Howard Davies
Management
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming. Today we are announcing our first annual profit since 2008. Achieving profitability is clearly an important milestone on the bank's recovery journey and the board acknowledged the hard work done Ross, Ewen and all their colleagues to get us to this point. They deserve much credit for that. But it's not the moment to declare final victory; we still have costly legacies issues to resolve in particular, the US Department of Justice's investigation of our historic RMBS activity. We continue to hope to be able to resolve that in the coming months, but as you know the time table and the process are not under our control and we don't have any further update on that provide to you today. We also have work to do to rebuild confidence among customers both retail and commercial and especially amongst smaller businesses. The GRG 166 report published in parliament on Tuesday made uncomfortable reading and we have apologized to customers who were not well treated. We've set up a compliant scheme overseen by an independent former High Court Judge which is working through individual cases and we've already taken an automatic refund of complex fee arrangements. We've provided £400 million for that redress activity in 2016, which is when we first saw the report. As well as rebuilding trust, we must also accelerate our transition to digital banking. We're making good progress but there is much more to do on that. And Brexit presents a challenge to our European business, the regulatory outcome remains uncertain. We have a contingency plan to enlarge our footprint in Amsterdam to allow us to continue to serve our NatWest markets customers. The timing of its implementation will depend on the nature and the length of the transition period on which we expect to hear more from the government and the European Commission soon. But in spite of these challenges we're confident that the bank is now in good shape for the future, most of the legacy issues have now been resolved and we've refocused our activity on products and markets in which we have a strong competitive position. For more detail I now hand you over to my two digital human Ross and Ewen.