Good morning, everybody, and a warm welcome to Vontobel's presentation of the annual results 2022. I'm here together with our chief financial officer, Thomas Heinzl. Welcome. We do this now for the first time also based on the feedback that we got from you, basically by trying a little bit more of an interactive experience for all of you guys. Monitoring our internal WebEx call , then he had to intervene with the global cloud back-up, so that's good things. Having covered 2022, let me share with you first couple of highlights and an update on strategy. I will ask Thomas to go through the detailed numbers, and then I will be back with the outlook, and then obviously after that, Thomas and I will be most happy to take your questions.
2022 was a challenging year for a pure play buy-side investment firm. However, fully consistent with our business model, we have delivered a satisfactory set of numbers. On top of that, we have demonstrated disciplined execution, both in achieving milestones and implementing key steps towards our Lighthouse journey, as well as in protecting our conservative risk appetite and navigating challenging years in terms of volatility and risks. Another proof point for our risk awareness also in the long-term perspective of our firm. Let's look into the solid financial performance. Very strong, outstanding wealth management results.
5.6% annualized growth, industry-leading organic growth, third year in a row, a little bit more color from my side, highly diversified across quarters, highly diversified across the different business areas, coming from the focus markets in the developed world that we focus on and coming in with very high quality as discretionary or advisory mandates. Posting, on top, rock-solid margins. Digital Investing clients, we are obviously exposed to investor sentiment, and investor sentiment was low in 2022, has normalized to the trajectory we saw before the extraordinary year of 2021. On the asset management side, in line with the industry headwinds, as a high- conviction active asset managers, our outflows were in line with what other similar industry players saw.
As we have announced last year, we have taken measured, sensible steps to protect our strategic flexibility and to make sure that we will be in a position of strength to seize the opportunities that this kind of environment will undoubtedly create. We have reported on the Investor Day against the delivery, against the business plan 2020-2022. We delivered on all key steps, including organic and inorganic growth. We have also announced the business plan for 2023 and 2024, which will be based on capitalizing on our strengths. One of our strengths is very clearly our balance sheet and our capital position. Despite the fact that we have digested the full SFA acquisition, our CET1 ratio increased to 16.7.
The capital position and the constructive outlook into the future of our business model brings the board to proposing a stable dividend of CHF 3 to the AGM. Let's look at a couple of numbers in more detail. Assets under management, we are facing the worst drawdown in global capital markets, down by 16% to CHF 204 billion. Net new money aggregated as the sum of outstanding flows in wealth management and within industry position. Asset management flows at -2.1%. Operating income stands at CHF 1.285 billion. Pre-tax at CHF 267 million. Group net profit at CHF 230 million. Return on equity, double-digit, 11.2%. Dividend as proposed to the AGM and as a commitment to the future at CHF 3. How do these numbers stack up in the long-term comparison?
These numbers actually still are a top 10 result in the history of Vontobel, and given the environment we had faced, another proof point for the key drivers of our long-term value creation. We think and act long term. We are focused on our key strengths. We deploy a conservative risk profile, as we have shown again in a world of war and huge volatility in 2022. We have acted with foresight and ahead of the curve, and we are disciplined in our execution. The backdrop that we faced in this year, and you see here the yearly returns from a 50/50 portfolio, 50% U.S. stocks, 50% U.S. Treasury as a proxy for global capital markets, the worst drawdown since the thirties of the last century. Not only the worst drawdown, also one of the fastest.
As a pure play investment firm, we were faced with a very fast walkout of revenues during 2022. How did we navigate against this backdrop from an investment perspective? We think we navigate reasonably well. We are confident that the consistency and the quality of our track records and our investment styles give us the opportunity now to move confidently in the new year. As we have seen now stabilization towards end of last year and a highly increased engagement level from clients going forward, and especially on the fixed income side, we expect to turn into positive territory in the flow side very fast. Quality of investment performance is robust and consistent with what we have promised to our clients as our business results are consistent with our strategy and our positioning.
This quality of our investment pledge promise also underpins our next step in the business plan towards our Lighthouse. We face different trends in the changing world. Inflation, central bank hiking. We expect continued growth in private markets. We are respectful about the geopolitical environment. We expect clients to continue to expect an even more digital hybrid client experience. We need to answer to these trends and to these changes in the environment with a strategy that is based on our strength. This is what we have shared with you in detail on the Investor Day, our four priorities to 2024, delivering future-proof investment solutions, navigating the new regimes, providing access to our clients to private markets, which we will execute in 2023. Delivering best-in-class private client experience.
We start from a very strong basis of strength in our private client business, and we will continue to personalize and to further enhance our service models and offer more flexibility to our clients. Making further progress in the U.S., we consumed the acquisition of SFA. All our products from London and from Zurich are available to U.S. investors. We have won the first institutional mandate. We have everything in stock that we need in order to make further progress in the U.S. The environment obviously asks for an enhanced focus on scaling value creation on the capital efficiency side, but also on operational excellence. What we implement across all priorities and we as a firm is our commitment to sustainability. We have been early movers in this field. We have been implementing sustainable investment strategy since the nineties.
Together with the board, we have sharpened our commitments to the area of sustainability. We label this in six commitments. The first three is our homework. We address the E with a path to net zero, the S with our commitment to our employees and team members in terms of diversity and inclusion, and the G with stakeholders like you to provide you all the transparency in order to challenge and engage with us. The next three, as an investment firm, we pledge to advise our private clients on the opportunities and challenges of ESG investing while respecting their own futures and their own definitions of their destinies. As a discretionary manager in our investment solutions, we pledge to incorporate ESG considerations into our active decisions.
As a firm rooted in Switzerland, we are aware that we operate on a license granted by society, we will commit to the community engagement that is respectable in this context. This was it from my side with an update on strategy, where we are. I now hand back to Thomas, our chief financial officer, for the detailed results, and then I will be back with the outlook. Thomas, please.
Thank you very much. I will now provide the update, the details on the financials. Before we start, I would like to remind you that we are comparing all the numbers to a record year. I mean, while we said it last year, memories are generally short. 2021 was the best year we have ever had. 2022 was a challenging year for investors and the investment industry. With rising inflation and interest rates, declining markets, the war in the Ukraine, and increasing geopolitical tensions general. Vontobel also felt the impact of this. That results in a revenue decline to CHF 1.285 billion or 16% versus the record 2021.
Don't forget, key drivers of our business model are financial markets investor and investor sentiment, both of which have suffered significantly throughout the year. We have reduced our cost by 5%, but the revenue decline outpaced the cost reduction, which led to a decline in our group net profit to CHF 230 million after a record CHF 383 million last year. Cost-income ratio increased to 78%. The ROE eased up to 11.2%. Let's dive into the individual drivers. Assets under management. What you can see, assets under management, we had a steep decline of 16%, being almost back to the 2019 levels. The root cause of the decline is clearly visible. The market development explains 15% of that decline. Net new money contributed negative 2%, FX a bit more than 1%.
In general, FX wasn't a big driver in this year, and SFA increased the assets under management through the CHF 6.2 billion acquisition to CHF 204.4 billion. Moving into assets under management and net new money by the client unit. Assets under management in asset management declined by 25%, which was driven by market development and outflows, as we have said earlier. Wealth management lost 3% to CHF 93 million, including the CHF 6.2 million AUM from SFA. Without SFA, it would be roughly a 10% decline. Net new money in wealth management, let me start with wealth management, was outstanding.
Is now joining.
At 5.7% and more than the absolute number, the CHF 5.4 billion. We are very happy about the fact that the inflows were of very high quality. They were mostly stemming from developed countries. A high share of inflows went into the mandate, and the inflows were very consistent across all the regions and across all the quarters. Net new money in asset management has experienced significant outflows of 7.4%. Here, the main contributor were clearly the equity boutiques. In particular, Quality Growth had substantial outflows. There was also some, call it, bad luck at work. TwentyFour Asset Management lost CHF 2.5 billion through the LDI situation in the UK end of September. Outflows that had, in principle, nothing to do with TwentyFour.
Here we are expecting a significant part of these outflows to come back over the course of the year. The good news overall here is that we saw a slowdown of the outflows into the year-end and a flat January. Operating income. Trading results decreased by 31% to CHF 338 million. Notable here is that the second half was even more difficult than the first half. In the second half, the revenues basically normalized to 2019 levels or to the 2019 trend. However, the last days seem to indicate that we have found the bottom here. Net fee and commission income is reduced by 15%, which is pretty much in line with the AUM reduction. Net interest income, as expected, has developed well.
The growth was 65% year-over-year, or if you look at it half-year over half-year, in the second half year, net interest income has more than doubled. The key driver was obviously the balance sheet business, deposits and loans. On the deposits, we have mostly Swiss francs, followed by U.S. dollar and euros, where we saw a substantial effect of interest rates rise only after September, kicking into our P&L. Looking through the operating income by client unit reflects the picture from before. Asset management is down to CHF 475 million. Wealth management has remained resilient, mainly through the acquisition of SFA, and Digital Investing has reduced by 40%. Now let's take a look into the margins. I start with the right-hand side with wealth management because here is relatively obvious what happened.
What you can see is the recurring commission income has remained stable. The commission income, which is non-recurring or trading driven, has been reduced and the gap has been filled by net interest income. Our net interest income has more than compensated the reduction in the transaction-based margin decline. On asset management, our margin reduced by 5 basis points to 37 basis points from 42 last year. This number is of course below our long-term aspiration of 40 basis points. What happened? The key drivers of the revenue of the reduction are a change in product mix and net new money. That's the number 1, and that explains roughly 3 basis points. Performance fees have vanished over the course of the year. They would explain another basis point in reduction.
Finally, there are some technical items which are the 3rd, the 5th basis point, the 3rd point and the 5th basis point of the reduction, which explain another 1 basis point, half of which would be one-off. In essence, in asset management, the margins reflect outflows from higher risk and higher margin products, both in the equity and in the debt area, for example, emerging markets, and inflows to the lower margin multi-asset base. Looking at the operating expenses, we have reduced our operating expenses by 5% to CHF 1.018 billion, so cost has come down 5% overall. Most reduction is coming from personnel costs, which were down 11%, and we had a slight increase in the general expenses. That was driven basically by normalization of travel and entertainment.
With COVID falling away, of course, travel picked up again, and some increases in non-discretionary IT spending, such as data costs, licenses and so on. The Cost-income ratio snapped back above the 78%, which is significantly our above our target. We are fully committed to that target and to getting the Cost-income ratio back to 72%. It will be very difficult to pull that off in the next year. We work on various measures. We have already put measures in place in Q1, which was basically reduction of variable compensation, a freeze of headcount growth, and some IT budget adjustments. Those have delivered the CHF 50 million reduction or roughly 5% of the cost base.
Additional measures of CHF 65 million gross exit rate, which we have announced after Q3, will be put in place in this month, which is also slightly above 6% cost reduction. Those are basically mostly coming from standard measures, which I would call, you know, standard house cleaning, which is reviewing the external spend. Productivity increases by improving our processes and by improving our setup. The last one is strictly focused on the strategy and the alignment of our business portfolio. That's, for example, a reason why we have reduced our why we have run down or shut down our business wealth management business in Hong Kong. Do not forget, we're not only working on cost, of course. No one ever shrunk to greatness.
What we are focusing on is a significant focus on revenues in areas, in particular where we're under-invested, where we have lost assets, and where we can regain revenues without additional investments. What I wanted to mention here as well, of course, the second round of cost reduction, CHF 65 million, will have some costs to achieve because we will have to do some investments in order to realize those cost gains. Moving on to capital. First and foremost, our balance sheet and our capital position is very strong. Total capital ratio and CET1 ratio are all up, and they're significantly above the regulatory and the internal requirements. CET1 capital generation overall was 2.1 percentage points, including all the adjustments for treasury valuations in the OCI and everything included.
The impact of the SFA transaction was roughly 1.8 percentage points, and then another 0.2 percentage points were added by the cyclical capital buffer for mortgages, which the SNB has introduced for all Swiss banks as of end of September. Overall, the risk-weighted assets were down CHF 400 million. CHF 100 were added from the SFA integration. As we have presented in 2020, we have now implemented a substantial part of our capital light approach and significantly reduced our risk-weighted assets from 2020, end of 2020, to now by 15%. While we're going to continue to optimize our balance sheet, we expect our RWA to develop more in line with the business development in the future. On the dividends, the chart generally speaks for itself. There's two important remarks that I would like to make.
Even in a difficult year with an unprecedented speed of market decline, we generated a positive economic value, we generated shareholder value. As a consequence of the strong capital generation, the BoD proposes a constant dividend to the AGM of CHF 3, despite that being a very high payout ratio of 73%. If you look at what you see here, this means we had 11 years of stable or rising dividends, we paid out more than CHF 1.5 billion to our shareholders, all at the same time, while increasing our shareholder equity from CHF 1.6 billion-CHF 2 billion. Summarizing up the KPIs and the targets, there's no denying that 2020 was a difficult year for Vontobel, I would like to repeat 3 key messages.
First, don't forget all the comparisons are against 2021, which was a record year, the best year for Vontobel we ever had. Second, we've taken measures to bring our cost-income ratio and with it, other P&L and other productivity KPIs back towards our long-term target of 72%. Finally, our capital position remains very strong and hence we will propose a constant dividend of CHF 3 to the AGM. That's all from my side. I hand over to Zeno for the final remarks.
Thank you very much. Quick recap. We have delivered a set of numbers that is in line with our positioning and with a very difficult market environment for a pure-play buy-side only investment firm. We have done everything. We have taken all the decisions required to protect our strategic flexibility and to protect our ability to harvest the opportunities that may arise in this kind of environment. Everything that has happened in the world only confirms our positioning as a pure-play investment firm with a focus on developed markets with a client-centric and investment-led approach. Our capital strength gives us the backbone to profit from opportunities in this environment. How have we started in the new year, and what will we focus on in H1 2023?
Our key target is to work with our clients on the opportunities that this changed investment environment brings to the table. What we see is investors are coming back to the table. We see an increase in client interaction. We see an increase in client sentiment, and our pipelines, especially also on the institutional and wholesale side, are building up. This confirms what we have seen already in December with a flattening out of flows and a neutral start into the new year from where we are confident that we will be able to build going forward. The rest of the start into the new year on the revenue side and on investor activity was constructive as well. We will implement the cost measures as we do this in order to protect the long-term focus and the long-term flexibility.
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We will execute on the four strategic priorities, bringing future-proof investment solutions with access to private markets in 2023 for our clients with a further improved private client experience, progress in the U.S., and a commitment to the scalability of our business model. With that, we're at the end of what we wanted to bring across. We're very happy and looking forward to taking your questions now. You can unmute yourself and just ask a question. You can use the chat module, or I'm just informed you have to raise your hand in Teams by clicking on the hand icon to ask questions orally, or you can use the chat functions. We see both of them. We have, as a start, the question from Daniel Regli from Credit Suisse.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I hope you can hear me well. I've four questions to be concrete, or five even, two on asset management. First, I would want to hear what makes you optimistic that you will be able to turn the flow picture in asset management soon. Second, on your gross margin ambition of 40 basis points, can you please remind me how much of this do you expect to come from performance fees, or put differently, what part is the management fee margin you are expecting?
On Digital Investing, with the Q3 update you said that you are back to 2019 levels in Digital Investing, which would have meant about CHF 80 million for H2, now your actual result was even below this. Can you talk about what happened in the last three months of the year? In particular, what are your expectations going forward from Digital Investing? One question on the balance sheet. Your balance sheet seems to have shrunk a bit, particularly, the deposits have come lower, so has the cash position. This was or I'm a bit surprised by this given, you know, higher interest rates. I would have expected clients moving more into the deposits rather than out of deposits.
Can you talk about these moves and what this means for your NNI guidance? Maybe I'll stop here and come back later with more questions.
Yes. Thank you very much. I will take the asset management question, then Thomas will cover DI and also the balance sheet and NNI guidance. Does that work? Flows, you know, actually one of the key components or the key changes is that fixed income is back. Fixed income was battered last year. Obviously, with the most significant drawdown in fixed income markets probably all of us have seen. On top, that very specific external event that Thomas has mentioned with the LDI situation after the debacle of the mini budget in the UK, which hit us very specifically on fixed income flows.
What we see now going forward that actually now investment-grade portfolios with a four-year duration have an implied yield of 8%–9%. What we see is that global investors look at their asset allocation. Global investors can achieve significant targets that they have, again, with fixed income investing. Our offering has always been geared more to the upside on the yield side. We are, in many of our products, we are a spread house, we are credit risk takers, and we do that very well. Clients know us for that. They respect us for that. I see client engagement flow, and I see a significant buildup of the pipeline. That's 1 point. Other point is, as you know, on the equity side, we have significant capabilities on the emerging market side.
After decades of difficult relative performance of emerging markets with developed markets, there is talk in the industry of renewed interest in that. Also there, after having been battered for our quality focus, so many of the strategies show an improved profile in terms of risk reward. That's another possible source. The third possible source is, you know, what...
What we have again done in 2022, we remained true to our convictions, which means that we stuck to our investment styles and in our to our investment convictions. Long-term institutional investors appreciate that. We also see an increased dialogue on the very institutional side of the business. We believe in an environment where interest rates and inflation will be in a relative situation that clients need to continue to invest in order to grow the real value of their portfolio. This is the overall picture, we have a constructive outlook into the new year. In terms of the 40 basis point ambition, we stick to that. You can check our history way back, performance fee was never significantly above 1% and 1 basis point.
We have not changed the pricing of our products. Performance is ±1 basis point on a yearly basis. We expect to achieve the targets with the business mix and management fee. Good. On Digital Investing, yes, it is a bit, Q4 was a little bit below. Don't forget that was basically driven by what happened in December. The whole year was a grind down for all of the retail investors. We've discussed this a lot. Last year was basically driven by the retail investor. What happened is the market was grinding down step by step. Retail investors, right, they went in, and then they lost money again. They went out. They went in again. As soon as the market recovered, lost money, went out again.
We believe there was a certain fatigue into December and into the end of the year. What we see already now is the 2019 guidance is not bad because in January we have seen a slight recovery again to the levels where we would expect it. I would assign this to a dip in the December and to a fatigue of investors, particular retail investors, trading with Digital Investing. On the balance sheet, let me start with the client deposit. Yes, the balance sheet shrunk because the deposit shrunk. It's a very simple reason for this. We have decided to, instead of increasing the pricing on, in generally on the deposits, we have decided to go for some other measures.
We have put in place some term deposits, what you can also see, we have done some private placements because that is cheaper capital, right? From the position. You see private placements went up from CHF 450 to almost CHF 1 billion, to a bit more than CHF 1 billion because... That was driven by the AT1 plus the private placement. That is cheaper money for us to refinance the asset side for the time being. As part of optimization, that's what we did. We are now looking into this and see how we strongly push term deposits to keep clients on. There is a bit of pressure on the margin of the deposits. The last question I think was about the cash position.
What you can find here is it moved from the cash to financial instruments at fair value, which basically means we deployed cash as soon as we had a positive interest rate environment again. That's, that's it.
I think his last question was on NII guidance.
The NII guidance, I would look into the second half by and large. That is something where we would expect that we can keep it. There were some extraordinary things in the second half. I would look into the second half as a rough guidance.
Okay. Thank you, Thomas. Daniel, does that answer your questions?
Can I maybe follow up with one quick follow-up on the Digital Investing? You talked about that January coming back to levels where you would expect it. What is the levels you would expect? Are we back to 2019 levels, or do you expect even beyond 2019 levels?
For the time we expect 2019, but January is always a good month, so it's a bit difficult to figure out. We need to see a little bit more into the year what is happening. Because January is always a good month but the month is roughly in line what we would have expected if you assume... let me not say 2019 level, but the trend that continued until 2019. We had a slightly rising trend, what happened, 2020 and 2021 were extraordinary years. Now we're back onto that trend line.
Okay, very clear. Thanks a lot.
Perfect. We move on to Samarth Agrawal from Citi, please.
I hope you're able to hear me.
Yes, we are.
Awesome. I have several questions, I think 5 currently, and happy to ask more, I mean, if we get time. First one is on wealth management. I mean, a small follow-up. Can you confirm run rate NII margin there? The main question is, I mean, what % of your deposits are in call and time deposits? I mean, what level of switching do you anticipate if rates increase by, say, another 50 basis points? That's the first question. My second question is on, basically your fee and commission side. Basically, the recurring margin fell again this time, right? I mean, we are seeing several peers raising their target for recurring fee margins. Your mandate penetration is quite high already.
I mean, can you do more on pricing and mix, or should we expect a gradual decline in recurring fee margins here? Third is on asset management flows. With gaining theme around China reopening, cross asset managers, do you see that clients are becoming more active this year? How are your clients positioned currently to themes on China reopening and in general about their sentiment? Fourth is on pipeline. I mean, you mentioned that fixed income is back. I mean, barring fixed income, performance looks weak in equities and multi-assets. I mean, with only less than 50% of equity funds in top two quartiles. I mean, what gives you confidence about a better picture in this year? Last one is on M&A. Your balance sheet is solid.
You earlier, you were pretty constructive on consolidation opportunities. I mean, just want to understand what are you seeing in the market currently and what is the visibility, and your ability to deploy surplus capital? Yeah, that's all. Thank you.
Good. A fair set of questions. I will start with asset management flows pipeline and quickly comment on M&A. Then I would ask Thomas to take the wealth management run rate and the recurring fee commission.
Mm-hmm.
China reopening—yes, a big topic. I would say it's probably also globally in the macro sphere, before the tragic events of the last couple of days, the positive surprise this year that it was not only the reopening of COVID, but actually also a strong messaging around a certain U-turn on tech regulation, gaming, things like that, and even a certain U-turn about in the language with the dialogue with Western parties, especially the US. We see investors reentering a dialogue on China. We have actually all the product capabilities available. We run standalone China equity products. We run emerging market global with China included, and we run emerging market excluded of China.
We have all the product capabilities available, all of them very consistent coming from the same investment processes, either Quality Growth or TwentyFour. We put that disposition at the decision of our clients. What we see currently is actually a strong positive sentiment on the investor side around the China question. Pipeline. We do three things. One-third fixed income, one-third multi-asset class, one-third equity. What we see on... Fixed income, I already commented, I can only confirm that. Multi-asset class, a significant part of our business is in mandate and not in the funds that we see, and our mandate business is in very strong shape. That's one of the reasons.
On the equity side, we have become very institutional in our deployment, and institutions look very much into style consistency, and we see a lot of support there from institutional clients. We have a number of yet very small but very promising fund products on the thematic and on the impact side that do not yet change the numbers on the aggregate level, but where we see a strong potential to improve the picture going forward. That's on the pipeline. On M&A, we have been, I would say, very consistent over the last 10, 12 years in executing on M&A. We have also clear targets, what we want to do on the M&A side.
For example, what we have done with SFA is fully consistent, reinvesting, buying additional volumes on markets and on capabilities that we have. It's like what Thomas has said on where do we focus on the revenue side. We focus on the revenue side where we are under-asseted relative to our capabilities. The platform we have built can do much more. We would also, if possible, underpin this with acquisitions. Large scale cost-driven consolidation transactions in Switzerland, we're less optimistic that there is a lot of that left in the marketplace that would fit our needs for quality, our needs for relative size, our needs for coherence in culture, our needs for availability. We would rather see books or add-on acquisitions on the wealth management side.
On the investment capability side, we concentrate on thematic impact and/or private markets. On the private market side, we are obviously aware of the different pricing characteristics of this asset class, and we would be very committed to protecting the interests of our shareholders. There are, there is a lot of, how shall I say, there is a lot of movement in this market. Is this helpful for the first three questions? I hand over to Thomas.
Let me take the first one first.
Mm-hmm.
Our time deposit, the share of time deposit is very small. It's a single-digit number. What we have been observing is for an interest rate hike of 50 basis points, we see almost no movement. As soon as we're exceeding the 50 basis points, what we then see is a set of clients changing. This, however, is three months. Almost all the moves happen in the first three months, and then it's a little bit tricky here and there. What that means is basically, we are not expecting huge movements out of the past. We will see what happens to the interest rates over the course of this year. As I said, our guidance is I would stick with the second half of the year, right?
That embraces all of these things and all of our expectations and how we look into, how we look into this. Again, we do not have super highly sensitive clients, which for each basis points they're trading left and right. That is not what we're seeing on our books. As for the second question, the pricing and the recurring fees. Yes, the recurring fee has gone down one basis point. First of all, one basis point is always difficult, whether that's a trend or a rounding error. The second thing, I would say is this is a good basis point because basically it shows that we are successful in our ultra-high business and that we are getting larger and larger mandates into our organization. Of course, the pricing is then a bit compressed, but that's not a pricing issue.
That's more an issue of size and client relationship and client- relationship pricing. Having said that, we will look into another round of pricing. What we are working on is a detailed client and product calculation, which is basically a P&L for every client and product, and we would assume to get some additional insights for pricing or some leads for pricing out of this as we put this in force.
Good. Thanks.
May I ask just one follow-up question here?
Sure.
I mean, that's on RM hiring, which increased by 14 relationship managers. I mean, how much of this is SFA and what is the underlying trend here?
That is... The RM hiring is in this year was mostly SFA, right? We still had a couple of changes where we did change out some of the relationship managers. You can assume that this number, however, is going to continue slightly higher, though. The question is for RM hiring, if I may explain this a little bit, we have a very structured process. We hire RMs, they're on a business case for 3 years. Pay and everything depends on this business case and on the delivery of this business case. After year 1, after year 2, and after year 3, we do a review, right? About the assets that have been brought and whether the business case also in revenues has been fulfilled. This is a very structured project.
We are expecting to continue hiring new relationship manager. If I may give another statistic, this year, as in 2022, roughly 50% of the net new money has been coming from new relationship managers. This engine is working very well for us. This is also we hire as fast as we can because the trick or the secret sauce of the whole thing is we cannot just go out and hire random people from everywhere because we need to find people that we strictly believe function within our culture and within our organization. That's the point that is limiting the relationship managers. That is how we are doing the hiring. It was 15 last year, but that is of course a net figure that you see, and the gross figures are normally quite different.
Thank you very much, Rudolf.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's very important to us we understand and we execute on reliable and constant organic growth on our RM side. It's very important that we run our firm not as a platform for different styles of working with private clients. You know, we insist on the coherence of our platform and in our offering. We are very carefully vetting the RMs and the needs of their clients to our capability to deliver. When you look through the years, you know, I would say the development of RM numbers and the development of assets under management and of net new money has been very, very consistent, and you can expect this to continue into the future.
Very clear.
Then-
Thank you very much.
Yeah. We will move on to Olga Scheer from Handelsblatt. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you for taking my question. I would like to come back quickly on the outflows and asset managements, just to be sure that I understood that correctly. If I may sum up, the problem was UK, you were victim of the turmoil on the market in the gilts crisis due to the politics from Liz Truss, the Prime Minister, and therefore your Boutique TwentyFour Asset Management has a lot of asset outflows. Is that correct? Can you a little bit elaborate on that and yeah, because last year was normally the year of the active managers because all the passive funds went down and some active managers did quite well. Firsthand I was quite astonished to see that number.
Just that, therefore, I would like to have some more explanation on this. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Yes, we can confirm that. That was around, Thomas, CHF 2.5 billion around, so 25% of the overall net outflows were coming from, in tennis it would be, you know, I mean it's an external event. With this important to say, you know, this was we could fulfill all the liquidity promises to our clients. We worked through that external shock very constructively with our clients, and we strongly believe that that has further strengthened our reputation and our relationship with these clients, going forward. What we saw as an overall firm is that people were just de-risking in many instances last years and shifting their asset class.
Not many people had the guts to stick with higher spread and longer duration fixed income products last year as the drawdown of the overall market was so significant, similar on the equity side where we did not see a lot of new allocations. What was missing last year, as Thomas has already outlined, is the lack of gross inflows on the fixed income side because there was no additional new risk-taking. As we expect that now hiking is more or less predictable or in a range where people have got accustomed to it, from here on, people will again look at what the promised implied yield of fixed income is, will come back to the market.
That's our current assumption of that. Are there any other?
So-
Yeah.
2.5 from TwentyFour Asset Management . That's the number.
Yes.
Okay. Thank you.
Yeah. Are there any other questions in the room, ladies and gentlemen? Please, raise your hand or, just go to the chat. We see both of it. We go back to Daniel from Credit Suisse, who has another one.
Yeah. Hello. Sorry. I'm coming back to your NNI guidance. First, I remember you talking about this CHF 7 million, CHF 70 million additional NNI from a 100 basis point shift, just to be clear. Basically, this is what we have seen in H2, and you don't expect more NNI from the current rate situation, and neither also from further rate hikes going forward. Quickly on the tax rate, I just noted the tax rate was quite a bit lower in H2, 2022. Was there any particular items included there? Has this an impact on your forward guidance for the tax rate?
Last but not least, quickly on the structured- products business, what are your general views for the structured- products business, in particular the yield enhancement products in this higher yield environment? Will this product continue to generate demand, or is it kind of, do you see a move back to traditional interest rate instruments?
Look on the, on the why is our interest rate guidance not more aggressive? The answer is relatively simple. Because we assume, as I said earlier, with the moves of the client, we have a model that assumes that we will see more switching into out of the deposits, sight deposits, more into term deposits or other ways of how you can get higher interest rates, particularly in the US dollar, right? We're careful. Let's say higher increase in interest rates, they might have a bit of upside, but the way we look at it, we try to be very careful, and we assume more switching into lower margin products. That's the number one reason why we would stay basically with this guidance.
Secondly, on the tax rate, that is relatively simple. The tax rate is mostly driven by the Swiss Bank. The Swiss Bank is reporting the tax rate is coming. There's various elements to this. It is under FINMA reporting, and there, all the losses that you take on the treasury book, right? When interest rates rise, you have to do some write-down. That is non-taxable income. On the
Okay. Very clear. Thanks a lot.
Good. That was a fair set of questions that you put us through. We appreciate this. And all these people, if there is any remaining questions from Citi or from whoever, you know, our Investor Relations people are here to help. Just link up with them, and we can also further deep dive. We're happy to do that. If there is no other urgent questions, we would like to thank you for your time and your interest in Vontobel, and we wish you a successful day.
You are now exiting.
Thank you. Thank you very much.