James Staley
Management
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our full year earnings presentation. 2017 was a year of considerable strategic progress for Barclays. On the 1st of June, we continued the sell-down of our shareholding in Barclays Africa to a level which will permit regulatory deconsolidation. We closed Barclays Non-Core unit six months ahead of time on the 1st of July. So over a two-year period, our Non-Core team eliminated some £95 billion of risk-weighted assets, sold more than 20 businesses and exited operations in a dozen countries. And we saw realized savings of over £2 billion. Between Africa, Non-Core and other restructuring, our overall payroll is now down some 56,000 people since I joined the firm a little over two years ago. We've also established our service company, which employs 52,000 out of our total headcount of 80,000. The ServCo delivers a unified approach to our Core business processes such as operations, technology and functional services. By December, we largely completed the work to build our U.K. ring-fenced bank, which is expected to be up fully running six weeks from now. Taken together, these accomplishments mean that we have completed our restructuring of Barclays and strategically recast the company as a diversified, transatlantic, consumer and wholesale bank. The benefits of all these actions in terms of cost efficiencies, balance sheet strength and improvements in operational effectiveness, are already being felt throughout the bank. While we've got some way to go in terms of delivering exceptional returns at a group level, I'm encouraged by how we're executing on the plans we've laid out, and momentum is building. Our group PBT increased by 10% year-on-year, driven in large part by a reduction in Non-Core losses. Group RoTE, excluding material items, improved to 5.6%. In Barclays U.K., profitability held up as we…