Kirt Gardner
Analyst · Bank of America. Please go ahead
Yes. In terms of your first question, clearly, if revenue were to go down further on the Investment Bank, we would expect and you should expect to see further reduction in compensation. So there is flex if we accrue on a variable basis. Obviously as well, as Sergio, highlighted and I also re-highlighted, you should expect to see some level, a responsible level of tactical actions that our IB and all our businesses continue to take as we go through the year, and so we see some level of normalization of conditions. So your assumption that there is zero flexibility is not correct. In terms of pricing, we have been progressively implementing pricing actions across our Wealth Management businesses. And we think there's still some remaining opportunity. However, the real opportunity, particularly in our Wealth Management international business is around discounts. And we think that, just in general, that's an area that has been under focused on to-date, and that's where we see some real upside over the next couple of years. Now, overall, if you look at the talent and the pressure on cost, clearly, in some markets particularly Asia Pacific, naturally, we continue to see some pressure on cost. But we actually don't see that the cost pressure from an industry perspective is anything that is more intense now than it was over the last couple of years. We still feel very comfortable with the cost-to-income guidance that we provided for both our Wealth Management and our Wealth Management Americas business. Now, as you highlighted in our WMA business, there was some increase year-on-year in our personnel expense. We did highlight that actually there was a reasonably stiff one-time expense related to the establishment or the migration to our new healthcare program. In addition to that, naturally, you would see, as we increase the level of our recruits, there are some initial upfront costs for on-boarding and that's natural. So you'll also see some of that coming through. Although as we digest, of course, those new recruits, their invested assets and their revenue come on board. You actually should see that start to favor our cost-to-income ratio overall. Now, finally, you talked about our capital, and so what you saw, what we highlighted in terms of our CET1 is that, yes, there was dividend accrual, but in addition to that we actually had a fairly stiff foreign currency translation loss that we realized in the first quarter. So it was the combination of both of those that offset our net profit attributable to shareholders.