Standard Chartered PLC (SCBFF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Standard Chartered PLC (OTCPK:SCBFF) Q4 2024 Results Conference Call February 21, 2025 3:00 AM ET

Company Participants

William Winters – Group Chief Executive
Diego De Giorgi – Group Chief Financial Officer
Manus Costello – Global Head-Investor Relations

Conference Call Participants

Joseph Dickerson – Jefferies
Robin Down – HSBC
Andrew Coombs – Citi
Perlie Mong – Bank of America
Kunpeng Ma – China Securities
Gurpreet Sahi – Goldman Sachs
Aman Rakkar – Barclays
Rob Noble – Deutsche Bank
Jeremy Hou – CICC
Alastair Warr – Autonomous Research

William Winters

Good morning, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our full year 2024 results presentation. We delivered a strong performance in 2024 with a return on tangible equity of 11.7%, up 160 basis points year-on-year. We achieved record income of $19.7 billion, including a very strong performance in Wealth Solutions and double-digit growth in Global Markets and Banking. Our fourth quarter performance continued the consistent delivery of previous quarters.

These results demonstrate that our strategy of combining cross-border capabilities with leading wealth management expertise is firing on all cylinders. We’ve remained disciplined on cost, delivering positive income-to-cost jaws in 2024, and we’re now 1 year into our Fit for Growth program, which is progressing at pace.

We continue to return capital to our shareholders. And today, we’re announcing a 37% increase in full year dividend per share and a new share buyback of $1.5 billion. This will take our total shareholder distributions announced since our full year 2023 results to $4.9 billion and well on the way to delivering our target of at least $8 billion by 2026. We made a positive start to 2025, and we’re tracking to the upper end of our 5% to 7% CAGR target for 2023 to 2026. Before I hand over to Diego to talk through our performance in more detail, I’d like to thank our much-valued colleague, Jose Vinals, who will