Hector Grisi: Sure. I will do so. But mainly, I think it’s important to tell you a couple of things. As Ana said, basically, retail represents the bulk of the business in the UK, mainly mortgages and the current accounts that we have. We anticipate in terms of your question in terms of cost, flattish cost. This is benefiting for the change of the model that we’re doing. And also, we believe that cost of risk is going to remain low given the quality of the portfolio and the focus on profitability that we’re telling you. Okay? It’s important to understand that high rates and economic slowdown are continued to affect the loan volumes and the market deposit growth continued to be subdued. Okay? So, in ’24, we anticipate a challenging competitive environment as the one that you saw during the third and fourth quarter with rates on deposits growing through the year and across all the banks, which is basically what’s going on there.
Mortgage rates have started to fall since December ’23, you saw that, following a drop in the market swap rates and in the number of mortgages approvals have started to recover since then. So, we see a little bit changes in the volume. The outlook is driven by an increased competition also, which will keep focusing on profitability as Ana basically said. And we’re going to leverage on the group platforms to maintain the cost of better levels and to find new revenue streams. Cost, as I said, flattish. And as a result, we anticipate and a slightly lower RoTE. But I don’t know, Jose, if you want to beat exact details.
Jose Garcia-Cantera: On the hedge, in the structural hedge no. I think looking at the structural hedge on a quarterly basis, it very much, it may suffer some volatility due to maturities, et cetera. If we look at the structural hedge in December ’22, it was £108 billion it is now £106 billion. And at that time, the duration was 2.5 years and its 2.4 years. That shows it’s very stable and we would expect it to keep it stable. This is structural, so we would not use the hedge to bring forward profits. But again, this is a structural hedge of the balance sheet and it should remain stable and, like you said, linked to our interest rate sensitivity basically coming from the current accounts.
Operator: Next question is from Antonio Reale from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Antonio Reale: I have two questions please, one on the guidance for this year and one on strategy. So you’ve disclosed your guidance for 2024 at 16% RoTE, which implies a net profit of more than 12 billion on current tangible book value. And this one has been growing, so we hope that continues. So you’d be implicitly guiding between 12 billion and 12.5 billion net profit this year, which I mean will be a strong number if delivered. Now I won’t ask you to confirm if that’s right, but it will be great if you could talk us through how you see the main units performing this year, particularly Europe, Brazil and the U.S? Actually, when you talk about Europe, if you could comment about Spain and the UK given the weakness this quarter that I think would help.
My second question is on strategy. So you’re adding a decent number of investment bankers in the U.S. And now over the years, we’ve seen a few of European International peers have ambitions, change the allocation of capital in their CIB businesses in the U.S., which is almost systematically resulted in negative jaws and higher capital consumption. Can you talk us through what your expectations are here, please? And possibly share with us some numbers in terms of size of the investment and expected returns on these investments?
Ana Botin: So in terms of the guidance, again, we’re not going to give specific numbers, but you can do the math. I think what’s important in terms of how we see revenues profits, costs, et cetera, is that the key here is the operating leverage. So as I said, this is going to be partly revenues and partly costs due to the change in the model, this is really important because obviously we have a lot more control. We control the top-line to a certain degree but there’s some external impacts. And so, what really matters is the operating leverage and the change in the model. So we have a structurally lower cost to serve. So we’re going to work very hard on both of those. As you know, we’ve moved to managing the bank primarily by global business.
So if you allow me, I’m going to give you the vision by global business because this is really how we manage, this is how we predict. We have been managing this way forever, by the way, at the country level. So, we’ve been predicting retail commercial by country. It’s not anything different. We’re now just putting that together and working together in a common business model that Hector explained in detail. So again, we expect all our five global businesses to do better in 2024. This is really important. So we expect revenue growth in all our businesses. Retail commercial DCB in terms of NII is 80%, so it’s obviously very important. Both our retail commercial and DCB should grow mid-single-digit. Again, our retail commercial, as I said, will do better in the Americas this year than in Europe.
But with the exception of the UK, the top-line will grow in all the countries, including Spain. So, revenues will continue to grow in Spain, Poland, Portugal. So again, very diversified and I would say very strong, momentum, in some cases, more now fees than net interest income. Hector mentioned on the retail commercial side, fees were negative to flat this in 2023. It should be much more positive in ’24, including in Europe, by the way, because there’s more activity. We’re seeing positive signs already the last few months that activity is picking up, so fees would grow in retail commercial. What’s going to be doing better, and Hector and I mentioned that already is our consumer business, DCB, and that is both in Europe and in the U.S. So again, here both net interest income and revenue growth should also continue to grow, fees growing much faster because of higher activity.
