Message from our CEO

Financially we have been able to set new highs, while we maintained our moderate risk profile and increased the speed of our IT transition. The latter is in line with our ambition to align our services across the globe to accommodate for the way our clients are transforming their way of doing business.

Geopolitical developments and continued heightened volatility on financial markets were the main drivers for high transaction volumes throughout the year. We have seen new peak levels in APAC triggered by geopolitical tensions and interest hikes in Japan. In both USA and Europe, multiple elections during the year kept all market participants active. Overall, our annual volumes in client transactions ended at 5.4 billion, versus 5.2 billion in 2023.

The number of IT disturbances declined further, and we mitigated any material client impact with the help of our vendors and staff. We executed on our strategic objectives by focusing on our IT transition under project name “1Global”, moving from a three-regional to a single global operating model. Significant progress has been the role out of one of our core clearing systems in the US with Fixed Income as the minimum viable product. The rest of the functionality is expected to be implemented around mid 2025. At the same time, we have been executing the DORA and Cyber Security Roadmap in a relevant program as planned.

Financially, we have raised the bar; revenues grew to EUR 769 million and net income to EUR 284 million, which resulted in a RoE of 11.5% and a Cost Income Ratio of 48%. A key driver of these results is the success of our clients in growing geographically, their product range and our ability to accommodate their business strategy. The interest rate environment remained high, which resulted in a strong revenue increase in 2024.

We are pleased with the recognition from our clients, as measured in the annual NPS score having received a score of 54 (41 in 2023). We are also very happy with the Employee Engagement Survey outcome of 83% versus an 80% outcome last year, based on increases in scores in almost all 15 subcategories.

In 2024, we continued to take responsibility, in line with our industry footprint, to live up to our purpose: Leading the way to Safe and Transparent Markets. We participated in many industry initiatives to create a better marketplace, together with our industry partners, by engaging in financial market policy debates around in the globe. Like in the past few years we keep pushing the envelope on operating in a more sustainable way; in terms of CO2 footprint and increasing the usage of renewable energy, especially of our datacenters.

By reading the above you can imagine I feel very proud of what we have achieved as an organisation over 2024. There is still a lot to do and improve on, but I feel we are well-positioned to deal with these challenges going forward. The trust and support of our clients, partners, shareholder and staff has been very important to get to these results and I am extremely thankful for it.

Amsterdam, 28 may 2025

Rutger SchellensCEO of ABN AMRO Clearing Bank N.V.