Commercial International Bank Egypt (CIB) S.A.E. (COMI) Earnings Call Transcript

Good day, everyone. This is Elena Sanchez. And on behalf of EFG Hermes, I would like to welcome you all to CIB's Investor Day. The executive management team of CIB will be discussing the bank's 5-year strategy. And at the end of their presentations, they will take questions from the audience. Please note that all questions will be received by management through the chat box. I would like to hand over the call to Yasmine Hemeda, Head of Investor Relations. Yasmine, please go ahead.

Thank you, Elena, and thank you, EFG, for hosting this call. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We are delighted to welcome you to CIB's Investor Day, where we will be sharing our 5-year strategic vision. Let me start by thanking all of you for your continued engagement with us. Your questions and ongoing dialogue with our team have been invaluable in shaping today's discussion. Over the course of this call, you will hear directly from our executive management team as they outline CIB's strategic priorities, provide updates on the progress we've made since last year and walk you through the key initiatives we're putting in place to drive the bank's long-term growth and success. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this call is intended exclusively for investors and analysts. If any member of the media have joined, we kindly ask you to disconnect at this time. With that, it's my pleasure to hand over to our CEO and Executive Board member, Mr. Hisham Ezz Al-Arab, who will kick off today's agenda.

Yasmine. Thank you, Elena. Let me start by telling you where we are and where we came from. About a year ago, we started to draft and put our thoughts together for the 5-year strategy. One of the important things is to have the right team, which we do have. And maybe we have some skill sets gaps in the bank that we are working on and we're very close to finalize. The key thing here, starting with Tony on my left hand here, and I have to thank Tony for all the efforts he has done over the last 12 months without his active engagement, either internally or externally, wouldn't have been able to reach the point where we have, in my opinion, a world-class strategy doable and acceptable to the Board members and the management. The buildup took a while from bottom-up, then fine-tuning, validating views by industry specialists from consulting firms. And I have to stress under industry specialists for each segment and each product, including technology. And we reached that point. The team, including Islam, Omar and Rashwan in my personal opinion, have done an outstanding job in getting us where we are. And the point here, I feel very comfortable that, that team will be able to execute this maybe as well. I don't want to raise your expectation, but I think we can do more than what's on the strategy. We cross our fingers. CIB is in a different league now and the future is very promising. And I will pass the floor to Tony to start his intro.

Good afternoon, everyone. Can I start by saying thank you to Hisham and Yasmin for that introduction. But most importantly, thank you for everybody joining us today. By way of brief introduction because as many of you I won't have met, I'm certainly [indiscernible]. I've been a banker technologist now for 30 years. I spent 16 years at Barclays, lastly as COO of the U.K. business and a member of Derexco. I then moved to Nationwide, which for those of you that know that business is the second largest retail and business bank in the U.K., where I was COO and Deputy CEO. And then I moved to Santander, lastly as Deputy CEO for the U.K. and Europe. So it's a real pleasure to be here today, and it's been a real privilege over the last 12 months to work with Hisham and the Board and the leadership team who you'll hear from today to put the strategy together. So thank you very much for joining us. With this as a background, what I wanted to do is just very briefly introduce the flow of the materials today so that the investors that are joining us are clear what we're going to cover. We're going to start from Islam as the CFO, who's going to talk to the macro. And clearly, the macro economically, from a demographic perspective, competitive perspective, has been a core input to the strategy that we put together. And what you will hear from all of the team is how that macro input has shaped where we think the opportunities are for the organization. Islam and I then together are going to give you the top line story for the strategy. What is it that we're seeking to achieve over the next 5 years, but also what does that mean for investors and other stakeholders in that context? And what are the strategic KPIs against which we will measure success. And then most importantly, in many ways, we're then going to start to look at our 2 core businesses. So corporate banking, where Omar, who many of you have met before, but has recently taken on a much wider role overseeing the wider Institutional Bank from a strategy perspective as well as his core job leading markets will talk to us about our growth opportunity in corporate and institutional banking. We're then going to come back to Islam, who in the same way as I've just said, Omar has extended his role, Islam has done the same thing to oversee strategy for the retail bank. And so between Omar and Islam, we will hear our growth aspirations for our current business today that there's a huge opportunity. What we're then going to do is shift gear and talk about our new businesses and where we think there's going to be real growth opportunity for us, partly because of the market in which we operate and also because of the way that technology will change our opportunity to engage with consumers. And for those items, we're going to come back to Omar, who will talk to us about commercial and SME banking. Whilst they are segments we've been in, we have a huge opportunity to scale them tenfold from where we are today. So we really think about those as new business build opportunities rather than just incumbents where we're seeking to scale. And then we're going to go to Rashwan, who equally a number of you will have met before, previously led our retail and business bank and has now been appointed as the CEO designate for the digital bank. So Rashwan will talk to us about the digital bank in that context. And then we will start to regroup the whole story to look at the underlying enablers. And what we're hoping for the investors today is that you, therefore, get the full architecture of the story. From the external perspective into the top line strategy down into the business lines, what does that mean for the enablers? And then we'll come back to Hisham and I to just give a close and to move to questions. We are also joined by Walid Fazy today, who's our CRO. So when we get to questions, Walid will also be able to address them. So on that, I'm going to hand over to Islam, who's going to talk to us about the tailwinds where there is huge opportunity for us.

Thanks so much, Tony. Let me start at the beginning with the macro context of this strategy. And before discussing CIB's strategy, it is important to ground ourselves in the market we will be operating in over the coming years. Having spent more than 2 decades at CIB, I can clearly say that I've never been more optimistic about the outlook. Egypt's transformation is not simply a macroeconomic high-level indicator story, it is a structural banking growth story. CIB is uniquely, in my view, positioned to translate those 5 tailwinds we try to a little bit elaborate about them in this slide into compounding earnings, sustained resilience and durable long-term value creation. Not only economically, but I'll start with the economic aspirations. Economically, Egypt remains on the fastest growing and remains as a fast-growing large market in the region with a resilient domestic and demand base that's supported with a clear reform agenda. As growth normalizes and start normalizing over time since last year and inflation moderates over time, we see big demand for savings, credit, transactional services and expanding structurally over time. Demographically, also Egypt is uniquely positioned with a huge young growing population entering the market at a peak earning and consumption years. That will drive the sustained demand for retail banking, housing finance, payments, wealth products for the next decade in my view. From a regulatory perspective, also that was a second win, a second support win we got. The agenda is increasingly enabling. So all the regulatory frameworks have been built around the financial inclusion. What we expect to have by the end of the first quarter in terms of online onboarding and EQIC or the so-called digital onboarding regulatory frameworks, Instant Payments and the support for the real-time processing for instant payments and digital onboarding are technically and economically lowering barriers to entry and allowing banks to reach customers at a scale more efficiently than ever before. Egypt technology stack or the connection of the regulatory and decrees and guidelines issued recently, which is framed as a technology stack, Egyptian technology stack also adding to this and accelerating that shift. So mobile penetration, digital payments, the country framework for data and AI are fundamentally changing how banking is delivered those days, reducing the cost to serve and enabling new propositions that were not economically viable in the past near time. Finally, I would say that the competitive landscape is evolving over time, too. So there are new entrants among the fintechs, telcos, there are digital banks, and we are launching this year, one of them, but they are also rather than increasing the participation, increasing the overall market size. The size of the pie is increasing over time. So for a established bank like CIB, we do believe that trust resilience, innovation and balance sheet strength, which is increasingly built over time, will add and it will become a critical clear competitive advantage for us. Taking all of these economic tailwinds together, we do believe that those tailwinds will create a large and durable opportunity, a competitive macro tailwinds will add to the sustainable earnings story and the resilience and the long-term value creation of CIB, which is shaping the framework of this 2030 strategy. On that note, I will hand back to Tony, and we will start taking this into a top-level strategy and the details of the execution.

Thank you very much. So as you can see just on the -- Islam, thank you very much. As you can see on the summary slide here, when we were developing the strategy, the tailwinds for us really fell down into those 5 core drivers, a much improving economic environment, an extraordinarily young demographic in the country that gives us huge opportunity to be able to penetrate and grow an increasingly supportive regulatory environment through the CBE and other core regulators, a more competitive environment, which in ourselves, we recognize will drive better outcomes from CIB and a nation itself that's under transformation. And so those headwinds when we were looking at the strategy is what's really guided the scale of our ambition that you will hear about this afternoon. So turning to the content of the strategy itself and starting at the very top around purpose and aspiration. For those of you that have followed CIB for a period of time, you will know that today that our strategy has been described as being at the forefront of change, building for the future, turning aspirations into reality whilst maintaining agility and integrity. And all of that remains true. What we have done, however, is take the opportunity to refresh the bank's purpose and ambition statements. You'll see them on the slides. This is partly to make sure that as we go through the next 5 years, we've got the rallying cry of the direction we want to follow, but also so that we can really engage our 10,000 colleagues inside the organization and all of our strategic partners to understand what we really stand for. So as you will see, we've reframed our purpose as being about helping Egypt and Egyptians prosper. And those words were not landed on lightly. They were landed on very consciously because we recognize in a nation that is in transformation, our role is to help Egypt to prosper. We are the single largest private bank in the country and help every single customer that we engage with to prosper individually in the SME sector, the commercial sector or in the corporate and institutional bank. And so that rally and cry of helping Egypt and Egyptian prosper is what's driven our real thinking from Hisham and the Board. But we also recognized when coming up with our ambition and statement itself is that whilst that may be a good rallying cry in the medium term, we've got to be clear about what it is we are aiming to do in the next few years. And to boil that down simplistically, it's about building tomorrow's bank today. building ahead of competitors, building ahead of customer demand, maximizing the opportunity from technology, ensuring that our products and propositions don't just continue to lead the domestic market, but are benchmarked globally. So those 2 statements put together is about the medium- and long-term impact that we want to have for Egypt and for Egyptians and for our customers. And the short-term statement is to build energy and dynamism and urgency about recognizing the market is changing. So with that as purpose and aspiration, what we thought we would share with you is the core questions that we posed ourselves when really thinking about the strategy that we wanted to deliver on. Now you can read these for yourselves. But as you will see, the questions that we started to address in part driven by feedback from investors through the Investor Relations team and through direct engagement with investors themselves are all about targeting the organizational growth. They're all about identifying sources of differentiation. They're all about driving sustainable economic returns in a market that's changing. They are critically about value creation, and we will talk about that as we go through today. And they are also about maintaining the competitive advantage that we have today in leading the market, but recognizing that external competition is going to change that. And so those questions that investors can read have been, in many ways, the core top line points of proof that we have sought to go back to when thinking about whether or not the strategy is going to deliver. Moving on from that, what we've then really started to think about is, so what are going to be the strategic pillars for strategy as we look for CIB strategy as we look out from now until 2030. And again, you can read them for yourselves. But simplistically, they are all about growing sustainable earnings, reducing reliance on treasury income as interest rates fall. That's about sustainability. Investing for growth, taking the opportunity to make sure that we are investing today in order that the organization can compete in the future. targeting dividend and stock performance for shareholders, recognizing that, that is why the bank exists to both support economic growth at a country level, ensure that we support our colleagues to grow, but also generate returns for you, our core stakeholders as the shareholders. And in that context, improving stock attractiveness, not liquidity, but our ability to bring new strategic investors to the table to help us ultimately drive the outcome that we are seeking to around the target valuation, which we will talk about later on return on equity. So they are the strategic pillars that we are seeking to drive towards. But what that means really is that over the period ahead, we really do need to scale, materially scale our 2 core businesses. Our corporate bank is an extraordinary organization and an extraordinary offer to consumers, and the same is for the consumer bank. But the reality is we really need to start to drive that towards a 10% market share. But scaling our 2 businesses alone, we did not feel would be enough. And so therefore, we have also talked about building 2 new businesses -- the first is in commercial and business banking. As I said earlier, we are already serving that market, but not at scale. So how do we grow that 10x? And then critically, how do we invest in building a brand-new, separately licensed, separately branded, separately governed digital bank in order that we really are disrupting the market in order that we can compete in the way that will be necessary for the future. And it was fantastic and has been fantastic to see Rashwan move into his new role and bring all of his experiences from the retail bank into starting to build what I have no doubt will be not just the leading digital bank inside Egypt, but in the region itself. As a result of all of those things, as you will see, what we are, therefore, seeking is that not just are the returns where we want them to be, but we are doubling the balance sheet to make sure that the returns are sustainable, and we will hear more about that. We're increasing profitability in U.S. dollar terms, and Islam will talk about that in a second. And we are rebalancing what does the overall portfolio of revenue for the organization look like for us. And so simplistically, the next slide is strategy on a slide. We are seeking to scale our corporate bank threefold. We are seeking to double our franchise in consumer banking. We are seeking to 10x grow our commercial and business bank, and we're seeking to launch a stand-alone newly scaled digital banking to the marketplace. And these are the 4 pillars. These are the 4 battlegrounds that we will judge our success against. They are the way in which investors can also judge our success as we move forward because you can see simplistically in one place, what are the 4 battlegrounds that will determine whether or not we've been successful. So that's really all I was going to say other than to then start towards, well, how do we execute that? And as you will see here, we have started to define for ourselves the cornerstones of execution, building scale in the core businesses, building new businesses for growth and diversification, building technology and operational excellence to ensure that we use the skeleton key that technology will bring for growth and efficiency, whilst continuing to build the culture of speed, accountability and agility for the organization. And as a result, not just digitally, but also physically building unparalleled customer experience. So that's all I was going to cover upfront before we move to Islam, who will build out on these cornerstones, start to talk about the shape of the financial ambition and the strategic KPIs, and then we will delve down into the individual businesses. So thank you very much, Islam.

Thank you so much, Tony. I'll try to take the strategy in a box and do the unboxing process for Tony and put it into the investment analyst lens. So in my view, these are not initiatives. They are structural choices that define how CIB will grow over the coming 5 years, how we're going to allocate the capital, compound the value through the cycle and in service of a clear strategic and investment objectives. So I would summarize using this slide actually to summarize those choices across 4 pillars of growth and value creation. So first, we are building the scale of the classic franchises by expanding consumer, corporate banking, business banking with a discipline to growing market share, deepen the relationship and generating earnings that is repeatable, defensible over time. Second, we will build the growth through diversification by developing new engines, including the digital bank, commercial banking and transactional banking, which is the GTB strategy that conclude the whole payment angles in this bank over the coming 5 years. The objective of this pillar specifically is reducing the concentration risk and lift the quality and durability of earnings over time. The third pillar is around the efficiency and reaching a solution for growing faster than the market with a capacity and experience that is unbeatable by the other and regional market players. And I think in my belief and in our belief as collectively as a team that technology, operations, shared services is basically the solution. So by simplifying journeys, digitizing at a scale and enabling and embedding automation into our day-to-day operations, that will lead to a lower unit cost, improving the service quality, taking everything to STB straight-through processing and expanding the profitability and the revenue-generating profile of the bank overall. The fourth pillar, in my view, is basically building resilience into the balance sheet and operating model by strengthening the risk discipline, capital allocation and controls to protect returns across the cycles and sustain the long-term value creation. This is how our strategy -- our strategic cornerstones and initiatives will translate into a measurable valuable outcome. If you want to put that into a financial context, I think that financial house matters and matters a lot for the story. And this slide specifically will capture the financial outcome of the entire strategy. So by 2030, our ambition is to double the profitability in EGB terms. But actually and equally important is how that profitability is generated is a fantastic story by itself in my view. Today, a significant share of our earnings is influenced by treasury income and macro conditions. While profitable, a very, very profitable strategy, that mix is inherently more volatile and brought to the dependency -- some dependency on the external conditions, too. By 2030, a material large portion of our income or group income will come from the core banking activities, including consumer, corporate and commercial banking, transactional banking. And that by itself strategically will shift and reshape the earnings profile of the bank from 3 angles in my view. The first one, it will reduce the concentration risk by reducing the revenue streams across customers and diversifying the revenue streams across the customers, products and multiple segments we are serving as we speak. Second, it will improve the earnings visibility and predictability. So a big portion and a core portion of our revenues will come from a recurring relationship and relationship driven. The third change is basically strengthening the resilience across the cycle, allowing the bank to perform a consistent performance, whether the interest rate environment were high or extremely low. The result is not large -- just a large version of CIB, but structurally stronger business model with a higher quality earnings and more stable return profile and even a foundation for a sustainable ROE higher than 20% for the coming 5 years. That's what will allow profitability to compound and why we believe CIB will be more resilient from and valuable from an institutional value creation perspective. And finally, I think my next slide is apparently to bring everything together. So this slide brings together the ambition of our strategy and set a concrete measurable outcomes. So when you look at it, you'll find that driving growth means expanding the growth on both sides of the balance sheet. So with deposits growing at an average of around 18% and loans growing at an average of 20% annually, that will capture market share while maintaining the funding strength of the franchise and will take us to the expected 10% we are aspiring to get by the end of the cycle. Building resilience means reshaping the structure of the earnings. So by 2030, over 20% of our revenues will come from fees and commission, the fee income, the noninterest income of the revenue side and from the core businesses, which will account for the majority of the group income and concentration on any single income source will be materially reduced. Creating value means converting that growth also into a resilience into a superior shareholder return. Our target is a sustainable return of equity, as I just mentioned, over 20%, supported by a consistent net profit growth and a very disciplined capital allocation. And importantly, these targets are designed to work together because technically, growth without resilience could increase the risk and resilience without growth could cap the return. So value in our value creation model only created with achieving both of them together. By 2030, CIB will be a bank that's larger in scale, stronger in a structure and more predictable in performance, a profit that's supported by long-term compounding on a higher valuation. So far, we have outlined we are going -- where we are going and why the opportunity really is compelling. The next section is about execution, how the strategy will be translated into a concrete growth engines, starting with the 2 scale-ups and then with the 2 bus businesses with -- that will sit at the heart of our value compounding model. So I'll go now to Omar, who will cover the corporate and institutional go-to-market and strategy over the coming 5 years.

Thank you, Sam. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Next month marks my 23rd year in CIB -- over those 2 decades, I have had the privilege of witnessing almost every major transformation that the bank has been undertaking. And from the early 2000s and until today across 5 strategic cycles, one constant has been always defining CIB, resilience matched with agility. So during today's presentation, I will be focusing on the business side of the bank outside consumer banking, which Islam will be covering later on, mainly Corporate Banking, Global Transactional Banking, commercial and business banking, as you can see it on the agenda. So the first part covering the corporate banking and Global Transactional Banking is to provide an overview on how we're going to be operating and where we have an ambition plan to both scale and diversity. The second, encompassing commercial and business banking is really a very different challenge and where we have set ourselves a goal of 10x build this business. In many respects, this is much more likely building a new business, given the scale of transformation and capability needed to execute. Collectively, there are -- those are not just business lines. There are 2 core engines of earning growth, resilience across cycles and shareholder value. What I'll walk you through today alongside the slam for the retail and Rashwan for the planned launch of digital bank is not a collective of initiatives. It's a coherent business platform designed to deliver stronger and more predictable earnings, higher fee contribution, better capital efficiency and scalability under a constructive economic outlook. This platform is central to support CIB's ambition by improving not just how much we earn, but how we earn it. So let's start by corporate banking. Corporate Banking is already a strong franchise in CIB. It has been a core contributor for earnings in periods of volatility and a trusted partner for many of Egypt's leading corporates. But as we look ahead, our ambition is not simply to do more of the same. The real opportunity lies in changing the shape of earnings, not just the size. Historically, corporate banking in Egypt and across emerging market has been heavily balance sheet driven. That model works, but it comes with higher earnings volatility, greater sensitivity to funding costs and increasing pressure on capital. Our strategy is to complement balance sheet growth with deeper relationships, strong client primacy and materially higher fee income. This is what allows corporate banking to evolve from a volume engine into a long-term value and valuation driver. To understand why this matters now, let me anchor this in the market opportunity, as you can see on the slide. The Egyptian corporate banking market is going into a phase of a structural expansion, not just cyclical recovery. By 2030, total corporate loan volumes are expected to reach around EGP 15 trillion, growing at roughly 17% a year. That headline number is really important, but what matters more is what sits behind it. First, growth is increasingly driven by private and nonstrategic public corporates, as you can see from the numbers in the -- on the slide. Those clients require more sophisticated financing, require value structuring and advisory and typically generate higher lifetime value for banks. Second, growth is becoming geographically broader. Economic activity is no longer concentrated in a few urban centers. New industrial zones, logistic corridors and export-oriented clusters are expanding the addressable market. Third, the sector mix is changing. Sectors such as IT, building materials, oil and gas, shipping, infrastructure, automotive and power are capital-intensive, investment-driven and structurally long term. These sectors, again, do not just need loans. They need structure and financing, foreign exchange expertise and advisory, risk management and transaction banking capabilities. Finally, lending demand itself is [indiscernible] based. We see healthy pipelines across working capital, term lending and CapEx financing in both local and foreign currency. When you put all of this together, the conclusion is very clear. This is a large, visible multiyear growth opportunity. The differentiator will not be a balance sheet capacity alone. It will be execution, client ownership and earnings quality. That brings me to how CIB intends to win. Our ambition is to become the leading primary bank for corporate clients in Egypt. We execute this throughout 4 deliberate levers. First, frontline productivity. This is not about working harder. This is about working smarter. By digitizing journeys and equipping relationship managers with better tools, we increase client-facing time, speed of execution and conversion rates. Second, targeted client acquisition. Growth is selective. Capital will be deployed where returns are attractive and risk-adjusted economics make sense, not simply where volumes are available. Third, deepening existing relationships. Today, our average share of wallet is around 20%. That tells us that we already know these clients, we already manage the risk. The upside lies in becoming their primary bank. Moving towards 30% share of wallet drives growth with lower margin risk. Fourth, fee income throughout global transactional bank. And let me pause here because GTB is one of the most important value levers in this entire strategy. GTB is not a support function. It's the spine of the business platform, the part of the bank that converts activity into recurring, predictable and capital-light revenues. Today, GTB already generates fee income, but its contribution to total revenues is still below its true potential. What makes GTB strategically powerful is that it sits inside our client daily operations. Once we manage payments, collections, liquidity and trade flows, we become operationally embedded. That changed everything. Client switch cost increase, balance volatility decreases and cross-sell becomes structural. In our model, GTB is treated as a product factory, serving corporate, commercial and business banking simultaneously. We are fixing the core first, cash management, payments, collection, cross-border flows. Then we differentiate by APIs, digital trade, embedded finance capabilities. And this is supported by $20 million to $30 million of GTB-related CapEx already embedded in the plan. Now let me be very clear about what this delivers by 2030, as you can see it on the slide. GTB fee income growth from EGP 6.7 billion to around EGP 24 billion by 2030. This is approximately 4x growth. GTB contributes to around 30% of corporate banking revenues and around 20% of commercial and business banking revenues. This represents roughly $270 million of incremental fee income. The impact is not just higher revenue. It is lower earnings volatility, stronger funding volatility -- stability, sorry, higher client lifetime value and better capital efficiency. This is why GTB is one of the most powerful drivers of valuation in this strategy. When you combine all of this together by 2030, we tripled the corporate lending book, we doubled the deposit base, Fee and commission income rises to around 30% of revenues. The result is a corporate banking franchise that is more predictable, more resilient and more valuable. Now let me hand to Islam, who will be discussing and covering the consumer banking part.

Thank you, Omar. So at the beginning, let's say, the opportunity in the retail market is really large. The economics have shifted over time and CIB is uniquely positioned to capture it. So Egypt has over 70% account ownership today, yet effectively banking penetration remains at 35%. That gap represents tens of millions of customers whose financial needs are being served only partial or not at all by the banking system, which is where exactly the opportunity is. So historically, this gap existed not because the banks lack the demand, but because the economics didn't work. So the cost to acquire, serve and manage mass market customers outweighted by the revenue generated from such specific segments that resides under the retail business in Egypt. The equation now is changing, and it's changing decisively for many reasons. So regulatory developments, which as I highlighted at the beginning of my presentation, while we were just explaining the tailwinds of the macro and specifically the expected digital onboarding and EQYC, which is dramatically will lower the acquisition cost and friction and mobile-first servicing models, which will reduce the cost to serve, which was a [indiscernible] over time in this market and the availability of data and analytics, which will allow a price and smart risk taking and personalized offers at a scale, profitability in such segments and in some of those segments were previously unattractive changed dramatically because of the new economics. At the same time, Egypt's demographics also, again, is working for our favor. This country has over 60% of the population under 30. All of them are really digitally native, increasingly bankable and honestly, entering the market at the weak consumption years. The result is a consumer and the retail banking shop with revenue pool growing on a combined basis on annual basis almost more than 10% over the next 5 years and materially faster than the GDP growth. For CIB, this will create a once-in-generation opportunity to scale consumer banking profitably and deepen the relationships with existing customers and capture share of underpenetrated segments, all while structurally improving margins through the digitization. In short, consumer banking no longer a trade-off between profitability or growth with the right engagement, distribution and technology model and infrastructure, I think we will solve for the profitability. When we design and strategize for the retail banking, and because in the world of the retail banking demographics, yes, it's creating the opportunity, but the wise and smart segmentation and targeting, we determine the right return level. So in order to convert this demographic tailwind story into a sustainable earnings, we have deliberately segmented the market and tailored our strategy for each segment based on its economics. So let me now walk you through how we think about each consumer segment, where we invest for growth, where we defend our leadership position and franchise and where we focus on cost discipline and how that translates into a scalable ROE-accretive consumer franchise by 2030 from an investor angle. So the first segment indeed is actually the wealth segment, which is one of the CIB's strongest franchises as we speak. And this segment is already profitable, capital-light and relationship-driven. So our objective here is not to reinvent but a disciplined expansion. So by 2030, we aim to grow our wealth segments and double the customer base from 75,000 to approximately around 150,000, increasing our market share from 8% to 12%. The value creation comes from deepening relationships rather than stretching our margins, increasing assets under management, cross-selling investments into insurance and investment products will reinforce CIB as a primary bank for such prime customers. From an investor perspective, wealth will deliver high fee contribution, strong CASA current account and savings a lower credit risk profile and stable returns, making it core pillar for the earnings and quality and resilience. When we look at the Bus segment, which is basically shaving the upper mass segment within the social grid in Egypt is where the largest absolute growth opportunity sets. So today, the segment represents a significant portion of the market, yet CIB is materially underpenetrated, which is where the opportunity. So by 2030, our ambition is to increase the share by around 5 percentage points, acquiring roughly 1 million additional customers while maintaining market-level margins. This is a scale story, not a pricing story. So the economics will work for us because customers in that segment have meaningful balances, rising income and high penetration to adapt multiple products. So it's an opportunity for upselling, cross-selling for deposits, cards, lending, insurance and investments. From an investor perspective, the Plus segment is the single largest contributor to the incremental revenue growth and a key driver for operating and leverage ROE extension, which is expected higher than the 20% for the overall bank in dollar terms, given the new norm we are expecting on the interest rate environment. The third segment basically is the Prime segment, which will require a more selective approach. So while CIB already captured a fair share of Prime customers, a large portion of this space is payroll driven with a limited product depth and subscale profitability indeed. So in Prime, the strategy is a bit selective. growth with selective in terms of growth with focus on cost to serve discipline. So we will grow the upper prime segment where economics are attractive and migrate the lower prime to a lighter and smarter digital infrastructure. The objective is a higher profitability per customer, not volume for its own sake. The fourth segment in that lay is basically the light segment. And the light segment is a very focused disciplined kind of a segment. We call it the financial inclusion segment. We don't pursue an aggressive growth over here. And instead, we reduce the cost to serve through a digital-only servicing and migration model. And we will consider that as a referral channel to our digital bank to when Rashwan will come to that, I think we'll elaborate about the synergies between the 2 entities. ensuring that the segment doesn't dilute the returns too. And finally, which is, in my view, an optional upside and critical and important upside is the overseas customers. So finally, that overseas segments will provide an incremental upside for the core dependency for the core segments within the retail shop. These segments will scale alongside wealth, plus and light, leveraging digital onboarding, remittance and targeted propositions without recurring heavy physical infrastructure, especially once the government starts introducing by the first quarter, as we expect, the digital onboarding and ECOYC regulation. That will enhance the deposit inflows, the FX activities, fee income while maintaining a low incremental cost over time. Our view over here is a capital-efficient extension for the domestic consumer strategy, and that's what will make CIB operating from Cairo, a regional player or a regional platform from a business perspective. Putting all of this together is not accidental. It is by design. And we have invested where returns will compound and defending where economics are structurally strong and apply discipline where scale alone doesn't create value. And this is how Consumer Banking becomes a structural ROE accretive, as we explained earlier. In my next slide, I'm trying to explain how we are turning demographics into a disciplined growth. So growth will be transformed over time into sustainable value creation. Our consumer agenda is built around 3 priorities. The first one, acquiring profitable customers at a scale. And we do this through partnerships, strategic partnerships, targeted acquisitions and data-driven segmentation, focusing on customers with long-term value rather than short-term volumes. Second, we deepen our customer relationships, and that means moving beyond deposits and lending cards, insurance and investments and increasing products per customers on lifetime to maximize the customer lifetime value over time while improving the stickiness of the relation and the stickiness of their accounts. The third pillar, we transform that service model into scalable, efficient model by digitizing end-to-end journeys and shifting service to mobile and remote channels, and we are materially planning to reduce severely our cost to serve capitalizing on what we're going to do into our plans for technology and operation. So now back to Omar to cover the first build initiatives, which is the commercial and business banking.

So now while corporate banking captures scale at the top end of the market, the next leg of growth for this strategy comes from segments that have been historically being underserved. Commercial banking and SMEs what we call it in CIB business banking. Let me start with commercial banking. So commercial banking sit at the heart of the Egypt economy. Yet for years, they have been squeezed between SME and large corporate models. Our approach is different. We are building distinct fit-for-purpose platform, each with its own economics, its own risk model and its own growth logic. This allow us to scale profitability. Mid-corporates represent one of the most attractive risk-adjusted opportunities in the banking sector. Today, we generate around 15% to 25% of banking revenues in Egypt compared to 25% to 35% in peer emerging markets. The gap reflects underpenetration, not lack of opportunity. So as you can see on the slide, the expectation by 2030 that loans will be growing to EGP 1.5 trillion, deposits will be growing to reach EGP 1.3 trillion and revenues to reach around EGP 700 billion. For CIB, Commercial Banking adds diversification, scale and strong cross-sell potential. And critically, GTB is embedded from day 1. Embedding GTB early allows us to anchor prime relationship faster, generate fees before balance sheet and improve risk visibility. This is why GTB will be contributing to around 20% of Commercial Banking revenues by 2030. Commercial Banking becomes a new earning pillar, not a transitional segment. Moving to SMEs or business banking. SMEs are the backbone of the Egyptian economy. They contribute to around 45% of GDP, yet remain underprepresented in the Egyptian banking lending. And the gap is closing rapidly. By 2030, as you can see on the slide, the loans will be reaching around EGP 2.1 trillion by 2030, deposits to EGP 2.4 trillion, revenues to around EGP 230 billion. Our ambition as CIB is not just to participate. It's to become the fastest-growing full-service SME bank in Egypt with discipline. That means scaling credit using analytics, protecting asset quality, growing deposits and transaction and balances and avoiding linear cost growth. And GTB is equally critical here as well. In SMEs, transaction volumes matter more than ticket size. Payments, collection and cash management allow us to grow revenues without heavy capital usage. This is why GTB-related revenues will be growing to around 20% of business banking revenues. And most importantly, business banking feeds commercial banking, commercial banking feeds corporate banking. And this is how lifetime value compounds and why this platform is so powerful. And if you look on the slide, our aspiration for the Commercial Banking is to reach $90-plus million segment revenues, $85 billion in lending portfolio and 1,000-plus customers with facilities extended, while on the business banking to double our active customer base to almost double our segment revenue and 10x lending portfolio. So when you look at corporate, commercial and business banking altogether connected throughout global transactional banking, what we are building is not just growth. We are building a structurally higher quality earning profile. Corporate banking delivers scale and primacy. Commercial banking unlocks the missing middle, Business banking captures entrepreneurial growth and GTB connects everything like a glue through recurring fee-based income. Together, these businesses support sustainable growth, resilience across cycle and the market capitalization well beyond current levels. And now I will hand over to Rashwan, who will take us through the planned build and launch of the digital bank.

Thank you, Omar. I'll try to walk you through the -- our planned strategy for the digital bank and building and launching the digital bank and try to put some light around why we're so excited about this new investment and the way forward for the program. So in a nutshell, that we'll be talking about why this is the right market to start doing that business in and why this is the right time also. Then out of that big opportunity, how we're building our business model and entry strategy to exploit that opportunity and how CIB and why CIB, we think we believe CIB is best positioned to capture this opportunity in this market. And the last part would be talking about where are we exactly from taking that from a strategy and plan into reality on the ground. So the first part is about why this Egypt is and why now is the right thing. I don't want to repeat many things that Islam and the team have already covered about the demographics in the market, the young population, the digital penetration, mobile phone penetration, et cetera, and also how many of those customers are already on digital payments somehow. They are linked to a wallet, linked to a prepaid card or somehow, they are into the digital play, however, still severely underbanked and severely underserved. The -- if you look just on the smartphone penetration and how much people are actually using their smartphones in the everyday life and then put that in front of how much they're consuming financial products, that's a huge opportunity to exploit, honestly speaking. The second part was about the regulatory framework and ecosystem, which is already the team have covered. But now we've seen clear digital bank regulations for licensing. We've seen banks are actually applying for digital bank licenses and taking those. And many fintechs are coming into the ecosystem. Central Bank other regulators are shaping up the ecosystem to enable offering financial services in the market. And also, as Islam explained before, how much of the ecosystem is getting ready for that in terms of real-time payments, eKYC or digital identity, the connectivity to the world on the remittance front, et cetera, et cetera, and how much the government is sponsoring AI and big data initiatives across the country. The last point about why Egypt why now is even the most progressive conventional bank will not be able to serve mass segments at scale with an economic model. So the 3 things together makes this the perfect moment, the perfect market to get into digital bank licensing. The second part is about how we're going to exploit this opportunity. One is about setting this as a separately licensed, separately capitalized, separately run bank for many reasons. And that wasn't an easy decision, honestly speaking. We've been thinking about this with many debates around what would be the right structure. We ended up with -- it has to be like that for 2, 3 reasons. One, the -- this is the only way we can really ring-fence this business performance in one entity where investors can really be able to measure, evaluate their business activity and performance so that it would have clarity for investors community around the value of the franchise we're building. Two is about the brand. CIB is the strongest ever brand in the market when we talk about blue-chip corporates, large enterprise, wealth segment, even middle class segment and consumer bank. However, when we go down the pillars of the customer segments, there's something wrong with the click. When we go down to the segments, then maybe CIB is not the right brand to use to penetrate those segments. And actually, that was proven by research. So that have a separate brand to address those markets is the right strategy to address. The last point is about we really need to make good use of building this tech stack on a clean slate and take the maximum opportunity in order to make the most efficient, the most agile, the most relevant to the consumer, technology and operating model, not just about the technology software or applications we use, but also how people integrate and interact together in order to come and produce products and go to the market. And that clean slate that we're going to use will build a world-class modular best architecture that banks are following globally. I mean, digital banks are following globally, and that will enable our go-to-market strategy to go after mass customer segments, NREs and small and micro enterprises in the business front. The last point about having that as a separate entity is how we structure the ownership setup around the bank. So that we're building this offshore holding company that will own UAE-based offshore holding company that will own the operating license banking agent. This will give us -- actually will give the shareholders of CIB 2 big optionalities in the future. One is value creation through capital injection through other strategic investors that could be possible into the future and realizing the real value out of the new franchise and also give the optionality for CIB and the new digital bank to grow beyond Egypt once we have a solid and successful business model inside Egypt. So between the 3 dimensions, that was a clear direction from the Board about the new investment. Then the question about why CIB. We have 4 things here to mention. One, CIB is by far not just the regional, but also an international benchmark for governance, compliance and understanding regulatory frameworks and respect and do business profitably within those boundaries. And that in itself is a huge competitive advantage to get a deposit-taking financial institution license in that country. Two, there's no doubt how deep the local market knowledge of this organization. You've seen through the other presentations and the other strategies, how much we accumulated experience amongst the team and the Board of CIB of how to build a product market fit, how to understand customer subsegments, how to leverage data and technology in order to build the best and the most effective go-to-market strategies and plans. Third, CIB is always a very renowned risk management school, honestly speaking, in the region. So we understand exactly how to balance between risk reward, how to exploit opportunity and value out of risk management, our asset products. And for that specific segment and our business case, asset growth is critical, and it's not really an easy thing to learn or to imitate easily. And then CIB is, by nature, a unique investor to get into an asset -- a big asset play in the financial services in that market. All these pillars would lead to a very rewarding business case that we just had the Board to approve that would lead to a 10 million customers acquisitions between mass consumers in Egypt, nonresident Egyptians and micro and small businesses across the country with an ROE that would exceed 50% and a breakeven period that would range between the third and fourth year basically. The last part is how far did we go so far. So as I just said, the Board of Directors of CIB have just approved our business plan and investment envelope and the license application for the digital bank last month, we've officially submitted our license application to the Central Bank and we've also submitted the request to establish the holding company in the United Arab Emirates under the ADGM jurisdiction. Two, we already have been already busy building our tech stack, and we continue to do this. And that would be technically ready for an MVP launch or minimum viable proposition to be launched in the second half of 2026. In parallel, we're also working on ironing the tiny details about recruitment, executive management and the entire team, the go-to-market plans in terms of acquisitions, the customer onboarding, the partnerships, pricing models and bundles, et cetera. And at the end, I thank the ExCo of CIB, the Board of Directors for the extreme excitement that I've seen and support for the new initiative. And we're equally excited as in the digital bank team for that plan ahead. Thank you very much. And now back to you, Amin. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Rashwan. In our next section, basically, we will cover in that about how technology shared services and banking operations are central to the delivery of this business strategy, not just the support functions operating at the background of the execution. So our business objectives are extremely clear from a strategy perspective. We want to grow faster than the market, improving the quality of earnings while allowing and controlling a broader risk management and maintaining our cost structure as it's within control limits. And without the right enablers, scale works against us. So growth could increase the complexity, cost and operational risk, ultimately eroding returns. And technology and operation in our view, is changing the equation, and that will allow us to grow customer base volumes and transactions without a proportional increase in cost at risk. From a business perspective, that will mean faster time to market for new products, better pricing and risk decisions through the data and analytics and service model, and that can support millions of additional customers without diluting margins. From a financial perspective, this will translate into operating leverage, lowering the unit cost, improving cost-to-income ratio and more predictable earnings over time, all of which directly support the valuation or in a very simpler terms, we want to make sure that growth is creating returns rather than consuming returns. So -- in my next slide, I'm trying to explain why incremental change is no longer sufficient in our case because both external environment and our internal ambition are evolving at a pace that require a very step change in how operations, shared services and technology functions. So externally, the regulatory landscape, the new one is pushing deeper towards for financial inclusion, digital onboarding and promoting for new entrants, including the digital bank of CIB, fintechs, telcos and digital banks from the competition too. And all of that are setting a higher expectation on speed, simplicity and security and maybe the availability of the ranking services too. So customers now expect banking and banks in general to be instant always on and seamless when it comes to channels and channel management. Internally, our business ambition has changed at a scale -- so you haven't seen a growth rate smaller in terms of size, less than 2 or 3x across all franchises, either the new ones or the classic franchises. So if we don't transform, the growth would increase the cost and the complexity and the operational risk. And that would ultimately dilute the return. So transformation change the equation, and it allows us to scale customer transactions and products without scaling the risk and the cost. In this environment, transformation is not optional. It is basically the price of the change. It's the price of the future actually value about to [indiscernible]. For the next slide and to support something -- so to support our growth ambition, so we have defined a clear and focused technology transformation agenda anchored in 7 strategic themes to build the bank that can go faster and safer and more efficiently than the market itself. These themes are not IT initiatives. They are business levers designed to improve scalability, resilience and returns over time. So the first one is basically which has already started working on is enhancing and modernizing the core banking and infrastructure technology. This ensures that we can scale the volume and customers and the number of services without compromising the stability, performance or availability of the services or the platforms itself. Second is basically the digital channels and customer experience platforms. This is about increasing engagement, reducing frictions across channels and shifting sales and services to a lower cost structure models, higher conversion channels to serve the new retail segments we are about to serve or even beyond the [ border ] segments we are about to approach soon. The third is data and analytics and AI, which is with the new capabilities will allow for a better pricing, smarter risk taking and more personalized offers, which will directly improve the revenue and the quality of margins. And then as long as CIB is moving into more digital form, so cybersecurity and resilience is not a question. And the first theme is basically around the compliance and ESG. And the target here is to make sure that we are, from regulatory expectations, we are managing and we are aligned and the governance and transparency is on the top of our business priority towards our customers and towards our stakeholders. Innovation, growth and ecosystem expansion. This is how we will accelerate the time to market and the partner efficiency and unlock the revenue streams beyond the traditional banking relations. The seventh theme is basically execution and transformation enablement because in order to reach all of those technology implementations, technology components and cornerstones, we need to change the way we deliver the operating model of technology and shared services from within. All of these 7 themes together will add for the support value creation model of the strategy itself. My next slide is basically speaking of how modernization and simplification will unlock a real economic value and bank simplification is not in our terminology is about doing less, but it's about doing better at a scale. So at a scale, complexity is one of the biggest destroyer for returns. And every layer of the duplication, manual process or tightly coupled systems will increase the cost and slow the execution and raises the operational risk, which will not be allowed. Our approach here is a very -- a little bit tough, but doable approach to modernize the technology architecture while simplifying the operating model at the same time. So on the technology side, we are moving towards more modular event-driven architecture that allows for upgrading components independently and launch new products faster than the market and scale volumes without rewriting the entire core like the old days. We are also decoupling digital channels completely out of the core system and the core infrastructure of the bank, which means customer journeys can evolve quickly without destabilizing the bank's backbone. And data is being treated as a strategic asset, and we are capitalizing on data as a key enabler for even the commercial offering going forward. So with real-time integration, strong governance around the data and AI and the emerging technology, a higher quality of decisions, especially when it comes to pricing, credit and services and serving customers across channels, I think that we will -- came a long way, and we start leaving some value over there. So in parallel, we are simplifying the organizational and delivery model within the operating functions, within the technology functions, within the control functions. Teams are being aligned around end-to-end products and journeys supported by modern engineering tools and clearer ownership over services rather than hierarchies. Finally, that will translate our transformation into measurable outcomes in my view. So these outcomes are what turn transformation investments into tangible shareholder value. So the first on customer outcomes. So our target is to deliver consistently a higher service quality across all segments and reflecting this in our targeted floor for our Net Promoter Score, higher than 70% to 80%. This is -- that will be the floor. A higher NPS doesn't mean a branding metric. For us, it drives retention, share of wallet and pricing power. Second, on the speed and efficiency, we are targeting end-to-end turnaround time for the key processes within the bank, which is beating from a service benchmark perspective, the regional competition. Faster processing improves the customer experience, increase the conversion and release capacity without adding headcount. Third, on cost and productivity. Through automation and digitization, we materially reduce manual processes within the bank that will lower the unit cost, improve the control and allow the bank to scale volumes without scaling operating expenses. Fourth, on the resilience and trust, upgrading the platform for stronger cybersecurity and governance and control environment will take us to a different space when it comes to digital competition. Taking all of these together, that outcome will ensure that the growth will be translated into operating leverage rather than complexity. That will bring us to the final part of today's strategy day. Let me hand back to Tony to take us through how we are setting up CIB for a sustained success.

Thank you to Islam, Rashwan and Omar. We consciously covered a lot of ground today, and I've been talking for some time. So it's just 2 final slides of closure before we go to Hisham. Firstly, as you can see from this slide, and I said earlier, the strategy in many ways is simple. It's execution that's hard. We've set ourselves an ambition to clearly scale our 2 businesses. What that really means doubling the franchise for the retail bank and more than doubling the balance sheet for the corporate bank. And you heard that from Omar and Islam earlier. Secondly, we have said that we will launch our essentially new businesses in Commercial and Business Banking with an ambition to take material market share and to grow that business 10x from where we are today. And at the same time, subject to regulatory approval, we will launch and scale the planned digital bank under a separate license, under a separate brand in order that we can really unlock the opportunity that new digital technologies and new digital models bring. And as a result of that, if we execute all as planned and the macro continues its current trajectory, we will have, as you heard from Islam earlier, diversified revenue and reduced concentration risk on treasury, build a more diverse and risk-managed, importantly risk-managed, well-risk managed asset base and lay the path for sustainable growth for the next cycle. So the final slide for today is just a summary of the outcomes of the strategy. Firstly, we genuinely do believe that CIB is undervalued. Now we know that, that's about market sentiment, and we have to prove that. But we have a clear ambition to drive valuation of this bank above USD 10 billion and maintain it there well before 2030. We believe we can do this whilst also achieving a real return on capital in U.S. dollar terms above 20%. And I know that we've had some questions come in on return on equity. So when we go to questions, we're going to ask Islam, as the CFO, to elaborate on that point to make sure that investors really understand them. We absolutely believe that the scale opportunity for CIB is mouthwatering in many ways. And therefore, we are going to drive the business towards a 10% market share across all of our segments. But we will not allow this growth to come at the expense of efficiency. In fact, the absolute opposite. And so as you've just heard from Islam, through technology and operational excellence, we should be able to deliver this growth whilst continuing to maintain our market levels of efficiency. The new digital bank, subject to approval, is, in many ways, one of the most ambitious value plays, not just for CIB, but in the entire market. And we genuinely believe as a team that without reinvention, all incumbents are threatened in real terms for performance. And so unlocking that value through the digital bank, securing 10 million consumers and getting to a breakeven within years 3 to 4 is something that we are firmly committed to. And then alongside that, as many people will know, CIB has always been an academy of learning. And as Hisham said right at the very beginning, we are continuing to bring new talent into the organization to make sure that we can deliver the level of excellence that we commit to you, the shareholders for our geography. But we will not, and I'm sure we will hear from [ Walid ] in a second, allow ourselves to do that at any point by weakening controls in the organization or by reducing the risk returns. So as I said and others said at the very beginning, we're hugely optimistic about the outlook for CIB, both because of the external tailwinds, but also because of the momentum we've now built for execution. Thank you very much for joining us today. We're really happy to take questions. But before we do that, let me just return to Hisham to say a few words of closure.

Islam, to elaborate on the 20% first then, before my closing.

So allow me to act like an analyst for a couple of minutes. So technically, this is not one of our earnings call where we're highlighting about historical results. This is reflecting a very stable macroeconomic view over the coming 5, 6 years. So technically, while we were planning for this 5C strategy, we're expecting a single interest rate digit, interest rate environment below 10% over the coming 5 years. We were aggressive on ourselves. We didn't expect that the music will keep flowing over time. So we were expecting that Central Bank of Egypt will run in our universe for the strategy, a single-digit interest rate. This is one. Second, we were expecting that a big part -- a big portion of our revenue structure will come from that comeback of CapEx, which will accumulate noninterest income over time, which could capitalize almost 30%, 40% to the total structure, which means a higher quality of earnings, a better, stable compounding effect on the value creation, which will reflect on the long run on a better valuation. A third important point in my view, as I highlighted at the beginning, the 20% were a long-term floor in dollar terms because we run the whole strategy in dollar terms to take the FX risk aside. Sorry for taking it to a deeper level of details.

We'll keep that for another call because I know it's getting late here, and we have kept people for more than an hour and 20 minutes. But to close, I think, all my colleagues here have elaborated as much as they can, and we are happy to take further questions later on if you want to go through details either concerning the operating models or the digital bank or the institutional banking, SMEs and business banking and you name it, the corporate side, Amr will be very happy to respond. Myself and Tony will be around. Please feel free to interact with us in short calls, if you wish, and Yasmine will arrange that. The -- Tony touched on a point and Islam as well about the quality of earnings. And I can tell you that 2025 was the test of changing the revenue mix to quality of earnings. And I will tell you why? Because at the early part -- late part of '24, our loan to deposits are local currency, when you split the balance sheet into 2 parts, was less than 50%. Now we have reached the optimal of 70% loan to deposits in local currency. When people tell you that I -- are relying on carry trades and treasury is not the case because what we are keeping in terms of liquidity is just the regulatory requirements. Therefore, it's no longer the core business as it used to be for many years. And the results of 2025 will come out soon. And that will prove our point that we have an engine or a machine that can produce easily by tweaking a few things, quality earnings that stands on a level playing field with the other regional or -- regional, I mean, in the Middle East or within the African continent. And that leads us to a point when we spoke about the valuation, maybe I told many of you that my KPI at the bank is shifting the earnings with the growth into quality earnings and reflecting that into the stock valuation. I have interacted with many of you either as a fund managers or some of the analysts and some are my friends, we spoke together. Some private family funds out of the U.S., they spoke to me or talk about the PE multiple. And when we made a comparison between CIB multiple and the African banks in Kenya or South Africa or other parts of the continent or in the Middle East, CIB is discounted, and we cannot justify why it's discounted. Some of my friends, as an analyst or the people I know, they said this is wrong. This is too cheap. The multiple of -- at the time, 4.5 should not be less than 9, because 9 is the mean within the -- this is the lowest point at the Middle East, and this is the average within the African continent. So without doing anything and just proving that we can create quality earnings from the actual commercial activities, it's fair to price CIB at par with its peers and their competitors within the African continent or at least at the lower end of the Middle East. I have seen some valuation of 17x earnings and 15x earnings. I'm not talking about that, okay? But at least the $10 billion that Tony is talking about will happen, will happen sooner than the 5 years because really, if I want to price -- sorry, I mean, I'm a shareholder, I'm talking my position, which is true. If you want to take CIB with expected, I don't want to reveal any insider about '25 numbers, and multiply them by the PE of 8, even 8, not 9. And this is the historic PE. It's not the future projected one. I'm being conservative in everything I said. I'm sorry, I'm going to exceed your 10 billion by miles. And I'm going to make a lot of money. And I will make a lot of -- I'm happy because -- listen, one thing I love in my life, this is personal. I like to see people wealthy, okay? Either the people that work with me, my shareholders, my customers, they deny that, will try to deny that. We have a lot of questions. I'm not going to talk about my personal life. You can go ahead.

Okay. So the first question, I think, Islam, you can take that one. What sort of normalized CAR base for the 20-plus percent ROE target? Also, is this excluding the digital bank initiative?

So on the CAR, I think we've highlighted that in a few calls earlier before, that there is a direction from the Board of CIB to maintain an optimal level of 22%, 23%. That was basically the range around the capital adequacy ratio at a normalized basis. And then our numbers here is the combined numbers, including the digital bank with the economics of the digital bank over time.

I may add one more thing to what Islam said. You have to keep in mind that even when we come -- we listen very well about the dividends policy and so on. And we have done a lot of work on this and maybe I'm not in a position to elaborate further, but we have done something that satisfy people and solid with the Board members and the requirements, especially that we have a lot of investments that we have to make with Rashwan on the digital bank next year and the year after. And we have a lot of CapEx we have to make as well in all the projects we are doing in terms of this straight-through process and digitalization. Taking those into account, and I'm not talking here -- and by the way, I'm not revealing a secret by saying that we are open to consolidation if there is an opportunity to look at. We are open in the market for a potential opportunity that will add value to us. Keeping that as well in mind, I think the team have done an outstanding job in analyzing and building up a case about the dividends, which is satisfying many people, I'm satisfied as well as satisfying the Board in terms of capital requirements in view of the aggressive growth we want to go.

Thank you. I think the CEO just covered 3 questions that we just had about the dividend policy.

Coming from my heart.

Okay. Next question for Rashwan. On the digital bank, how much equity is planned to be invested, both initially and also until it becomes profitable? And then you have a second question that I'll ask after you answer this one.

The current plan would -- the CIB would invest from $280 million to $300 million over the coming 3 years, including what we've spent already so far.

Next question, also about the digital bank. Should we assume that all the growth in the digital bank space will be organic? Or would you be open to scale the digital bank in M&A?

Definitely, our focus and key priority for the coming 12 months is to build and launch our own platform. But 100%, we're open beyond that to scale that business propositions, especially if something that will come across and that would enable us to accelerate our product road map or customer acquisition strategy.

Thank you very much, Rashwan. Next question is for Mr. Islam. Should all growth targets such as the 10% profit CAGR be viewed as real growth? Also, are the growth targets from financial year '25 results. So basically, is the base year is '25?

So the base year is '26. So we start basing '26 based on our aggressive expectation for the macro environment, taking into consideration all the impacts of running a single-digit interest rate environment, the CapEx come back. The 10% is basically the average compound growth rate, which is basically the CAGR, which doesn't mean -- this basically means mathematically that we need to grow at a minimum rate of 10% over the coming few years given the expected interest rate environment and the new pricing rationale. So that's the floor, again, exactly all the numbers and indicators are our floors because we build our strategic framework for this 5-year strategy on a marginal basis.

Don't worry, I will stretch them later. As usual, always I try to put the ambition -- and we get it, by the way. Listen, you are as good as your dreams, okay.