Antonio Horta-Osorio
Management
Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. I will cover the key highlights for the first half of the year, economic trends and progress against our strategic priorities. George will then cover the financial results in detail, after which, I will conclude, and we will take your questions. Starting with the highlights for the first six months. In the first six months of the year, our simple, low-risk, UK focused multi-brand business model has continued to deliver with improved underlying and statutory profits and a very strong underlying post-tax return on tangible equity of 16.6%. The group also completed the acquisition of MBNA's prime UK credit card portfolio at the start of June, and this has contributed to an increase in customer loans and advances in the period. The group has delivered strong capital generation in spite of additional legacy provisions, and this has enabled the Board to approve an increase interim dividends. In terms of our financial guidance, we have updating our full-year margin and AQR guidance, where we now expect to deliver a margin of close to 2.85% and an improved AQR of less than 20 basis points, both of which include MBNA. All of the guidance remains unchanged. I'm also pleased that the hard work undertaken in the last 16 years to transform and simplify the business has allowed the UK government to fully dispose of their investments in Lloyds and to return more than £21 billion to the British taxpayer. We're paying nearly £1 billion more than the original investments. Turning briefly to the financials. Income was up 4%, with increases in both net interest income and other income, which combined with our continued focus on cost management, delivered positive operating charge of 5%. Our market-leading cost-to-income ratio, therefore, improved further to 45.8%. Credit quality…