The second source of ballast is our international corporate bank. That income has grown also. It’s helped, of course, by the rising interest rate environment. But in turn, it makes for a more stable top-line. So I said first is income. And you continue with income, and what you’ve got, as I said, is a scale business overall, but two businesses at slightly different stages of evolution and success. In Global Markets, we’ve made significant investments in technology and capital and we’ve had a corresponding growth in revenues. What we want to do now is monetize the investments which we have made and continue and deepen our capital discipline. The bottom-line here is that the markets business is at scale, it’s well invested in, and it’s a counterparty of choice for the most sophisticated investors in the world.
The investment banking business is at an earlier stage of maturity. It has just gone through a repositioning under new leadership. We have to strengthen in DCM and in the UK and with financial sponsors — we have strength in DCM and in the UK and with financial sponsors, but we need them to broaden and we need to deepen. We’re happy to focus here on RWA productivity, trying to move the business from being debt-heavy, which tends to be RWA-heavy to be more balanced across advisory and ECM, and fully integrate with our international corporate bank. Anna spoke to you earlier about the income growth in the investment bank and how much of it is under control, is in our control. And on this slide, what I want to convey to you is that over half of our income growth is coming from initiatives, which we control.
This means, of course, doing things better, because our team and client relationships can improve and deepen. And it is not arising from heroic assumptions about wallet growth or market share. We expect high single-digit income CAGR through 2026, but over half of that comes from management initiatives in markets and banking, which Adeel and I will cover in more detail shortly. The remainder comes from a normalization of the industry wallet. But as you heard from Anna earlier, it’s not the industry wallet going from lows to highs, but it’s going from its currently low levels to more historically normal levels. So the first lever was income. The second is RWA productivity. So moving to that second lever, what does RWA productivity mean? And why is it important?
As you can see from the top left, as we’ve increased RWAs in the markets business, we’ve actually kept the ratio of income to RWAs relatively constant. This reflects capital discipline, which we need to continue by recycling capital continuously to higher returning opportunities. And it also benefits from the higher velocity of capital, which we allocate to markets. On the other hand, the right hand side shows banking income over RWA, and this has declined over this period, which reflects the reliance on DCM in our current mix. As I mentioned, we have a plan to improve this, and I’ll cover this among the key initiatives in a moment. Overall, we intend to increase RWA productivity by reallocating capital towards the higher returning international corporate bank, and that’s within investment banking, and as well as towards financing opportunities in markets.
So income, RWA productivity, costs. And so the third important lever is costs. We have invested in a very planned and focused way in the investment bank, both in markets and banking, to the tune of about £3 billion in cash investment in the last three years. In markets, it’s mostly been about technology. Investing in the modernization of our infrastructure not only simplifies our operations and reduces costs, it also drives improved stability on our platforms, which leads to better client outcomes. Remember what I said at the start. Technology excellence and client outcomes are the same thing. In investment banking, of course, it’s much more of a human capital business. And what we’ve invested is in people with a focus of the infusion of talent in our focus sectors and products.
Now, what we intend to do is to monetize these investments and grow future income with relatively modest cost growth expected across the investment bank. So this includes higher performance costs, given the higher income, which we have in our plan. We will, of course, continue to make focused investments in our client franchise, but we expect these to be self-funded by efficiency savings. Overall, we expect to deliver an improved cost income ratio from around the 69% we have now to the high 50s by 2026. So, let me now take you through these two pieces, and Adeel Khan is going to begin — I’ll begin with investment banking and then Adeel will go to market. So in investment banking, I said that our markets and banking businesses are at different stages of evolution.
What our markets business did three to five years ago has been paying off, and we look to do the same in investment banking. So we start with some points of advantage. As I said, we are consistently number six globally. We finished this year over 2023 as the top UK investment bank, which is a position I always inspire to hold. We look more like a US bank than a European one. If you look at 66% of our revenues coming from the Americas and which is a much more profitable market than Europe. I’ve also said debt and DCM is the calling card of Barclays, where we are number five globally. We’ve also ranked number five with financial sponsors and have established ECM and advisory practices, but we need to grow them, and I’ll describe that shortly.
We intend to leverage our strength in DCM in several ways. We drive greater product penetration with clients, making existing capital allocated to our loan book work harder for us. First, we aim to broaden the product relationship with existing clients, principally by a treasury-oriented products and services. Second, we will continue to provide sophisticated rates, FX and equity risk management solutions to our clients through ongoing collaboration with global markets. And these synergies are important. This kind of business is typically originated with investment banking clients, but designed and executed in our markets business. Adding incremental products requires minimal additional capital and provides attractive recurring revenues, as I’ll cover on the next slide.
Our international corporate banking business is already well established in the UK, where if you look at it, 92% of our UK investment banking clients, have corporate banking dealings with us. That number is far lower outside the UK, and we aim to increase that by fully integrating our treasury platform into the investment bank. The ICB generates high-quality income and about 80% of it is recurring, therefore, making it more stable and more predictable, and it is capital efficient, helping RWA productivity, which is an important area of focus for us, as I said. We also need to rebalance our investment banking mix. We recognize clearly that we are overweight in DCM, and we are going to grow the proportion of our relative share in ECM and M&A, and we aim to do this in two ways.
First, we have invested on the top right to upgrade talent in technology health care and energy transition. Over 60% of the hires for which we made in 2023 were in these sectors. And together, they represent — these sectors represent about 40% of the industry wallet in the last three years, and we are confident that they will continue to be important. We also have an opportunity to leverage our strong position with financial sponsored relationships, where we rank on par with our US peers and to do more, ECM and M&A with the same sponsor clients as our US peers do. So to summarize on investment banking, we’ve got the products. We’ve got the client relationships. We’ve got the capability. What we’ve got to do now is to translate it into returns.
And the bottom line in the Investment Bank is we expect to generate about £700 million of income growth by 2026 from management initiatives. We will do this by building our key share to the levels we had a few years ago in the ways in which I outlined, and by improving our income productivity to drive further returns. I will turn over now to Adeel to talk about global markets, and then I’ll come back to conclude.
Adeel Khan: Thank you, Venkat. Good morning, everyone. My name is Adeel Khan. I run the markets business at Barclays, and I’ve been here for the last 15 years, a stat I’m incredibly proud of. So before I start, I think it’s important to set the stage. Over the last few years, we’ve all lived in an increasingly challenging environment. This has been experienced by a lot of few. As Venkat mentioned, we’ve gone through a pandemic, a war in Middle East and Europe and also a unpredictable inflationary environment. So our clients have also experienced this and the increasingly need a more reliable partner. So with all of this in mind, our ambition for the business is fairly simple. Number one, we want to be a consistent partner for our clients.
And secondly, we want to drive stable double-digit returns for our shareholders. So how do we do this and what are our drivers for success. Firstly, we won deep, broad client relationships within our business. Secondly, we want prudent risk and capital discipline within our businesses. And lastly, we want to transform our technology to drive better outcomes. So now I will run you through our plans for the next few years. But before that, let’s start with the numbers. So on the top left, you can see in 2019, we produced £5.3 billion of revenues. Now we knew at £5.3 billion, we cannot produce stable double-digit returns or be consistent to our clients. So we embarked on a new strategy. And over the last four years, we have increased our average revenues by £2.2 billion.
And today, we run a £7.5 billion revenue franchise. Now we care deeply about the capital we use to produce these numbers. And last year, our income to RWA ratio was 6.2%. Now that is a little light compared to where we like to operate, and we have generally operated higher. Plus in periods of volatility, like 2020, we were at 8%, which means we serve as a natural hedge for group income. Now over this period, we’ve also grown our institutional client market share by 200 basis points. In fact, since 2019, we have been the second fastest-growing client franchise among the major banks. Now if you look on the right, you can see that we have diversified ourselves across geographies, capabilities and businesses. Our regional footprint has a strong lean towards Americas.
