Good set of numbers. Asia did well but not as well as the rest of the region. What's the outlook for the second half.
Can Asia outperform the other regions. Asia will outperform itself. Outperforming the other regions will take us a little
bit of time. But what we are doing is spending a lot of our resources and
energy towards laying the foundations of a solid growth trajectory over the next three to five years. You will
outperform itself. How strongly will outperform. Is there a sense of what are you looking at. I'm kind of thinking we're
about a little over a billion euro business for a bank. And I wouldn't be surprised if over the next three to five years we
would be 30 to 40 percent growth. And the contribution of that we could expect a very solid contribution starting from the
second half going into the next year. Give us a sense of the wholesale banking in this part of the
world and how you grew that and what sort of percentage of the overall revenues you get from what you are head of.
So for the wholesale bank a park is about 17 percent of its loan portfolio and about 15 percent roughly off of income. And I and
she does see it back as a growth region and a source of diversification both from a risk as well as portfolio
diversification perspective and an earnings diversification perspective and is manna from heaven. Surely with interest rates
going up that enables you to be able to make more money. So how is that been helping you.
Interest rates. Interest rates going up has actually helped us across the board in the wholesale bank. Our top line was up 24
percent quarter over quarter and about 13 percent year over year.
And a pack is similarly going to be a beneficiary of that. We feel that interest rates are here to stay higher for longer.
Unfortunately inflation too is there to stay higher for longer. And our and our clients some of them are benefiting from the
current macro environment and the dislocations others particularly those in manufacturing are having to deal
with what's going on from you know labor tightening and supply chain and basic cost increases.
But nonetheless holding fairly strong great line selection on our part and our clients are able to weather what's going on.
How then are you capitalizing on the expected growth in Asia. Are you hiring more. And if so how many are you hiring. Well we
I don't know whether an exact number is appropriate but I wouldn't be surprised if we hired about almost 100 people in the
next 12 months or so. And we've already been on that journey this year.
We are investing in growth particularly in some of the countries Australia Philippines. We quite excited. We're already
reasonably big in China and it's been a year for us. So we will be investing. So this year it has been a year of
investments. We are already starting to see the benefits of that. And I think if you continue solidly into the future I mean
that ISE Chinese fiscal stimulus it was really a bit of a damp squib but really since then we've had this property crisis
there. How does that affect what you do. I mean we are in China. We've got a little shy of 100 people.
It'll be a year for us. We are not in the property development sector by design and by
luck I would say a bit. And you know our portfolio is holding well. And we are we're still excited about China as as a country
that will present growth going forward in the future. The current lockdowns and Covid zero policy is of course a
hindrance both in terms of supply chain bottlenecks that actually affect all of our or many of our clients I should say.
And it does have an impact on overall growth and a fact but in fact as a whole is in the 11 markets. And that's the whole idea
of a portfolio where you can pick your broad spots from time to time. Climate climate risk is becoming more credit relevant. I
mean how how are you looking at that. How are you positioning yourself for that. Climate risk is is an actively evolving topic
across the globe. And we are you know it's front and center for us. The regulators are all over it. Banks are interacting with
each other and pure learning is important in the space. It really presents itself in two major buckets. One is physical.
The other transition and the impact of it is it's complex because climate climate pathways can be various and
and the impacts of those are different. And it presents itself differently in different geographies differently in different
financial products and differently in different sectors. So we run scenarios. We identify those risks. We evaluate them. We run
scenarios. We stress our stuff portfolios. We monitor and we do reporting both internally and externally. And it's a journey
that's going to have to continue because despite the ambitions on transition
you know the climate risk is also there and for real.