Chief Executive’s message While Q4 was down from the levels seen earlier this year, our Net Promoter Scores for Commercial and NatWest Personal in 2016 were the highest they have ever been. With £30 billion of gross new mortgage lending in UK PBB, we helped 320,000 customers with their mortgage in 2016, growing our market share for the fourth consecutive year without leading on price or risk. We are the largest commercial bank in the UK, and are ranked joint number one by Net Promoter Score. Our ability to generate value here is shown by the scale of support we have provided to the economy in the past year, with almost £9 billion of new net commercial lending. The bank we are becoming We still have more work to do. In part, that means finishing the restructuring of RBS, resolving the remaining legacy issues, and preparing the bank for ring-fencing. In the main, however, it is about adapting to the changing nature of the UK and Irish banking sectors, and investing to meet our customers’ evolving needs. Digital innovation means customers are doing more of their transactions online. We interact with our customers over 20 times more through digital channels than physical ones. 35% of all new products were taken out digitally in UK PBB, and this is rising steadily. A fifth of our customers now solely use mobile and digital to interact with us. As customers change the way they bank with us, we must change the way we serve them. This means continuing to simplify for our customers, and accelerating our deployment of digital and mobile capabilities. The role of the branch is fast moving to an advice and service centre, away from transactions. While the branch will still be a core part of our offering to customers, inevitably some branches will have to close. We’re working to blur the line between traditional and digital banking channels. We are investing in a video sales and service proposition that will connect customers, no matter where they are, to the right specialist. This shift isn’t only in personal banking. We are aiming to service 95% of our commercial customers’ needs through mobile and online by 2020, up from nearly 80% today, by introducing a new digital banking service that will greatly improve experience. We’re also responding to customer preferences for more innovative lending platforms and products. We are investing heavily in technology in our NatWest Markets business. Hundreds of separate product databases will be replaced with a single, scalable platform, which will help reduce costs significantly and dramatically increase the speed at which we can deploy new capabilities for our customers. We are also introducing a single dealer platform, an electronic front door, through which we can provide FX and Rates solutions to our clients. These are the kind of changes that will lower costs while protecting revenue and delivering even better customer service at the same time. We are committed to running the bank as a more sustainable and responsible business, serving today’s customers in a way that also helps future generations, generating long term value for all of our stakeholders and society. In 2016, we improved on our position in a number of rankings, including achieving our highest ever score in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. We continued with our commitment to manage our impacts on climate change and support our customers to move towards the transition to a low-carbon economy. We continue to support financial education and our goal is to help a further one million more young people understand all about money by the end of 2018. 17 RBS – Annual results 2016