thank you very much for taking the time to chat with us today howard davies, the chairman of natwest. >>> we're getting some flashes come through from the auto industry and here we have confirmation that shareholders with double voting rights have formally approved the psa group merger with fiat. so this has formally been approved now and we are just getting confirmation and this is the relative price action for both of those stocks. both of them are up decent in the last couple of months. we did see quite a big bounce for the auto sector in the last trading days of the year and this does create, i believe, the fourth largest automaker in the world now with this tie-up big news in the auto space >>> let's take a quick look at how european markets are shaping up a huge bounce for the ftse today, up more than 3% this is the first proper day of trading since the uk formally exited the eu. ftse 100 up 3% there's a lot of value there we've been talking about it and perhaps investors are seeing that value and are deciding to dip in in the first day of trading for the year dax up about 1.3 c