Andrew Coombs: Good morning. I’ll ask a couple if that’s okay and just a quick one firstly. You reiterated the great consensus 5 billion NII guidance in the past, you’ve talked about being comfortable with consensus, which is obviously above that 36.5. So if I could just push you as to whether you are still comfortable with consensus. And then second question, buybacks and how you’re thinking about those. Obviously, a step change today going from two to three for the next quarter, a full month [ph] for the buybacks and the France retail, you’re looking at a 14.2 call it one ratio, still within your target range. You’ve said 2024 ROTE similar to 2023, payout ratio for the dividend similar to 2023. So the only delta seems to be loan growth where you’re still talking cautious short term there aiming for mid single digits in medium term.
So when we’re thinking about the buying back going forward, is it a trade off with that loan growth? So is it the case if the loan growth goes to mid single digits, you go back to 2 billion, whereas if it stays low single digit, you stay at 3 billion? Conceptually, how are you thinking about the buyback? Thank you.
Georges Elhedery: Thank you, Andrew. Okay, on your first question, NII guidance, I can reaffirm. We’re still comfortable with the 2023 consensus. As you look into 2024, we haven’t given guidance yet apart from the mid teens ROTE. But I’d like to kind of just point out two things just to keep in mind. The first one is, again, banking NII would be a better guide of how our earnings will behave with rates. So look at NII in combination with the funding cost of the trading book and immunized therefore your analysis from how much we end up channeling or not in terms of funding to the trading book activities. And then the second one just to keep in mind is the disposal of Canada and France, which will both contribute to an annualized $1.5 billion of NII, which obviously not be there as and when they go away, as and when the sale is complete.
And then finally, balance sheet growth at some stage in ’24 where we kind of start resuming the expectation of our balance sheet to grow. That’s I think in the broad sense how we should look at for 2024. Again, we’re not guiding but we’re giving you some tools that you can do your analysis. In terms of buyback, so a couple of things. First, the reason we announced a 3 billion buyback, certainly because we have the capital to support it, but equally because we have an extended period to do it. We mentioned that this is an intent to do it up to February results. That gives us four months. So I’ll definitely encourage you not to look at 3 billion as the new 2 billion. It is not. It is a reflection of the fact that we’re aiming for a — we have a longer period ahead of us, four months instead of three.
And we’re aiming to see if we can get up to 3 billion during that period. It’s there for kind of a specific consequence of this length of the period that is ahead of us for that buyback. We — look, I continue saying it remains our intention to perform a rolling series of share buybacks as long as the capital support it. We look at our forecast and our capital does — capital buildup does seem to be reasonably realistic in our forecast. And therefore, it remains our intention to do the series of buybacks. About the question of trade off between buybacks and loan growth, a couple of things. First, as you know, the proceeds of the sale of Canada will give us a buyback runway regardless of loan growth, because the gain — the proceeds less the priority use for special dividend will still allow for a few billion dollars of additional buyback and irrespective of our loans, so that’ll give us runway for loan growth.
