed income was okay. ECM continued to be really, really challenged. The outlook as you go forward is a little less clear. By and large, if the markets sell off massively, then you will see some impact on Wealth Management because people tend to be risk-off when markets sell off. But the good news is that after the sell-off day before, the markets rebounded yesterday. And so far, we are not seeing any letup in momentum. In fact, even going into the third quarter overall, July numbers are very strong. So our outlook currently based on all this, we expect total income growth to be high single digit for this year. That still factors in a couple of rate cuts.
So we haven't changed that. But even if the rate cuts are more, the reality, like I said, is $4 million per basis point. And if the rate cuts happen late in the year, we see more rate cuts in November, that's like a month or two months of impact. It's not going to materially change that. This income guidance is now stronger than we had. Earlier, we were started with low, then we said probably mid-single digits. Now, based on the strong run we've had, we think we can get to high single digit income growth for the year. Cost-income ratio will still target to do around 40%. The other thing where we think we do better than previous guidance is our allowances. We had earlier guided 17-20 basis points just based on through-cycle average.
At this point in time, we've done about 9 basis points in the first half of the year. We're not seeing any major stress. I'm still guiding 10-15 basis points because you really don't know what might happen in the next three, four months. But if I had to bet, I'd say we'd probably come in somewhere halfway through that range. But 10-15 basis points is probably a good guidance. So when you add all of that together, you will get net profit growth in the mid- to high single digits for this year. And remember, we did 10.2% or 10.3% last year. And so you can work the numbers and see that we will have a pretty solid year this year as well. So why don't I stop and we can take some questions.
Okay. Again, the same drill. If you have a question, please, you know, let us know. And we have moving mics so you can speak into a mic in front of you. Any questions? Okay. Well, it seems like the result's quite self-explanatory. So with that, then if there are no questions, we'll draw this time to a close. Oh, John Lee. Oh, there it is. Sorry. Sorry. There's a question. Still any questions?
Okay. What is it, David? All right. Thanks for the presentation and congrats on the results. So just a few questions here. I think the first one, your second quarter, ECR one and two rose quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year. And it was right back in the second quarter of last year as well. But the loans didn't grow quarter-on-quarter and only 2% year-on-year. So are there any areas of concern?
I know that PwC has flagged issues, further issues in Hong Kong commercial real estate. My second question, could you just provide some color on the profile of your customers with commercial real estate loans, maybe in markets like Hong Kong and the U.S.? One of your peer banks mentioned broadening into other areas like residential, for example. So any thoughts on this? Finally, how will you continue to defend your SGD 10 billion profit for this year and the next? Thanks.
Well, on the first, I think I'll leave it with that. You know, our total commercial property exposure in China, we've said that our total property exposure in China is about SGD 14 billion, SGD, right? We said before, it's about SGD 6 billion to state-owned enterprises, which are pretty solid.
It's about SGD 4 billion to foreign enterprises, you know, Singapore companies which are there, which is also fairly well covered. And then it's about SGD 2 billion each to private enterprises and our, you know, REITs in China. Our total commercial, our total exposure to property in Hong Kong is about SGD 30 billion, of which commercial is about SGD 18 billion. There's a little bit of overlap because that includes about SGD 1 billion of Chinese companies in Hong Kong, but you know, we can round it off. But the bulk of that is to the big Hongs, to the large, you know, the Cheung Kong, the Henderson Land, et cetera, et cetera. We think that exposure is pretty solid. But there is a small amount to what we call large corporates, but not the blue chips. So there is some.
Because of the headwinds in the property sector, there is some migration in our portfolio in those two categories. The POEs, this thing in China and some of these small names in Hong Kong. But the numbers are not big. It's quite manageable. But as this portfolio migrates, the way we calculate our ECL is if the portfolio shows weakness, we add ECL. And therefore, you can see that our ECL is up for the quarter. That's only because, reflecting a portfolio migration, that, you know, something must have moved from amber to red or something and that results in our chalking up greater ECL. We've had two NPLs in the portfolio between China and Hong Kong this year. First quarter, we had one about $100 million. And second quarter, we had one about $100 million. In both cases, our loan-to-value is very low.
At least in one case, it's likely to get resolved in the next couple of days. So we expect to get paid out. So it's not a big problem. It's a manageable problem. But that explains the ECL lift that you see. Your second question on commercial, I already told you, it was the nature and profile of commercial real estate and this thing. We're not seeing any challenges in the rest of our, you know, property portfolio anywhere. It's actually quite stable. And your last thing, how do you defend the, you know, profit level for this year? It's early to give guidance for next year. But if you go back to our interest rate sensitivity and we figure $4 million per basis point, even if you assume the Fed does eight rebate cuts, right?
You figure five, six on the average because they'll start, they won't do them all in the beginning of the year. That's $600 million-$700 million bucks of income loss, $800 million bucks of income loss. So the question is, can we then get that income loss through increase in the loan book? I think if rates come down, your lending will go up. So I think we should be able to pick up more loan volume if rates start coming down. And I already said the uncertainty is what happens to things like Wealth Management. Generally speaking, if rates come down and the markets are benefited by that, Wealth Management should be fine. So I don't see anything to change that fundamentally unless there's a big sell-off in the markets and people go into, you know, cold freeze. It's not impossible, but unlikely.
So if you figure we lose some income on the interest rates coming down, but we'll make it up on volume and we continue to make it up on double-digit growth and non-interest income, that makes us reasonably well positioned for the next year. So your last question would just be, you know, so what do you do on cost of credit? Like I said, we have enough reserves. So if we really have an outside solution, we can dip into the reserves. Right now, we're not seeing a need to do that either.
Felicia?
Hi, Felicia from The Edge Singapore as well. A few questions more on your digital banks. The first one is, do they pose any challenges in Singapore? And do digital banks pose any challenges in your overseas markets? The second one is, are you attracting CASA in other markets such as India?
And are you attracting new accounts via digibank in India? Third and final question is, how many customers does DBS have on its digibank? And are there plans to roll out more products on your app? And how do you attract new custome rs to digibank?
That's a lot of questions. So...
Sorry .
So on digital banks, I've said that before. I mean, obviously everybody's a threat. Anybody who comes in with a banking proposition is a challenge and a threat, and you've got to be competitively positioned. But in our home market, I think not just us, all the Singapore banks have done enough on the digital front to ensure we are as credible as any digital bank. There is no digital bank out there which has created digital capability or experiences or products or solutions better than we have.
And therefore, we're not finding that anybody's coming and saying, "Oh my God, I'm going to shift because the digital banking is so much better than DBS's." It hasn't happened. So I don't think that's a threat. The real threat really comes from the fact that some new banks, whether it's digital or not, use pricing. So they have... But we've seen already in Hong Kong this thing, and we've seen here as well. Pricing is only for short periods of time. They do tactical promos. They cannot continue to do it continuously. And so you find our experience so far has been that the digital banks tend to compete in very small niche segments of the market. But the broader market, where the large revenue pools and the wallet pools are, you know, you can hold your own against them. And that's what we're seeing. So we're not...
You look at our, you know, quarter after quarter, our growth rates and our income and our results in all our markets just continue to show that we can hold our own. In terms of CASA growth, we're getting CASA growth everywhere, including in Indonesia, India, where we've used digibank. We are getting CASA growth. To be fair, if you just use digital, we found it hard to get CASA. So to get CASA, we've had to go phygital. The fact that we have a branch presence, we have 500 branches, we marry that with the digital capability. And so customers still, we've come to the community, they like to see the branch, they like to see... But then they want to deal on the mobile and they want to deal on the desktop. So based on that, we continue to grow CASA and get CASA inflow everywhere.
But you do need to be phygital. It just cannot be purely digital. We continue to improve our product offerings. So we have a complete suite in all of the markets that we have, which is available on the mobile phone. But again, like everything, we've got to keep improving. So there's some capabilities. For example, we have it on mobile, but we don't have it on the desktop. So we've got to build it back and make sure... You know, when we launched digibank, our original premise was that we will only do mobile. And then we learned over two, three years that that doesn't work. And it doesn't work partly because signal goes, the signal drops, and then you can't do your mobile, so you want to go back to your desktop. So we need to have a desktop backup offering.
But when we built the desktop backup offering, we didn't put all the same functionality. So we've got to go back and keep improving. So on mobile as well, we keep improving the functionality. One of the things that we're working very hard on is adding more and more artificial intelligence and GenAI into our offerings. They've been very constructive. In Singapore, for example, we do 30 million nudges a year using AI. We don't have the same number of nudges in the markets outside India. We're still building the AI capability. We have the capability, the databases to be able to do similar kinds of nudges, as another example. What was your last question?
How do you attract new customers to digibank?
So it's not straightforward. You know, when we tried attracting customers through digital marketing, we found you get adverse customer selection because you get a lot of customers. You know, when we, in our first 18 months in India, we got 3 million customers through marketing, through Facebook, Google, direct-to-customer channels. The problem is that many of these customers are not good quality customers. So you get the eyeball, but you don't know how to monetize that customer. So we changed our strategy, and this goes back to the phygital. So today what we do is we make sure that we leverage the branch presence, the shingle, along with the digital push. And so now we get much better quality customers when we do that. But again, you need to marry both the physical and the digital.
Just to follow up, the 500 branches is global, is it? Or in...
No, that's in India.
India alone. Okay. Thank you.
H ow many branches do you have in Indonesia then?
Indonesia, we have about 50 branches, if I remember.
Okay. Thank you.
I have a question on CET1 ratio, which is still quite elevated. I mean, can you share on capital returns plan, any share buyback plans, or any buyback still on your mind?
Yeah. So, you know, I mean, first of all, as Sok Hui pointed out, we've been quite generous in our capital and our dividend distribution already. You know, 32% up, you said, year-over-year or something. So our dividend yield is great. That's 6.6%. I saw you raise your eyebrows when she said that. So it is a good dividend yield. Now, having said that, yes, it's still true that our actual capital adequacy is still very high.
You know, we have some fairly well-developed plans now in respect to how to return capital. But this is one of the things that, you know, today is Su Shan's first day on the job. I think it's only fair that when it comes to return of capital and capital management, she gets an opportunity to look at it and weigh in. So...
So you won't do a Noel Quinn?
Huh?
You won't do a Noel...
What did Noel Quinn do?
[Trade India] and share buyback.
So I've never said what we will do, won't do. We won't do it today.
Question from LCT Cultural [Union].
I don't know if you can hear me already. Sorry. Yeah, I just wanted to ask, it's good to hear that you have very strong performance and the wealth business is very good. Just wonder if you can share with us something about, you know, like MES is asking for, I mean, has been asking for like, you know, anti-money laundering safeguards. So I just wonder, how do you, can you give us a sense of how you balance between the need for caution due to these requirements and, you know, staying attractive to your, you know, all the, your clients?
Yeah. You know, the first of all, I want to start with big things. There are trillions of dollars of money flow around the world, right? And so you have to start with the assumption you'll never get zero anti-money laundering. I say it's like crime. If you really thought you could get zero crime, you wouldn't hire a police force in any country.
But no matter how good a country is, you still have police and you still have courts and you still have judges because people still commit crimes. And so money laundering is no different from that. You will still have people who try to commit crimes and some people will get away with it. So you should start with that understanding. However, within that, we've been very, very focused on trying to make sure that we are very, very diligent on the quality of the money that comes in, the people that come in. And, in addition to checks, you know, manual checks, we increasingly are using data and artificial intelligence. So we use data to scroll all of the universes to see if there's somebody got a record, is the name picking up anywhere, does somebody look at this thing?
And then we look at the nature of the transactions that flow through. And then we do post-transaction surveillance. What money flows through an account? Does it go up? Does it go down? In truth, we focus a bulk of this on large value clients, the private bank, which is the big money, right? And so we're much more buttoned up over there. In low value clients, you know, we have 18 million customers. So if somebody opens a credit card account, opens a small account, you can't do the same degree of diligence, at least in the past. And if you look at the last Fujian case, many of them opened accounts in the retail bank. They're small value accounts. So sometimes those kinds of accounts slip through the system.
What we are trying to do is use the same data and AI to tighten up that process as well, even in the larger market. That's the only way it can be done. Physically, you can't, you'll have to require hundreds of thousands of people to look at every transaction. So you have to rely on technology and you have to rely on increasingly AI to pick up these behavior patterns so you can take them, block them down. So we continue to do that. We continue to refine the rules. We continue to tighten. We continue to put AI so that you can get the balance right. We continue to be an attractive wealth center, but keep out the bad guys, as far as possible.
Is there a final question? Okay. If not, then thank you, everyone.
Thank you. Thanks for joining us.