This builds on our existing UK partnerships with other leading retail, consumer electronics, and loyalty program brands. Importantly, the customer base is similar to ours, leading to broadly aligned risk profiles. So, this fits squarely within the risk appetite framework that I outlined earlier. By delivering on our plan, we position BUK for the future and deliver an attractive and sustainable RoTE profile that is high teens in 2026 on a larger balance sheet. Underpinning that is continued growth in income, where we expect a compound annual growth rate of mid-single-digits CAGR over the next three years, concentrated in net interest income. Our continued focus on efficiency will lead our cost-to-income ratio to around 50% by 2026. We expect the better utilization of risk appetite to normalize our loan loss rate towards the 2019 level in a controlled and disciplined progression.
And as we grow our asset position, our RWAs will necessarily grow as a result and BUK’s contribution to the Group’s RWA profile is expected to grow. Given our focus on unsecured lending, you should expect the impairment build in RWA growth to be slightly more weighted towards the first year than the associated revenue build. That will cause RoTE to moderate in 2024, then recover to our target. Our ability to invest in that future revenue growth, as I said at the very beginning, is protected by the structural hedge, reflected in the 2024 net interest income guidance of £6.1 billion that Anna referenced earlier, although that excludes any contribution from the Tesco portfolios when that transfers to the UK expected in the second half of this year.
So, our focus on efficiencies will make us simpler, our focus on our customers and clients will make us better, and our plans for growth will make us more balanced. We have invested significantly in recent years to prepare the business to growth. We are now ready to seize the opportunity before us. Thank you for your time, and I will hand back to Venkat.
C.S. Venkatakrishnan: Thank you. So, we will now spend a little time on the Corporate Bank and Private Banking and Wealth, which are two new reporting units. I mentioned that we will also come back later in the year with a presentation on each of these by Matt and Sasha, respectively, in addition to a deepdive on the Investment Bank. So, you will have the opportunity later to hear from them. The UK Corporate Bank is the beating heart of Barclays’ 330-year history. We have relationships with about 25% of the UK market. These relationships average 18 years in length and they are covered with a network of locally-based teams around the country. Under the resegmentation, the UK Corporate Bank includes a large part of the operations, which we previously reported in the corporate lending and transaction banking lines.
It also includes corporate card issuing previously included in consumer cards and payments. So what this does is that it brings together our trade and working capital solutions into one business. The integrated business has reported strong returns and last year generated about £1.8 billion in income. The income streams are diversified, and the key priority for us is to grow the fee income alongside capital-efficient growth in lending. So what is it that we do here? On this slide, I’ll summarize the breadth of our offering to corporates. We support clients with their short and long-term financing needs, including extending finance to support the transition to net zero. We provide working capital solutions through card issuance, overdrafts, invoice discounting and traditional revolving facilities.
We help clients to move their money, to pay suppliers and employees, to collect money from their customers and reconcile their transactions. We also help clients to invest liquidity through a range of solutions. We support clients in managing risk as they grow their international exposure through our award-winning trade finance and FX propositions. And what this range does is it positions us well to grow over the next few years, while giving clients access to expertise in other parts of the group. Our clients’ needs are evolving quickly, and we are focused, therefore, on delivering operational needs simply and seamlessly. And to meet these, we have priority areas, which are well defined, starting with the importance of our leading payments ecosystem.
And digital delivery is important because it frees up time for our clients and also makes our bankers more efficient, allowing them to spend their efforts sharing data-driven strategic insights. And this client interaction will enable us to deepen and to broaden our client relationships. And as growth opportunities emerge, clients want us to make it easier for them to access the right financing structures in quick and simple ways. I said I will talk about payments. We spoke earlier about looking for a partnership in our merchant acquiring business. So I want to say a little bit about the payment ecosystem, which is about making and receiving payments. This is an essential part of the functions we provide our corporate clients. We are one of the largest sterling clearers in the UK.
We are a leading corporate card issuer with more than £12 billion of payments per annum and the third largest merchant acquirer across Europe. That’s the far right. We process over 300 billion payments a year a pound in payments a year, which we estimate represents one in every three card payments in the UK system. Our objective always is to bring the best capabilities and the most efficient services to our clients, and we pursue the models which deliver these outcomes. Our traditional bank payment systems have largely been built in-house over many years and are very resilient. What we are doing now is focusing on developing further digital solutions. And the landscape across card issuing in the middle and merchant acquiring on the right has been fast moving with much innovation.
We’ve had years of experience combining strong in-house capabilities with those provided by some of the partners listed here in order to benefit from greater scale in technology and operations. In merchant acquiring now, which is on the far right, we are exploring how best via partnerships to provide further benefits of scale, global scale and new technologies and innovation to our clients. That is what that strategic exploration is about. As with the rest of the bank that you’ve heard, we talk about simpler, better and more balanced. We are focused on making this business simpler by enabling clients to access the solutions and services more easily. Our main digital channel, something we call iPortal already gives clients access to a wide variety of services through a single entry point, and they can self-serve about 30% of their needs, and the adoption for these solutions is around 90%.
We plan now to build on this, expanding our self-service capabilities through both online and mobile access and increasing the efficiency, speed and frankly, better controls. And what this will allow us to do is to decommission legacy systems. And what we’ve been doing is also investing in stable and automated back-office platforms and the tools our relationship teams use, making their client interactions, as I said, more productive. All of this, we expect will improve the client experience while using efficiencies to fund investment and it allows us to retain our low cost income ratio. We aim to be better by deepening the relationships, which we have. We were the first bank to introduce industry specialist teams more than 20 years ago, and we continue to lead and to innovate.
Our network of business development directors has resulted in more than 550 client wins in 2023 and a growing market share. And we are hiring additional coverage bankers in areas where we see growth opportunities and continuing to develop our propositions. Recently, we migrated our trade finance business from legacy technology to cloud-based systems. 40% of our clients use five or more products, which is up three percentage points over the last two years, and this demonstrates our ability to increase that penetration. And as we deepen our relationships and improve our offering, we think we can do more with 28% of our clients using two products or fewer today, the potential for revenue growth here is significant. And we are confident that we can increase our share of wallet from existing clients and grow through new client acquisitions.
So next, I want to focus on lending, which makes us more balanced. We have a loan-to-deposit ratio here in the UK Corporate Bank in the low 30s, and we are well-placed to grow, providing a better balance for the business as we grow more fee income. And we will deploy more RWAs to support this effort, which in turn can lead to deeper and wider client relationships. Our existing book is well-diversified across sectors, and we have a track record of low impairment. And so we’ll continue, of course, to use the group’s significant risk transfer program, providing first loss protection and reducing both impairment risk and capital requirements. Within our credit risk appetite, there are areas where we can be more competitive on price and take larger credit positions with stronger clients.
And we are confident in that way of growing lending at attractive risk-adjusted returns as we develop our digital delivery and product offering. And we also expect to generate business for other parts of the bank, leveraging our track record in the debt capital markets. So finally, on the corporate bank, I just want to highlight some key financials and summarize our ambitions. As I said, a key priority is to grow fee income alongside a capital-efficient growth in lending, our recent performance positions as well to achieve this. Over the last two years, we’ve grown at a 15% CAGR. This reflects, of course, the benefit of — to NII from rising rates, but also double-digit growth in fee income and net client growth. And while loan and deposit volumes have been stable, our propositions and client relationships have enabled a 10% growth in clients in the last two years.
The income growth has actually helped us with resulted in a healthy cost/income ratio and contributed to returns increasing from 14% to 20%. We have the opportunity now to grow income further while we increased our investment in simplification and automation. So we still aim to deliver a cost income ratio in the high 40s. And post COVID, we have benefited from a gradual release of modeled impairment, and we expect a more normalized impairment profile going forward. Overall, we expect returns to moderate from the 20% we reported last year, but we still target high-teens over the coming years. So to summarize, the UK Corporate Bank is already delivering strong returns. We are confident we can continue to grow at these attractive returns despite the normalization of rates and impairment Lastly, Private Banks and Wealth Management.
On top of my mind, day I became CEO, who was an ambition to realize the great opportunity that the Private Bank and Wealth Management business provides for Barclays. We had a strong private bank, have a strong private bank, both in the UK and in select international markets. But the wealth management business in the U.K. and our digital investing business, what we call smart investor was unprofitable and subscale. Moreover, these two businesses sat in separate parts of the bank on either side of the ring plans. Over the last 12 months, we have put them together again with the regulatory commission. And what this does is it provides us with a very significant opportunity to serve the financial needs of UK customers in our retail business, together with serving our high and ultra-high net worth clients.
In addition, it enables us to have a single investment function and shared platforms. We aim to provide advice to our customers and clients at each stage of their financial — personal financial journeys. And we will do so with robust financial management tools, which are fairly priced, managed transparently, constructive simply and delivered efficiently. So this is the Private Bank and Wealth Management business today. As you can see on the left-hand side, the business has been structured into four distinct segments. Firstly, self-directed digital investing for those who are starting out or want to invest anything from £1 upwards, a UK wealth management proposition for those that are more advanced stage in their financial journeys. And of course, a service for high and ultra-high net worth clients domestically and internationally, who have a full access to a full suite of private banking products.
What you see on the right is that the business has grown its assets and liabilities on the average of 10% a year over the last five years, and it’s reasonably well diversified both geographically and in terms of products. The combined business today is already producing high returns, 31% in 2023 compared to 14% RoTE in 2021. A good part of that growth has come from deposits, given the impact of higher rates, but we’ve also been growing our investing and lending offerings. The income has grown from £1 billion to £1.3 billion, and our cost-income ratio has shrunk from 86% to 69%. This is a very good and profitable business, but what it needs to do is to scale, particularly in the digital investing and the U.K. Wealth Management segments. Again, given its high contribution to the group, this is an area of investment.
So again, we’re going to do this by being simpler, better, and more balanced. Part of what I, being simpler, as I said, was to combine the businesses. We now have one management team, a single investment function, shared platforms, and simpler segmented customer propositions. And there are significant efficiencies from doing this. Part of being better is for us to fully leverage the synergies across the bank. And we are developing a more effective two-way referral flow for clients with other business units within the group. Barclays U.K. provides us with a significant source of new client referrals into digital investing and wealth management. And having a closer collaboration with the investment bank enhances our distinctive point of differentiation by giving private banking clients access to a wider range of investment solutions.
