James von Moltke: Thanks for the questions, Chris. I’ll take all three and Christian and Olivier may want to add. First of all on costs, look, we’ve established a run rate. So what gives me confidence about ’23, is we exited ’22 at the run rate we essentially have to preserve now through the year. And that means that a lot of the initiatives that we’ve talked about, as Christian mentioned, that the key deliverables that we bucket for you on Page 29 of the deck that are in flight. And that’s I think an important thing to understand. This isn’t stuff on a whiteboard, this is where the initiatives are funded. We have delivery underway, we already have delivered on a significant portion of it. And we have great governance and tracking of how we bring this all to fruition, that’s underway.
And in a sense, those deliverables offset the impact of inflation and other investments that we make in the business over time. But the critical thing is to continue to manage that to that run-rate. Now, obviously, there’s some variability if it’s about, 1.6 — €1.65 billion per month, there obviously be some variability, but in essence, it’s trying to manage that flat, given all of the moving parts. We’ll also have the single resolution fund assessment, non-operating expenses, and where possible, we obviously seek to influence those to be as small as possible. In a sense, that has to continue now for several years. Obviously, there’ll be some FX impact over the years on that run-rate, but that’s sort of what the mindset is, and how we think of the building blocks.
As Christian outlined, we’re always working to find more measures on the expenses and peel the on, and then to be honest, the deeper you get into it, the more tools you build, to understand and control your expense base, I think the more opportunity you also find, which is good. Because as I mentioned, inflation has been running ahead of what we anticipated, say a year ago. On the targets and the path to the target, it’s a similar story. Revenue growth with flat expenses drives operating leverage and the cost income ratio down ROTE up. We feel really good as Christian outlined about the compound annual growth rate in revenues that we laid out in March and if anything, the ’22 start on that path was better. Interest rates a little better and the underlying drivers also better.
On credits, we entered a cycle that perhaps we didn’t expect prior to the beginning of the war, but we see a normalization of credit, as we get into ’24 and ’25. And we feel pretty confident on the book, as you’ve heard — Olivier describe and he can go into as well. So while the environment has clearly been dynamic, and the cost base has reset upwards in part with inflation, in part, with some investments that we made last year, I’d say the overall picture is actually pretty consistent with what we shared with you in March. Lastly, on the share repurchases. The REG items that are on the way, really the most significant is what we refer to as the wholesale IMI or Internal Models Investigation. So where we’ve been, as you know, other banks as well, they’ve been reviews underway on the applicability of new EBA guidelines in our model environment.
