Amit Goel: Hi, thank you. Two questions for me. So, the first is, I mean, so clearly the legal entity mergers are pretty important in terms of the kind of the cost and the tax and so forth. So do you mind just reminding us exactly the main pieces in terms of the timing? So, would you be expecting some of that to happen within the first half of the year or is that kind of second half? And just things that we can monitor to check the progress there. And then secondly, just in terms of the revenue picture, just into Q4, obviously there’s the commentary on the transactional income and NII. Just thinking, are you thinking the underlying revenues Q4, X NCL are likely to be in line with what we’ve seen in Q3 or slightly better or due to seasonality slightly worse? Thank you.
Todd Tuckner : Thanks for the questions, Amit. So, on the legal entities in terms of the main pieces and the timing, obviously the big groups to address are the parent banks that will take place, the two Swiss banks and then the U.S. IHCs and the subsidiaries below. I mean I’d say those are, and in the UK as well. And those are going to be the biggest chunks of course across the globe. There’s also a lot of undertaking in Europe and in Asia, but the big, I highlighted the big pieces because that’s what you were looking for. We are working hard on developing plans for all of those. I think it’s fair to say over the course of 2024, I won’t at this stage speculate on exact timing, but we’ll provide more updates as we go and as we enter the year and as we go through the year, we’ll give you more specificity around timelines.
In terms of the revenue picture in the fourth quarter, I mean as you mentioned, repeating back that I offered some NII guidance for our core businesses in terms of underlying NII. We do see the potential for transactional activities. I mean, the market for transactional activities is a bit clouded at the moment. We are seeing some risk off, even though earlier this month, certainly some of the less hawkish sentiment, coupled with further rate hike pauses and seeing bonds and equities rally more recently, that would suggest perhaps more risk on, but I think that’s all counterbalanced as well in our clients’ minds also about what’s happening in the Middle East. And so we do see the potential for TRX in our asset gathering businesses as well as transactional activity in our IB to potentially be affected by that.
And as you mentioned, seasonality will for sure in any event be a factor. So I’d say the revenue picture is a bit clouded, but I at this point wouldn’t necessarily expect it to increase quarter-on-quarter significantly at this stage.
Amit Goel: Got it. Thanks. And just on the legal entity piece, so just, sorry from my understanding, it’s like getting the legal work done and getting the regulators to kind of sign off and just in terms of the main things that obviously have to get done to do the mergers. Is that right?
Todd Tuckner : Yeah, that’s correct. There is a lot of planning to be done. The planning manuals are incredibly extensive. And of course, it needs to be approved by the regulators. And when you think about the parent bank and how many jurisdictions they operate in, you’re talking about regulators across the world. So these are not simple transactions by any stretch of the imagination.
Amit Goel: Okay. Thank you.
Operator: The next question is from Benjamin Goy from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Benjamin Goy: Hi, good morning. Two questions, please. The first, if you could maybe speak about the profitability of the recovery of funds and assets of Credit Suisse and how it’s going, the discussion with clients there. And the second is, it looks like in particular non-core significantly outperformed your expectations, you said in Q2 in the third quarter. So just wondering what does it mean for the budget? So to say you have to accelerate a rundown in Q4 and beyond. Thank you.
Sergio Ermotti : Yeah. I mean, in terms of the non-core, I don’t think that extrapolating a quarter is meaningful. I do, as Todd mentioned before, we need to look at. In some cases, we were able to dispose that assets above marks in order that we will need to make an assessment about what we think is the value of those positions. But I would pay attention to – not to use the third quarter numbers and extrapolate and call it is better than what we expected, because we didn’t really give any guidance on that. So I mean, I think that we are confident that the quality, broadly speaking, of the assets is there. They are non-core assets per se. The vast majority is not problematic and therefore I’m not overly concerned about the revenue or the cost to exit.
As I mentioned before, it’s more of a matter of addressing the cost to sustain those assets than it is about managing out the asset themselves. In terms of recovery of the funds, we see the win-back strategy still in place. We have been – it’s very focused. Probably what I can offer as a comment is, as time goes by, we saw it already in the second quarter of the year after the announcement of the transaction and definitely has been confirmed in the third quarter. Basically, the third quarter is a year after you started to see departure of assets and client advisor from Credit Suisse. Despite the massive outflows that you saw, the amount of assets that were able to be moved by the people that were serving those assets has been within what we expected.
