Executives
Operator
Javier Marín Romano – CEO Jose Antonio Alvarez –CFO Juan Manuel Cendoya Mendez de Vigo – EVP, Communication, Corporate Marketing and Research Javier Marín Romano: Okay. We’ll start. Good morning to everybody. Welcome to Santander’s First Half Results Presentation. Jose Antonio Alvarez, CFO of the Bank; and Manuel Cendoya de Vigo will be joining me for this presentation. As usual, I will begin with some key facts and figures for the Group. Later on, Jose Antonio will do the same with the respect to the individual units. And then, we will open – I will close with a few conclusions, and then we will open the – some time for Q&A. Let me start with a few highlights of what has been the second quarter for the bank. Santander continues to develop its business on a very complex macroeconomic and regulatory environment. The Group maintained the priorities of previous quarters; strong balance sheet in terms of liquidity and capital, and reinforcing underlying results offsetting external impacts in several units. Some key features, business volumes reflect the macroeconomic situation of the countries where we operate and the strategy of bolstering the balance sheet vis-à-vis in a sharp negative impact from exchange rates. Excluding it for management purposes, the Group’s deposits grew 7% and loans decreased 2% while de-leveraging in some countries. As a result, there was a further improvement in liquidity with a ratio of loan-to-deposits already moving into 107% which is a very comfortable ratio for us. There was a very strong organic generation of capital in the quarter, 44 basis points with a BIS II ratio rising to 11.11%, and of course very comfortably in order to meet the Basel 3 requirements for the end of the year. Of note in results were revenue stability, with some countries recovering…