KGI Financial Holding Co., Ltd. (TPE:2883)
Taiwan flag Taiwan · Delayed Price · Currency is TWD
36.75
-0.55 (-1.47%)
Sep 9, 2026, 1:30 PM CST
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Earnings Call: Q1 2024

May 28, 2024

Speaker 1

Dear investors and friends on the media, welcome to the 1Q 2024 investor conference call. In today's call, we will have our management team and financial team to talk about the strategy and financial overview. We will also talk about KGI Life's embedded value in the next session and the various subsidiaries. In the Q&A session, you will be having the time to talk to our individual presidents. Now I hand over the floor to Paul, our Chief Executive Officer.

Paul Yang
CEO, KGI Financial Holding Co

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the 1Q 2024 investor call. I would like to tell you that, starting from the next quarter, we'll resume our in-person investors meeting after every half and whole year results are available. While we'll still host an online call like this after Q1 and Q3 results, I look forward to seeing you in person in our upcoming meetings.

As you know, we have just made a significant leadership transition. Let me start by introducing our new leadership team. As shown in the chart, the team is consisted with new talents, existing talents, and returning talents. We're very happy to welcome Vice Chairman Shen Tong-jin in joining our team. Chairman Shen formerly served several ministry-level posts. He has deep experience in Taiwan's key industries and unparalleled network of corporate executives, industry leaders, and technology innovators.

I think I can speak for the team that we're fortunate to have him leading us for years to come. Next is CDIB's new Executive Vice Chairman, Mr. David Chou. He joined us from Goldman Sachs. He was a partner and co-head of Asia Special Situations. In his new role, he will be directly overseeing our investment activities internationally and in mainland China, where he has more than two decades of hands-on experience.

At KGI Bank, he'll be working with two industry veterans, Wayne Hsu, our bank's president, and Corey Wang, our head of consumer banking and wealth management. Both of them have vast experience working for both Taiwan and international commercial markets. You will hear from Wang later on our new, and may I dare to say, more aggressive business plan.

Last but not least, we're also excited to bring on Winston Yung, our new SEVP at KGI Life. Winston joined us from McKinsey & Co. He was a partner leading the financial services practice. In his new role, he is tasked to further strengthen our agency force to enhance our marketing efforts and develop KGI Life's long-term international expansion plan. As for the existing talents, Melanie Nan has been formally named president of CDIB, which is well-deserved after acting in this role for more than two years.

Under her leadership, CDIB has largely completed its first transformation from a proprietary VC investor into a PE VC fund management company serving financial institutions, corporates, and government agencies. We expect Melanie, together with David, to take CDIB to the next level. You will hear from both of them later.

You also already know Julian Yen, our SEVP at the Holdings, effectively my number two, Jenny Huang, our group Chief Financial Officer, and William Fang, the president of KGI Securities. I don't think they need much introduction. I would just say that we have the full confidence in them to take our franchise from strength to strength. As for the returning talents, Alan Wang and Yu-Ling Kuo are the chief architects for building then China Life from a second-tier insurance company to what KGI Life is today.

In addition, both of them have served at CDF, so they know all the business quite well. Last but not least, we have Andy Lin, Chief Financial Officer at KGI Life. Andy worked with me while I last served the Chief Executive Officer role at CDF and was instrumental in executing many of our key initiatives, including acquisitions. Since most of my team members are returning and existing talents, so we won't be having any transition per se.

We fully expect to hit the ground running. While we are still proud to have a very international team experience-wise, we are all ethnically local, so we can and will be closer to our frontline colleagues and equally important to our clients. On this page, in the previous investor calls, our former Chief Executive Officer, Steve Bertamini, for many, talked a lot about the ABCDE strategy update. Here, I must thank Steve and the team's contribution.

I can see clear improvement in areas like corporate governance, digitization of processes, fintech adoption, and ESG practices. I will continue on the journey Steve started, and the ABCDE is a big part of it. I see ABCDE less a strategic framework or KPIs targets, but rather an intrinsic part of our corporate DNA, and we will continuously optimize them. In terms of accelerate digital, we must continue to adopt new technology, including AI. We're not doing this for the sake of keeping up with our peers, but to deepen our relationship with our clients and enhance client experience. As for becoming the employer of choice, we know that having competitive compensation and benefits are not enough.

We must create and maintain an environment that attracts and promotes the type of people who are willing to take leadership and meet challenges, and dare to initiate and innovate in uncertain conditions, and always put clients' interests as the top priority. As for customer-centric, we need to strive for being One KGI to our customers, including all our products, services, and solutions.

It is an easy concept, but extremely hard to execute given the regulatory constraints and different market practices among insurance, banking, and security sectors. This is a top challenge for us, and my team is working through many details that we believe will move us closer to this goal. I will elaborate driving growth in the next page. In short, we must grow our AUM across our subsidiaries for bank and our side business units.

I will even say that growth is more important than margins in the near term. Lastly, execution excellence. As I mentioned when I introduced the team, we need to get closer to market and clients. We're making some notable changes in how we run our business that will result in a smaller financial holdings or larger subsidiaries.

We want to ensure business decisions can be quickly made at the subsidiary level, and the key business units have the authority to take necessary actions to stay competitive. While we won't be referring to ABCDE as much going forward in our presentation, they will be the major pillar which we continue to shape our corporate culture. This page illustrates our major strategic direction for the next 12 months. I will let the president of each subsidiary to present in detail.

Here, I will highlight only the key objectives for the holdings in our four subsidiaries. For holding, our top priority is to improve balance sheets. We aim to continue to improve our balance sheets in the event that raise additional capital. We will make sure that the new capital is deployed in a creative way. We must manage distributable income carefully to ensure stable dividend policies.

That means the distribution for our shareholders. For KGI Life, we will further develop our direct sales force and deliver products that meet the needs of markets. Given the major shifts in capital markets, we need to invest in additional resources to ensure the investment capability is required. As for KGI Securities, our priority is to fortify leadership positions at home and abroad in developing our wealth management business.

We see very interesting growth opportunities in wealth management, prime brokerage, and futures and options trading in Hong Kong and Singapore. For KGI Bank, our goal is to grow our AUM, including corporate banking, SMB banking, consumer banking, and wealth management. Being the smallest bank among all financial holdings company, it is imperative that we better leverage our larger franchise in insurance and securities. We also recognize that if we want to grow faster than the market, we will need to invest in our people and infrastructure.

While we do our best in controlling our cost, we are prioritizing growth this year. Last, CDIB. For our Taiwan business, we want to continue work with large corporation to expand our fund management business. Our investment focus include technology, healthcare, clean energy, and smart infrastructure. For our overseas business, we want to leverage the strength of Taiwan industries and continue to work the best PE/VC manager in the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific region. Again, thank you for being with us today. Now I will give the floor to our Chief Financial Officer, Jenny.

Jenny Huang
CFO, KGI Financial Holding Co

Thank you, Paul. Next, I will talk about our Q1 financial performance. Please go to page nine. Our 2024 Q1 income is TWD 8.2 billion, up 134% last year. Life securities and bank subsidiary have all seen growth. Our Q1 OCI on realized income has grown by TWD 20 billion, so our equity also grew 11% to TWD 291 billion. Next page. In terms of the profitability of our subs, KGI Life's income is TWD 5.1 billion. We have seen notable growth from the previous year. This is mainly coming from the equity investment and the lower hedging cost.

In terms of policy sales, VNB margin growth 48%, we will continuously push for premium growth. Investment-wise, we have a prudent investment portfolio to maintain our investment gain. The pre-hedging return is 3.45%, up 5 basis points year-on-year. KGI Bank's income is TWD 1.5 billion. More provision is required because of the growth in deposits. The pre-provision net income has grown by 25%.

Our total asset growth has been notable. The personal finance growth is also strong. Wealth management income grew by 56%, and P-Loan grew by 23%. Suyin KGI Consumer Finance also brought some good news. The profit growth is 33%, and the loan portfolio growth is 47%. Next, KGI Securities income is TWD 2.9 billion, up 53% compared to last year. Q1 Taiwan equity stock trading is amounted to TWD 500 billion.

With the 10% of market share of KGI S, we have received great income from brokerage. Wealth management business is increasing as well. Our customer AUM has grown by 30%. Wealth management fee income is up by 65%. CDIB's income is TWD 129 million. This is because of the fluctuation of overseas investment portfolio.

Our Innolux Fund II has completed its first closing in Q1. The AUM fund size has amounted to TWD 2.6 billion, and the total fund commitment is TWD 56 million. We also work with the ITRI on signing an MOU to create a medical healthcare system. Next is on our capitalization. Our double leverage ratio has returned to 120%, meeting the regulatory requirements. Each subsidiary has maintained stable capitalization. We will continuously do so. In terms of capital raise, we will factor in whether or not they will bring in benefits for the shareholders. I'll hand over to KGI Life.

Yu-Ling Kuo
President of KGI Life Insurance, KGI Financial Holding Co

I will talk about KGI Life strategy. First is to strengthen our self-owned channels and boost premium growth. Over the past few years, we continue to expand our self-owned channels, and we have seen some initial results. Now we need to continue to build on top of that. Therefore, we have recruited Winston Yung from McKinsey with his abundant experience in life insurance channels.

Our agency channels percentage will increase from 42% to 60%. This will further increase our CSM. We fulfill customer needs in terms of financial planning, retirement, inheritance, and we will continue to offer diverse product to our customers. Second, for IFRS 17 and ICS. For the transition to the new theme, we will focus on product transition and continue to strengthen our self-owned channels to create long-term value.

We have a dedicated team for the transition, for the regulation already announced by the regulator. We will successfully make the transition. We will continue to participate in related discussions, and we look forward to the localization approach. Next, we need to increase our investment returns. In the past, overseas equity investment, especially alternative investment, is quite small compared to that of the peers.

This has good performance. We will expand and increase the percentage of this investment in order to increase the overall yield. For ALM, we will grasp market opportunity to remain flexible in terms of asset allocation and continue to optimize ALM, increase the percentage of our foreign currency policies in order to lower hedging costs and increase the overall return. Next, I will talk about our performance in the first quarter. On page 15, you can see our premium income.

Our traditional regular paid product account for 58% of FYP. At the same time, we continue to strengthen our agency channel, which contribute 42% of FYP. I have mentioned that our target is 60% in the future. Our premium income will increase quarter by quarter based on our plan. Page 16. We see the result of our product mix optimization.

In Q1, our VNB margin has increased from 34.4% to 48.2%. For investment spread, our CLL was 3.04, and the returns is 3.77. The spread is 73 basis points. For our investment portfolio, we continue to focus on prudent ALM to have stable investment portfolio. Our net worth ratio has increased from 6.7% to 7.2%. The returns of each asset class is listed in this slide for your reference. Next slide.

For investment performance, pre-hedging recurring yield increased by 5 basis points to 3.45%, benefiting from strong USD. The hedging cost has gone down to 0.91, and the FX reserve balance is TWD 13.9 billion. Next slide. I will talk about our embedded value in 2023. First, page 19. Based on market condition, investment strategy, and our expected return on our asset allocation, we made assumptions regarding the return rate for NTD and foreign currency policy.

Overall, the equivalent return rate for EV is 4.24, and the risk discount rate remains at 9.5%. We have also commissioned EY to review our various actuarial assumptions. This is the return curve chart for NTD and foreign currency policies for your reference. Next slide. This is our EV comparison. First, adjusted net worth.

Due to the rebound of equity's unrealized gain and the contribution of profits for the year, the adjusted net worth is TWD 169.5 billion, a 31.3% increase, and the value of in-force is TWD 316 billion, a 3.9% increase. Therefore, our overall EV is TWD 427.7 billion, a 15% increase compared to last year. If converted based on the outstanding shares of CDF, our EV per share is TWD 25.5. From page 22 to 24, we talk about the changes in adjusted net worth, value of in-force, and VNB. They are listed for your reference. Page 25. This is the sensitivity analysis. This is also listed here for your reference. This is all for KGI Life. I would like to pass the floor to the President of KGIB.

Wayne Hsu
President of KGI Bank, KGI Financial Holding Co

I will talk about our business strategy. We will continue to expand our deposit and loan scale. Through the support of CDF, we will continue to expand our customer base. CDF has abundant resources. For example, the policyholder, the equity holder of CDF is greater than the customer base of KGIB. We want to increase our assets to over TWD 1 trillion by 2025. In addition to business growth, we need to allocate reserve.

Although it will affect profit in the short term, when we reach a certain scale, the income brought by cross-sale and fee income will be very considerable. We will squat and then leap, each quarter will be better than the last. For our three main focuses, first, for consumer finance, this is our main and stable profit engine. We will consolidate physical and digital channel, to be customer-centric, so as to increase the stickiness of our customer.

We also want to develop the industry's most efficient online loan procedures. Corporate finance has been our strength. In response to rapid trends of industrial development, we continue to transform and provide differentiated services. In addition to extend our SME business, we also aim to provide comprehensive financial solutions to business owners, allowing SMEs to have one-stop services.

For jumbo business, we continue to deepen our engagement with major domestic groups to actively develop various financing projects for our clients, and target emerging rapidly growing industries such as smart manufacturing, logistics, supply chain financing, and green energy projects. In addition, we have also applied to establish a branch in Hong Kong to provide more comprehensive overseas financial services. Number three, increasing demand deposit. This can reduce the cost of fund and also enhance the stickiness between the bank and customers.

The improvement in fee income, particularly relatively diverse and stable income from wealth management, can effectively support asset growth. We will leverage salary transfer accounts and also security settlement accounts, emphasizing financial management and introducing a variety of new products such as digital deposits, credit cards and so on. Next, I will talk about some financial figures.

Our net income was TWD 3.95 billion, up 16% year-over-year, mainly due to a more than 50% increase in income, especially in wealth management. The fee income grew by 56% compared to the same period last year. Syndicated loans also increased significantly. The spread and NIM are 2.1% and 1.32% respectively, maintaining the same level as last year.

Next slide. For deposit and loans, we will continue to intensify in asset growth, resulting in a 9% annual growth in loan balance. Mortgage increased by 8%, customer loans increased by 17%, mainly from P-Loans, which grew by 23%. Next, we will pass the floor to KGIS.

William Fang
President of KGI Securities, KGI Financial Holding Co

Securities focus. In addition to securing our business status, as our Chief Executive Officer mentioned, we want to continuously push the growth in brokerage and wealth management. Securities firms are facing pressure from the competition in traditional business and the decline in rates. Securities firms are transforming by accelerating development of wealth management business.

KGIS continues to transform its sales force, establish expert teams to provide professional wealth management services. This will improve the quality of service customers. In order to provide the best financial service to the customer to increase the service quality. We also continue to optimize our systems and tools and platform to serve both our customers and is also used to assist our sales force. KGIS continues to strengthen our product line.

In response to the high popularity of ETF in recent years, we pioneered the online subscription of IPO ETFs through trust accounts, allowing customers to seize investment opportunities without having to apply over-the-counter. We also have committed to provide customers with a wealth of diverse services, such as notification for IPO ETF know-how, ETF analysis reports and so on, to help customers make the most suitable investment decisions so that customers can obtain key information at any time through various channels.

For those various channels, we act in line with the trends of younger investors to launch a variety of content on social media platforms, including our YouTube channel, our podcast and LINE communities. At the same time, we also work with Far EasTone Telecommunications LINE Bank to expand our customer acquisition channels.

In addition to collaborating with external resources, we continue to work closely with our life insurance and banking subsidiaries to expand the customer acquisition and our customer base. We have also successfully helped over 1,000 salespersons from KGI Life to obtain and register their licenses, fully leveraging the group resources to achieve synergy. Last, our focus for overseas business will be regional wealth management business development.

We will leverage our successful experience in Taiwan to assist overseas subsidiaries to build product platform, train staff and promote regional research resources. In addition to the established regional product team, currently, we also have professional wealth management teams in Singapore and Hong Kong to provide asset planning services for investors with overseas assets. The next page. This is the net income for the first quarter. It has grown by 57% year-on-year, showing increase in both wealth management and other business.

The next page. The profitability and business performance are both maintaining leading position in the market. The ROAE in Q1 reached the level of 18.9%, not only improved comparing to the same period, but also performing better than our peers. That will be all from KGIS. Next, I'll hand over to Melanie. Please. Chou [Non-English content]

David Chou
Executive Vice Chairman of CDIB, KGI Financial Holding Co

[Non-English content]

This is David Chou. It is an honor to give you an overview of our business. A month after joining CDIB, we thought about our previous establishment in the 1990s. We focused on our proprietary investment, and later we transitioned ourselves to management of assets.

In the last decade, we have launched 14 different funds. In the next 10 years, we not only want to become an asset manager, we also want to provide alternative products, become the provider of these products to the high-net-worth individuals or the listed companies in Taiwan, provide them with comprehensive financial services. This transition is very critical. I believe, we all know evaluating CDIB's performance is difficult, so we also want to grow our AUM. Currently, our AUM is about TWD 65 billion.

We want to double or even triple it, so that we will have a more notable increase or stable income coming from management fee. It sounds easy to tap into overseas markets, but in the long run, if we want to shift ourselves from Taiwan, we need to leverage Taiwan's high-technology industries background, and use the spread model to copy them overseas. We also need to leverage KGI Life's alternative investment overseas or globally. We will be able to seize these investment opportunities to grow our business. Next, I'll hand over to Melanie for more executive details.

Melanie Nan
President of CDIB, KGI Financial Holding Co

Okay. Thank you, David. As previously mentioned, CDIB in 2023, we will enter our second phase transition. This means that although we are a PE/VC company, but just like Paul mentioned, our goal will be more client-related and to be more customized. Our services and product lines can be divided into four areas.

First, our starting business, it's Taiwan PLUS, is our VC and PE investments in Taiwan, including innovation, healthcare, new infrastructure, and Taiwan Strength. For innovation, the size is about TWD 6.5 billion. This will have a first closing of our fund on the cross-border innovation fund working with Japan. Healthcare size is about TWD 6.1 billion.

If we add China's part, it amounts to about TWD 8 billion. New infrastructure is the new funds aligning with the energy transition. We currently have the green energy platform and the computing center, which has also closed their first fundraising. Next is Taiwan Strength. The fund size exceeds TWD 9 billion. Currently, we have closed our Innoracks Fund II. This is focused on smart infrastructure, smart city, and so on. We've also noticed that families and companies in Taiwan want to transition themselves.

In order to help them leap further through investment, we have launched CVC and family office investment service to help them avert risk and position themselves globally. We have an experienced Taiwanese team. This team have already launched PEPC and other portfolio as well as advisory services. We've also launched eight different methods and platform to bridge ourselves with the U.S. markets.

We have more than 90 investment experts locating in Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York, and Tokyo. Our proprietary fund and our investment portfolio are very flexible with CDF backing us and also our 60 years history across different industry and the collaboration and beneficial ecosystem for our investors and customers. We will be able to become the financial hub as the government envisions. Next page is the 2024 business focuses. For the darker blue ones are already passed by the board, including Innoracks and Taiho Energy.

We also have other transitional-related funds. Our 2024 focus will be perfecting our fund portfolio and to increase the raising of capital and increase our AUM and fee. Next page, we can see that Innoracks I, II has closed for the first round and the AUM increased to TWD 56 billion. Our proprietary investment position amounts for TWD 35.7 billion. Next page Lower chart shows our private credit positions, our annual return amounts to 11.6%. This will be our focus of business. Next, I'll hand over to our Chief Financial Officer, Jenny.

Jenny Huang
CFO, KGI Financial Holding Co

Okay. Thank you, Melanie. Now we will enter our QA sessions. We'll first invite analysts and investors to raise their questions, and then later we will invite the media. Please click the button to raise your hand so that we can invite you to speak.

Question. Let's welcome Jamie from JPMorgan. Jamie, you may proceed.

Speaker 9

Thank you. I have a few questions. First, regarding KGIB. Credit cost, the first quarter is around 40 basis points. The guidance was 15-20 basis points. I'm not sure, how do we look at the gap? Do we need to revise the annual guidance upward? If you look at the first quarter loan growth, it's been targeted, was pretty much the same. I'm not sure how to look at credit cost. Are there any special case in the first quarter?

Second, for CDIB, in the slide, it mentioned the profit decreased because of overseas investment portfolio. Can you point out it was affected by which one? The stock market in the first quarter across the world performed quite well, so I want to know what's the difference. Next two questions are related to KGI Life.

For VNB margin, we see a good improvement. How about CSM? Is the improvement as positive as VNB? For midterm, we want agencies contribution to 16%. This kind of structural improvement for our annual CSM. Our annual target, what's our CSM target for the following years? Second, the new FX reserve. Are you applying for the new scheme? If so, how will it affect our hedging strategy?

The other two questions are regarding EV. President Kuo mentioned the equivalent return is 4.24%. If the curve, what's the base this year? If we look at EV and VNB changes, the returns for EV is negatively impacted while EV is positively impacted. Can you further elaborate on this? Cost of capital has declined. Can you talk about some of the contribution to this situation?

Jenny Huang
CFO, KGI Financial Holding Co

First, let's welcome the bank to reply to your question regarding credit card cost.

Wayne Hsu
President of KGI Bank, KGI Financial Holding Co

For the credit cost in the first quarter, the annual live percentage is 3.34 basis points, the increase is because of a single case. You can see on page 28, our NPL and NPL coverage, the information is listed here for your reference.

Melanie Nan
President of CDIB, KGI Financial Holding Co

Second, for CDIB. First quarter overseas business profit was affected because the healthcare overseas. Healthcare is one of our main focuses. In Taiwan, the performance is quite good. For overseas, because of the beginning of the year, due to geopolitical risk, therefore, overseas business was negatively impacted. These two projects, the fundamentals remain strong, as the market continues to rebound, the profit will pick up.

Jenny Huang
CFO, KGI Financial Holding Co

Now, let's pass the floor to KGI Life regarding the question that were previously mentioned.

Yu-Ling Kuo
President of KGI Life Insurance, KGI Financial Holding Co

For VNB increase, the first quarter increased 2% year-over-year, CSM also increased compared to last year. For the full year, compared to last year, we will increase around 5%. For agency channel, increase from 42% to 60%. This is our three-year target. We hope that our CSM goal can be reached, we want to see double-digit growth.

Third, new FX reserve, because we do not know the latest details yet, we have been discussing internally. Once we have a clearer picture, we will decide then whether to apply for the new scheme or not. Based on the discussion in Life Association, for peers, the new scheme shall provide more flexibility. For EV, I will pass the floor to Rochelle.

Rochelle Hsieh
SVP and Chief Actuarial Officer of KGI Life Insurance, KGI Financial Holding Co

The return last year after rolling is 4.34%. You can see the negative impact. EMV, because there is no rolling effect, therefore it reflects our asset allocation. That's why there is an increase. For DLC, last year when we are calculating DLC, we look at the regulators increase the weight of related figures. Our EV reflects the deferred effect of the latest regulation.

Jenny Huang
CFO, KGI Financial Holding Co

Please press raise your hand if you have any questions. Next, let's welcome Tina.

Speaker 11

Can you hear me?

Jenny Huang
CFO, KGI Financial Holding Co

Yes.

Speaker 11

First, for the bank. Page 28, NIM, it did not decline. The spread has declined. What's the FX contribution? Can you provide the NIM on the books for our reference and how we should look at FX and the spread trend? Second, loan, the increase in first quarter is quite strong. What's the full year guidance? Will we see double-digit growth, whether 10%, 12%? Is there a more specific guideline?

Number three, for KGI Life, outlooks for dividend income, because now the stock market is quite high, will we focus on dividend income, will it affect our pre-hedged recurring yield? Number four, for CDIB, first quarter, the fee income year-over-year decreased, asset size has increased. Can you further elaborate why it declined? Last, for CDF, there is a capital increase of TWD 250 million. Can you further elaborate on that? First, let's have the bank talk about spread and NIM and FX-related issues.

Wayne Hsu
President of KGI Bank, KGI Financial Holding Co

For FX swap income is around TWD 0.7 billion. NIM will decrease to 0.3%, we have strong loan performance, we still remain prudent. We think the growth will be around 10% annually.

Jenny Huang
CFO, KGI Financial Holding Co

Next, KGI Life regarding recurring yield and dividend income.

Yu-Ling Kuo
President of KGI Life Insurance, KGI Financial Holding Co

The stock market now has peaked out, we will increase stock investment because of dividend. We will look at capital gain and dividend on a whole. Second, for recurring yield in 2023, the market rate has peaked out, and our recurring yields increase is limited. We will maintain the recurring yield of last year.

Melanie Nan
President of CDIB, KGI Financial Holding Co

Income in 2023, this is a transition phase for our funds. Some of them have already entered the exiting period, our fee income ratio is decreasing. As we are raising new funds and closing new funds in 2024, the fee income will be increased.

Jenny Huang
CFO, KGI Financial Holding Co

Next, I'll answer CDF's capital raise issue. I believe you've noticed that in recent years, we will ask for general authorization from the AGM. This is to meet the purpose in case there is any capital raise, and this will allow more flexible operation. As our Chief Executive Officer mentioned, our current financial indicators are all meeting the regulatory requirements.

We will continuously observe and monitor, but our capital raise, we will see if the raise will be beneficial to our shareholders' equity. Thank you, Tina. Next, we are still having time for our investors and analysts. Please click the Raise Your Hand button if you have any questions.

Jamie from JPMorgan, please.

Speaker 9

I have a follow-up question. First, for the bank, you mentioned in Q1 there is a specific case. Was it the same case as you mentioned in the last quarter, a London case, the CRE? Is the provision by the end of the first quarter, is it sufficient enough? Your credit cost estimation, is it still 15 - 20 basis points? Then for the return, this pro forma you have lower by 10 basis points. Are you factoring higher hedging costs or there is other reason?

Jenny Huang
CFO, KGI Financial Holding Co

First invite Wayne.

Wayne Hsu
President of KGI Bank, KGI Financial Holding Co

Yes, indeed. That is the single case in London, the real estate. This whole year, we will have a higher cost. It will be higher than 15 - 20 basis points. Equivalent returns drop by 10 basis points is affected by increasing hedging cost, indeed.

Jenny Huang
CFO, KGI Financial Holding Co

Wei from Commercial Times. yourself before you speak.

Speaker 12

You mentioned that KGI Bank will be focusing on asset growth. Will you consider any M&A? Second question, KGI Life, what is your last year's dividend income? Earlier, Chief Exective Officer [Inaudible] talked about adding the capital gains and yield. We will look at it as a whole. Will there be an increase or decrease to your dividend income?

Jenny Huang
CFO, KGI Financial Holding Co

I'll answer the first question. For M&A, we talked about this with the media before. We will always evaluate any opportunities that will be a boost to our company. This has always been one of our focuses. We're not going to do M&A for the sake of M&A, unless it has synergy to our company. Regarding dividend income, as we mentioned, we won't look at dividend alone. We will look at capital gain and dividend income together as a whole.

Speaker 1

Thank you for joining today's conference. This marks the end of our investor call. If there are any more questions, please feel free to contact our IR team or our PR team. Thank you.