Company: HBCYF
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0001089113-25-000040
Chunk: 39

Company: HSBC HOLDINGS PLC
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form: 20-F
Chunk 39
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 strengths, while maintaining tight cost discipline and continuing to invest in growth and efficiency. We see growth opportunities in each of our four franchises. In CIB, these include further expanding our international network businesses, notably transaction banking. In IWPB, we intend to particularly focus on building our successful wealth business, especially in Asia. In Hong Kong, we intend to support continued growth in non-resident customer numbers and will seek to build on our strong SME proposition. In the UK, we see the opportunity to continue building our mortgage franchise and build share in SME banking. We will consider using cost savings generated through business disposals for incremental re-investment into our core franchises. This would be in addition to our ongoing investments. Capital generation Our business model is designed to be highly capital generative. In 2024, our common equity tier 1 (‘CET1’) capital ratio grew from 14.8% to 14.9% as at 31 December 2024. During the calendar year, we paid $5.5bn ordinary dividends with respect to 2024, we expect to pay a further $6.4bn through the fourth interim dividend and we expect to repurchase $11bn of our shares for cancellation with respect to 2024. The capital generated on the disposal of our Canadian banking operations supported the $0.21 per share special dividend paid in 2Q24, representing a further $3.9bn distribution. We aim to maintain a CET1 capital ratio in the range of 14 to 14.5% over the medium term. Our primary use of capital generation is to pay an ordinary dividend of 50% of profit attributable to ordinary shareholders, excluding material notable items and related impacts (our dividend payout ratio target basis 1 ). Our preferred use of capital after paying the dividend is to support the growth of our four businesses. In recent years, much of our income growth has come from capital-light income streams, such as deposit revenue from higher interest rates; and from fee income, notably in Wealth. Our RWAs of $838.3bn at 31 December 2024 remained broadly stable compared with 31 December 2022. Combined with strategic actions, this enabled the Group to buy back 11% of its outstanding shares in two years, while reporting a CET1 ratio rising from 14.2% to 14.9% over the two years. Should organic growth in any given year require less incremental capital than the Group has retained after paying ordinary dividends to our