Are you able to hear me?

Yep. Thank you.

Hi, this is Yong Hong from Citi. Just three questions just touching on wealth.

First question is on your $1 trillion AUM target. That implies that your wealth AUM can grow at 11% CAGR through 2030.

Could you share some color on the net new money versus the migration from retail wealth versus the market's impact assumption for this? That is my first question.

I'll kick off, and Tse Koon will follow. When Tse Koon said $1 trillion, he said total wealth including retail wealth, right?

The current figure for the wealth, including Treasures, Treasures Private Client, and PB, is

$516

billion, right? $516.

That's right.

If you need to know the retail figure, the retail figure is... $164.

$164 billion. ...$164 billion.

In total, if we include retail, the total figure—and retail that's $30,000 and above—then the total figure today is $680. Right?

Yes.

We've been compounding at about 8% growth for the wealth side every year. We can add more effort and push it up.

Let's see. Then the retail side has been also snowballing and growing quite nicely.

There's a few levers that Tse Koon and the team are pushing, from the digital wealth to POSB plan, CDP, CPF, etc., etc. There's a lot of levers we can pull.

Taiwan also has a few levers that we're pulling, upgrading our wealth tech there, etc. It's optimistic, but not unrealistic, right?

It's doable. We have the ambition, and we just need to execute for it.

Tse Koon?

Building on what Su Shan has said, if you look at it, it's $680 billion today, as of half year this year, right? The $1 trillion target we're setting for ourselves is by end of 2030.

Again, not going to say that it's easy, but it is something that is quite doable if we continue on the kind of traction trajectory that we've been making. Just for discussion's sake, if you look at it, at $680, $680, our net new money only covering Treasures, TPC, and PB have been consistently about $40 billion per annum now.

If we're talking about another four full years from '27, '28, '29, '30, all else equal, same kind of traction, the uplift and all about $160 billion, without even adding retail, right? $160 billion.

So $160 billion, if you think about it, $680 add $160...

$840.

Huh? $840, right?

The $1 trillion marks another $160. Generally, if you look at the way our AUM have grown, it's always been a function of both net new money, as well as the cash translated to investments and when market moves, right?

Far our AUM growth has been a function of these two. All else equal, in four and a half, four and a half years from now, as we say, nothing is a walk in the park, right?

We all still need to work hard at it, but it is not something that is so out of whack that we don't think is achievable. Then, building on what Su Shan has said, of course, there are quite a number of levers that we're pushing, pulling.

We've seen actually quite good traction when we relaunched our DigiWealth last year for the retail space, just not even having any RMs or human beings, but simply using technology, AI nudging, the uptick has been very, very encouraging of customers now getting into investments, getting into insurance, and at the same time, proactively contacting us to say that they want to talk to somebody, for example, about their financial planning, including insurance. This ability for us to use AI, use technology to harmonize what we've said for a long time, the phygital approach, right, of having both human beings and technology is very, very real.

Thanks for that color. Maybe just pulling out of that, and assuming we can get to the private wealth growing at 10% CAGR, how should cost-to-income ratio look like over the next 5 years?

Because if we think about cost-to-income ratio at 40%, then opex growth should be at about 10% on a CAGR as well, just doing the calculation mathematically. Just wondering if this is the right pace of growth rate to think about for opex.

Are you looking at the whole bank or just the wealth business?

For the whole bank, on a group perspective.

Okay. In the near term, we've been able to keep our expense growth at circa 4%, sometimes slightly below, but it's been quite stable.

We are able to also keep the structural growth engines firing. We're still hiring, it's not that we're not hiring, and we're still getting our people to go up the curve, to do more, which means you have to pay them more, right?

If they do more, you pay them more. They're also getting more senior, more productive, more skilled, etc.

I think with the AI tools, they can do more, right? That's the point.

All my managers, myself, my team, their management team, they're all expecting their teams to do more with the tools that they have. A lot of it is also reskilling quite a lot of our own staff into higher-order jobs, right?

If you used to be a level 1 production engineer, you now learn to become a level 2 production engineer and a wealth tech engineer for that, right? That means you have to learn domain knowledge in wealth management, and you got to do keep go using AI on tech.

That means we have to train them, and it takes time to train them. When we train them, they become more productive, and they get paid more, but they are doing a higher-order job, and we haven't changed our headcount, right?

We're trying to do more with less people, or we are still growing where we need to grow, but we're also shrinking where we need to shrink, right? I think I see us being disciplined around cost and trying to keep it at the 40, low 40s figure.

Thanks for that color. Maybe just one final questions, it's just following up on the earlier questions, in the context of this China closing the loopholes through the 20% tax helping offshore trust, any color on what is the exposure of offshore trust, especially from mainland China, for your group AUM?

As an extension to that, any thoughts on where directionally China and group on offshore wealth could go, given the recent development, and how we can navigate that?

and

Yeah.

I kind of answered it just now at the media. I don't know whether you were there.

The two directives, right? One is the 837 directive, which is really more around the outbound investments and it affected more of the online brokerages, and the other is the announcement 21, which affects more of the offshore trusts.

Our actual amount in trust is actually quite small for China nationals. On the insurance announcement, there's been nothing official and nothing conclusive yet.

We have to keep our eye on the ball, but I mentioned that we are building both offshore franchise and onshore franchise, right? Also, we have always abided by regulations.

We are not a fintech that doesn't do reporting. We do all our CRS reporting, we do all our client declarations, the client has to sign off, etc.

We do the right thing, and sometimes we are handicapped, we are slower to onboard because it takes us longer versus a fintech or onshore or online brokerage. I think this does two things: one, it equalizes the playing field, it's not bad for law-abiding banks like us, plus we are onshore, we are in China, if wealth stays onshore, then there's more potential for us to grow our onshore business, and our actual exposure in trust is relatively small.

Yong Hong, if I may just add to that as well, some of these regulations are really around the requirement for onshore residents to report and all that for their own personal tax purposes. As Su Shan mentioned, we abide by regulations.

Customers will have to do what they have to do. The reasons and the purposes for which they avail themselves to some of these services including trust is really not just about tax, right?

It's also about their own family governance, transition, legacy planning, and all that. In the more holistic solutioning or advice that we offer, not just to Chinese clients, but across the board, to Su Shan's point, actually the proportions are not that big in that sense.

Notwithstanding, the holistic solutions we bring comes across for all many, many kinds of reasons. Okay?

It's not just these particular new changes that might affect what they need to kind of declare onshore, right? It's much broader than that.

Thank you. These are all my questions.

Thank you.

Hey, Nick.

Couple of questions from me. I just, first of all, want to come back to just get a little bit more detail on your wealth management numbers.

I wonder if you could give us a split between invested and deposits in that 5—517 or whatever it is, 516 billion, and also any indication you can give us on the split of net new money between deposits and invested assets. The other question, I'd just like to ask, just in terms of fee growth, it does seem that the investment products non-fee income was quite high in the quarter.

Looks to be running about double the rate normally. Just if there was anything specific on sort of product behavior or investment behavior in the quarter you'd like to call out.

Then just switching on to something else, you talked about SRTs, Su Shan, and it obviously looks like we're in a higher loan growth environment going forward, which is great news, but that's obviously going to consume capital, and I notice your credit risk-weighted assets were up a chunk in the first half. Can you just talk a little bit about how you might use SRTs going forward and what sort of impact that might have on risk-weighted asset growth versus loan growth?

Okay.

We'll take the first question around the the the split between in wealth management of what's going into into investments. It went from 58% to 59%, so that was up 1% on the quarter.

If when you ask what led the growth, by the way, the growth wasn't just in wealth, wealth did extremely well, but it was also in IBG, right, in our corporate bank and in our SME. What led the growth fees figure this first half has been equities and equity structures.

Like the US investment banks, when you have volatility and opportunity and new IPOs and what have you in in the markets, whether that's structural or cyclical, to be determined, but you will get a boost in both cash equity and equity structured products. That's been quite strong.

There was also a strong, very strong double-digit growth in funds. Our CIO has a barbell, DPM, and that's been doing very well, growing by double digit.

We've launched quite a few discretionary products that were very well received, hedge funds and the like. Also in private equity, we we did some pre-IPOs that were also very well received, so that was also strong double-digit growth.

In the corporate banking side, it was transaction banking. There was this We had a very strong first quarter last year, first half last year for syndicated loans, it was so our syndicated loan fees were down a bit year on year, but it was still quite a strong pipeline, and transaction banking had a strong pipeline.

I don't know whether Hui Jen wants to weigh in on the fees. Oh, there was ECM fees

and and and

M&A fees as well, and origination fees.

I think on the IBG side, the growth comes primarily from deepening our relationship with our clients. When you see the numbers, you see that the transaction services fees are up, I think, by about double percent year-on-year basis, and a lot of it comes from what we do on the underlying cash management, trade finance, and of course, you get it from SFS for the custody fees as well.

All that coming through quite nicely. Second quarter, we also saw nice fees from the financing and the advisory that we do for Sembcorp acquisition of Alinta, and that was booked in the second quarter as well.

I forgot to mention banca. Both IBG and CBG had very strong banca sales as well, SME, business owners, and wealth clients.

Nick, were you asking a question about the non-fee component as well?

Yes. I thought that was about $200 million in the quarter.

It's usually 100 to 130, something like that.

What we call treasury customer sales, I think they are referring to that category. For accounting purpose, we do need to split the lines.

What we take from our own treasury, our own dealing room, they manufacture the products. The products are frankly quite similar: equity structures, equity derivatives that customers want.

These are their financial solutions. We can't call them fees if it's actually manufactured in our own dealing room.

If it's manufactured by a third-party bank, then we book it as fees. That's why that number has also been growing, and in this quarter, it's been strong growth in the equity derivatives and structured notes, very similar to what you're actually seeing in the demand on the fee side.

Are you bringing more product in-house? As a trend?

No, we don't bring in more products in-house. I think we are on open platform, actually.

Yeah.

It's just that more of the products that were taken this quarter, I think, were manufactured in-house because of the equity derivative component.

Perfect. On the SRTs?

Okay. Phil will take that.

Yeah. Nick, this is Phil.

For the SRT, this is just, I guess, us opening a new product in this market. As we pioneered the first covered bond many years ago, and now it's a fairly established feature in the Singapore market.

Similarly with SRT, it's just one tool in the toolbox, right? Obviously, there's direct loan sell-down, there's syndications, there's various other ways we can manage our credit risk, our credit RWA.

We felt that this was a product that was worth bringing to Singapore. We spent more than a year actually preparing and doing all the groundwork and ensuring that we could process the transaction, talking to investors.

I think we kind of did a bit of groundbreaking for the market as a whole, which is good. We'll see how it goes.

Obviously, we want to keep a full toolbox of mechanisms for managing our credit RWA, and this is one of them.

Cool. Just on credit RWAs, therefore, do you expect them to grow in line with loans, or do you think you can manage credit RWA growth below loan growth?

It will be about the same. Essentially, if you look at our past trends, the second quarter showed more loan growth, but if you assume that the risk weight density is relatively constant, then the RWA and the loan growth tend to move in line, unless there's a change in mix.

I think he's asking with the SRT, lah.

Yep. We will see how that particular product...

It

depends on how many SRTs we launch, maybe 2, 3 per year, and I think that actually benefits the growth trajectory of the RWA, lah.

Okay. You can use it, but we've just got to see how much demand there is for it and how it takes off as a product.

Exactly.

Yeah. Perfect.

Thank you very much. Thanks for your answers.

During the call, you talked a bit about Taiwan and how that will be a growth driver. Maybe can you just share a little bit more details on Taiwan, how much does that contribute to net new money, to AUMs, also on the loan side, how much did that kind of bring in in terms of the loans?

In that perspective, then how should we kind of look at it going forward? That's my first question.

Then second question, maybe, given all this just news on tax and all this, can we just share again what is the Chinese contribution to net new money? Also on the banca side as well, if you can just share how much banca contributed to wealth and also how much I heard just now you were saying that the banca doesn't include just wealth, it does include some SME, maybe if you can just help with that idea.

It's also quite good that we can understand it a little bit. Then if I can just ask a third question on sensitivity.

You mentioned also on the call that you managed to do more hedging this quarter, just wonder if there's any change to sensitivity for your NIM. Thank you.

There were three questions there. One was around Taiwan, one was around net new money by nationality, and one on...

Banca.

...banca. NIM.

The banca question I didn't hear.

Banca SME, some flavor about how much that contributes including SME.

How much that contributes. The fourth question, sensitivity.

Actually that didn't change, but okay. In short, Melissa, we don't divulge the net new money by nationality, but your question around Taiwan is really one where it's structural growth, right?

Number one, it's the ecosystem growing for semiconductors, for AI, for hardware, and that's a real growth. The Foxconn ecosystem, the Nvidia ecosystem, the TSMC ecosystem, they're all firing on all cylinders.

The structural growth there is real. Number two, the wealth creation is relatively new, but they are old families.

The families have been doing the business for a long time, but their wealth creation, some of them, especially in the AI construct, the wealth pickup has been very sharp, and now they are needing solutions. It's quite concentrated, and it's onshore, they need onshore solutions.

They also need offshore solutions, right? Then they need planning as well for the next generation, etc.

In the onshore side, there's the new Kaohsiung wealth center, and we've set up there. Our purchase of Citi Taiwan's franchise has been quite timely because with the franchise came both wealth clients, wealth RMs, but also a really good high-end credit card franchise that as we use AI and RMs to uncover, we're finding a lot of hidden treasure in that franchise as well.

We've found some even billionaires and all that who hold our credit cards today, and we can use that as a hook to do more. We are also experimenting with the use of AI from voice to text, text to propensity models at the cards call center to also unearth a lot of these cards wealth client potential.

Our Taiwan team is all over this, both onshore, offshore. We think that we've given them big budgets to grow this year, and we will probably continue to want to put big budgets on them to grow next year.

It's been one of our best-performing markets. That's Taiwan.

China, no, we don't really give net new money by nationality. In PB, TPC, we have 110 different nationalities, it's very well spread.

You want to add anything, Tse Koon?

Yeah. Suffice to say that on the Taiwan piece in particular, what we have seen very clearly is that after the integration of the Citi franchise from a couple of years ago, actually we look at it, it's added additional scale to us on the wealth business as well apart from the cards, but more importantly, actually because of our ability to bring in a holistic investment and insurance solution onshore, what we've discovered is that the same cohort of customers actually do more with us than they had done with Citi.

If we look at it, we are way beyond just the pro forma addition of the two franchises. We've done a lot better than Citi had it when they had these same customers.

All right.

The question was on banca? What was the question?

Banca. Banca.

Oh, banca.

What was the question?

The proportion, right? Proportion to the total franchise, if you look at it, I'll say it's in the range of, let's say, 20%, 20-ish percent, right?

Of wealth

fee. Of

wealth fee. 20%, 20-ish percent.

20-ish percent of wealth fee. It's 20-ish, correct.

Then

Then maybe just the sensitivity.

The sensitivity hasn't changed. It's still for Sing dollar, plus $11 million per basis point; for US dollar, minus $4 million per basis point.

You want to say anything else? Yeah.

The same, Melissa.

All right, thank you so much.

Yes. I have two sets of questions.

The first one is just touching upon the China-related regulations again. I understand you said that you don't share the net new money breakup by nationality, but I think DBS has said in the past that less than a third of the net new money comes from Chinese clients.

I was just wondering, without giving any specifics, can you say, within this cohort, how much is mainland-domiciled clients as opposed to already offshore Chinese clients? Just some rough idea of what portion is mainland-domiciled versus not.

Have you seen any change in the inflow of this clientele in the past one to two months? That would be the first question, and maybe I'll ask more after that.

Tse Koon here. Can I just take this question?

As we've mentioned earlier on, we do not disclose the details of either nationality or domicile. Having said that, within our net new money, as we've guided and Su Shan has talked about, actually our entire wealth franchise does have both an onshore element and an offshore element.

Obviously, if we're talking about kind of our onshore Treasures, onshore retail, emerging affluent kind of net new money, right, the net new money would all be onshore-onshore, right, wherever we have an onshore presence, which are in our core markets, all right? Now, if we're talking about our offshore wealth franchise, which are predominantly booked in Singapore, Hong Kong because Singapore, Hong Kong have been traditional international wealth centers like a Switzerland, like a London, like the US themselves, right, where when we look at the wealth business, there's always kind of a set of numbers that the world looks at as international wealth flows into these international centers.

Now, what I'll say is that for these offshore wealths, actually this offshore wealths have been circulating within the offshore markets. In case you're thinking, "Oh, how much have flowed from onshore to offshore?"

, the fact of the matter is that in these offshore markets, we are winning market share from other banks from their offshore pot, if that's what you're kind of getting to, right? We are growing both onshore-onshore and offshore-offshore, and those are growing very, very strongly on multiple fronts.

Great. I think that's very helpful.

Is it possible for you to share some relative size of these two businesses? How much is the onshore China business versus offshore China business?

Now, I'm afraid we do not go into that level of detail, but we do have, I would say, very robust wealth franchise, as you have seen how we have been performing all this time, right?

Okay. Then on the insurance sales, again, life, savings insurance products, would you have any sense of how much of these sales are to mainland-connected clients?

Sorry, how what?

How much of the banca sales are to mainland-connected clients? We don't break it down.

No, again, yeah, we don't break it down, but again, suffice to say, within each of those markets in which we operate in, there is an insurance offering onshore, right? Whether it is in Singapore, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, in India, in Indonesia, and in China, there are regulated insurance partners that we work with to offer these solutions, and these are all kind of advice, distributed, booked onshore, right?

Then, of course, in our wealth centers offshore, likewise, there are insurance solutions, a fair amount of that also for legacy planning, which is not uncommon.

Aakash, that's the difference between a DBS and a global bank, right? We are in these six core markets in Asia, we are onshore, and we have onshore partners, and we have branches, we have wealth centers, and we have RMs, and so, we are their onshore bank, and if they need offshore solutions, we're there for them too.

Right. No, Su Shan, I understand that, and I think I appreciate the comment that you made earlier that if wealth stays onshore, DBS also has a strong onshore presence to participate into that wealth as opposed to just offshore.

I just wonder, is the nature of the business very different onshore versus offshore? Onshore, we all know that in the wealth management business, a lot more competitive, margins would be a lot more thinner.

If onshore wealth were to stay onshore in the future, the wealth management business for DBS would look very different from what it does today. Would that not be a...

I wouldn't say so, Aakash, because actually this has always been the way wealth management has functioned, right? The difference would be that in many of these onshore markets, with the exception of, let's say, Hong Kong, Singapore being international centers that in themselves, right?

The so-called onshore clients in Hong Kong and Singapore already have the ability to access full holistic suite of products and solutions that are international, right? You go to certain other markets, the onshore solutions in some of the markets might be somewhat lesser because they are subject to whatever is available onshore, right?

As I've mentioned earlier on, there is still sufficient for us to tap into the onshore wealth opportunities, and we've seen that growing actually across all our onshore-onshore franchise, right? Within the offshore ones, as it's always operated, now would it be very different?

If you look at what the market says, right, between Singapore, Hong Kong, international wealth itself is today already $5 trillion, right, of AUM, growing at the fastest pace, even faster than Switzerland, and by 2030, this $5 trillion will be about $7.9 trillion. The offshore-offshore proposition has always been there, continues to grow.

The onshore-onshore has always been there and is also growing in our core markets. Asia is generating a lot of wealth, and Asia is attracting a lot of wealth coming in.

Aakash,

I think it will grow, right? We're ready for that growth.

I think, we've brought products like the mutually recognized fund product, which is MRF, we've got fund-linked SIPs, we have DBS Securities onshore, we are active in onshore insurance policies. I think you need to build both, right?

To be a holistic wealth offerer in Asia, you need to build both, and that's exactly what we've been doing. That gives us a diversified client mix.

If one channel goes down, the other goes up, right? That gives us a diversified client mix.

I think a brand name like DBS in China has a good chance of success because we were not involved in any of the trust products where customers lost a lot of money. We've stayed away from selling CDOs and CDSs, etc.

We've been pretty holistic in our wealth offerings onshore, and we've garnered a good reputation for being a safe bank and a smart bank and a digital bank. I think we have upside onshore, which is why Tse Koon and the team are building wealth centers in China.

If the money stays onshore, there's no property to buy, then they will be looking for wealth solutions, and so I see upside there, and we're building for it.

Actually, we're doing it not just in China, right? These wealth centers, I've actually told the market, right, that we are building 18 additional wealth centers and upgrading another 36 of existing ones.

Now, these are actually across all our core markets, right? Even in Singapore.

Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, India. We're kind of doing that, right?

We are hiring, we're putting technology to enable them, and we are also adding new, as well as upgrading existing wealth centers.

Got it. I think that's very helpful.

Thank you. I just have one related question.

Su Shan, I think with all this complexity and uncertainty in the Hong Kong-China corridor, DBS does look very well-positioned. Are you starting to see any net new money benefits because of all these challenges and headwinds in the north?

Net new money benefits for what?

For the DBS wealth management business, because the whole Hong Kong-China corridor is so complex now, is DBS a net beneficiary of all that? Instead of money going to StanChart or HSBC in Hong Kong, it's coming to DBS, simply put.

I don't think I would look at it from just this single lens, right? I'll look at it really from a much broader lens, which is the reason we are quite confident about the wealth opportunity, which is the fact that, number one, there's a lot of wealth being created in Asia.

Number two, we're also seeing, interestingly, a lot of interest in Asia even from customers outside of Asia, right, namely from European countries, from the Middle East, etc. That falls to what I've mentioned earlier on, that the $5 trillion looks like it's going to grow to $7.9 trillion, right?

This is about international wealth, yeah, over and above the Asian wealth that's being created. I look at it from that lens.

Then when we look at DBS, I think DBS benefits from the fact that we are an Asian-headquartered bank, and the headquarter is in Singapore, where we are known to have exercise the rule of law, stability, etc., etc., etc. I guess that's the reason why we have been named by Euromoney, right, as the best private bank in the world and the safest private bank in the world, on top of the other accolades we have won from Global Finance and Euromoney over the years as a bank at large.

I do think we benefit from that. We've also kind of won Best Innovation Bank, etc.

I think it's the sum total of many of these factors where any macro trends, I would say, whether it is some of these that you talk about or the geopolitics instability in the world, etc., we tend to see DBS benefit because of also the Singapore branding.

Also, I think the differentiator for DBS is the one-bank solution. Our corporate bankers are very much part of their business growth, their supply chain diversification, their connectivity opportunities in South, Southeast Asia, etc.

Being there to connect their business growth means that you then have a front seat or an early start in their wealth management as well. Our teams work together.

They hunt in packs, and so if we're helping corporate clients grow in Southeast Asia, South Asia, or elsewhere, then that's always opportunities offshore as well.

Just on the capital management side, I think, obviously, the business is in great shape, and you've increased the guidance. Now the 15 cents special capital return dividends, if I understood correctly, they will sort of come through this year and then next year.

Any thoughts on being able to sustain it longer, or even think about a revised sort of dividend path, because it does sound like the outlook for the business is actually very strong? We'll be keen for your thoughts on this.

All right.

Thank you very much, Jaden. If you look at the capital return dividend, we set it up because we wanted to return excess dividend, and by definition, the excess dividend should be a finite amount.

I think we'll continue to calibrate, but I would say that we do not sort of intend to sort of keep it as a continual feature of our capital management.

Okay. If I may ask a follow-up question, Sok Hui, I think there is a buyback obviously.

Can you sort of remind us how much is remaining of the funds that were set aside for the buyback, and I guess what the current sort of expiry date for that would be?

We set out to sort of do a $3 billion share buyback, and to date, we've done $0.4 billion. There's $2.6 billion that's unutilized, and the timeframe is end of 2027, as we originally communicated.

We think that at this kind of price to book, it's a bit challenging to go and do share buyback. We have better deployment of the capital.

We are thinking, and it's subject to board discussion, board approval, and we still have one and a half years to go before we make the decision, but it is possible that we may, if we don't sort of utilize the $2.6 billion, we'll convert it into a capital return dividend as well, because those are all excess dividend that we had calibrated to be paid out, but it's subject to further discussions at the board level.

That's really helpful. Thank you so much.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yes.

Thank you. Just one follow-up on wealth management and one quick question on loan growth.

On wealth management, of course, we've had many standout years now. Looking ahead, when we think about growth, you mentioned over the next few years we could continue to see net new money at $40 billion-plus, but overall on the fee side, how are you seeing trends if there is competition?

Will that fee momentum also continue to support the wealth expansion, or do you think at some point that fee momentum kind of derails a little bit? Most of the growth will be supported from here from the offshore booking centers, or is it more a broad-based across offshore and onshore?

Okay.

We'll take it, and then the loan growth side, Hui Jen who runs IBG will take that, and then Tse Koon can amplify my answers. Fee growth is a function of a few things, right?

Number one, it's a function of the markets. The good thing is global markets don't tend to move together.

Sometimes, US goes up, Asia goes down; Asia goes up, US goes down; AI stocks go down, some other stocks go up, right? Gold goes up, whatever.

The good news is, the fee income is cyclical, it is market-dependent, but if you're not just geared to single stocks or single country or single product, if you have a diversified offering, you will have some volatility, but you should still have growth. Then the second component of fee income is obviously number of customers, right, and net new money.

If you continue to grow that, you should continue to grow your fee income in line with your new clients and your net new money. The third component is new product, right?

Sometimes clients start with one product, then they buy another one, or they invest in another one, etc. The velocity of that sort of inclination to new products also helps.

Then the fourth component is AI, right? Because your productivity is as good as your tools and your people and your ideation.

Can AI help all three? Yes.

AI can help on ideation, AI can help you nudge your customers, AI can help you inform your RMs and your investment counselors, AI can help you fulfill the trades. If you use AI smartly along the customer wealth journey, you can also use AI to amplify your fee income.

These four things taken together should mean that if you have a holistic grounding for your wealth clients and you are able to give them ideas, you can asset reallocate, you can shift with the markets, you help them make money, and you keep them safe when the chips are down, and you keep them diversified, and you keep their portfolios healthy, you will gain market share. That's what we intend to do.

We intend to gain market share, right? Tse Koon and the team have a lot of ambition to gain market share.

The good news is, whilst we're at the level we are, the gap between us and number one and two is still very big, and the structural wealth growth is still there. We still have a lot of white space that we need to cover, and the team is working very hard to cover that white space to grow.

Tse Koon, you want to amplify that?

Yeah. Thank you, Su Shan.

I think on the fee side, right, to Su Shan's point, a lot of that also has to do with diversification of the various investments, insurance solutions. Suffice to say that we have today already put on a pretty comprehensive suite, right, of products and services.

Whichever way the market goes, I do think that we have sufficient solutions, and we've seen how customers rotate in and out as well. At the same time, likewise, the way we are building out these fees, right, also has an element which will be kind of recurring.

There are also those that I would say are episodic, or some that are not necessarily episodic, but it's still the ongoing distribution kind of fees. There are multiple levers or, should I say, multiple kind of drivers of that that contribute to this fee income.

I do think that something we can continue to sustain with volumes as well. Then whether it's onshore, offshore, I'll say, yeah, actually both, right?

As I've alluded to earlier on, we do have a full suite of onshore products and services, likewise the offshore ones. I don't see anything imminent, right, that's going to suggest a different kind of trajectory in that sense.

Yeah.

Understood. A quick follow-up on the wealth side.

On the onshore booking centers, you mentioned the six key markets where you're expanding the number and growing it to 18, but are there any new markets that you may be looking at as well? Within Asia, we do have markets like Korea where wealth is also growing.

I know you did a partnership with Samsung there recently, but is there a thought process to expand to more markets?

There's no plan to open up in new markets per se, right, like what we have in our core markets now, right, the six core markets plus what we have in Thailand, right, which is a securities business. It's a 6 plus 1.

No immediate thought about any of that kind of onshore-onshore expansion. When I've mentioned earlier on the wealth centers, right, these are all wealth centers within these markets.

So 18 new ones that we're adding, as I've mentioned, even in our own home base here in Singapore, we're going to add some, and then we have some existing ones, 36 of them, which we will upgrade, right, as well. That's what we're trying to do, okay?

No new entry market in that sense. Right.

Got it.

He wants to send us a text with the question?

Yong Hong, are you there? Yong Hong?

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Right. Thanks, Su Shan.

Thanks, Sok Hui. Maybe just a follow-up on loans.

That was very strong. Could we get some color on the key drivers, how sustainable that is, and also some thoughts on how your risk management about these loans, especially around the digital asset class, just in case, basically, in the next few years, the spending from the digital sectors normalized in the years to come?

Hui Jen, please.

Right, Yong Hong, thanks for the question. As you saw, the second quarter for our non-trade loans is very strong.

If you unpeel that, essentially, $5 billion is what we would normally do based on the underlying activity that we see from our clients and the penetration. Then there is the opportunistic growth that we saw in the second quarter of about $6 billion.

Half of that comes from the Sembcorp Alinta acquisition, which we did the bridge financing for them. Then there is also the opportunity that we saw from the whole GLS financing on real estate in Singapore, where there's a fair number of loans generated there.

On the TMT side, it's actually a lot of what we call short-term financing. It's like short-term loans taken up by the customers in Taiwan.

Then there's a little bit of DC financing in Singapore and a small project in the US. In terms of what we do on data center, that number is not large.

We're involved in a lot of underwriting, and then we typically sell down a huge chunk of it, and that's where we make the fees out of it. All of our data center financing are very well-structured.

They are triple-net leases for those in the US with no pre-term, and so the counterparties are very strong on the underlying take-out, and so not too much concern around that. Overall, the momentum goes with what we see in the general macro, which is some of it in AI, some of it in real estate primarily in Singapore, and then we were also supporting our clients in other acquisition that they do in the aircraft leasing industry.

Yep. Then on the sustainability part, should we be expecting this kind of growth run-rate for the rest of the year and maybe even into next year, just based on your pipeline?

I think the underlying growth momentum, we are looking for somewhere between 4 to 5 every quarter. That's the steady state that we're aiming for.

The repayments is what we can't predict. When you look at repayment itself, there will be repayment from customers where they saw some of the higher loan rates that they get, and as a result of that, some repayments could vary.

We do have some line of sight for some that has already come in, and so the growth itself will be essentially dependent on the rate of repayment, because the steady state is 4 to 5 that we aim to get. Then the acquisition ones, they come when they come, and we will participate.

Okay. Okay.

Wai-Fai, just two questions. One is, can you comment on the wealth management momentum in July?

The other is, how to think about potential GP write-backs?

Okay. Momentum was okay in July, right?

It was quite well-spread.

Early flash is okay, still up on the year. We shouldn't give the numbers yet,

pretty decent across the board. Right?

Yes, yes, yes. I'll say fairly...

Robust. ...yeah,

robust, within the expectations,

yeah.

On GP?

GP write-back. GP write-back.

I think you ask how to think about GP write-back. I think we sort of continue to stress-test our portfolio.

I think the macro environment is quite uncertain, and I think we've always taken a prudent approach to anticipate what might be needed. You heard that we have taken sort of general provisions ahead of Hong Kong real estate, and then they were all paid back, and so we released some general provisions.

That tells you that we've always taken a more prudent approach, and therefore, we'll continue to stress-test, and depending on the external environment, which continues to be very unpredictable, that will guide us on our decision of what GPs we can release.

Thank you. Thank you, everyone.