In commercial banking, we are unique in our ability to serve clients across multiple geographies, which is what HSBC was founded to do. The result was the $13.3 billion of profit before tax that commercial banking generated last year. In global banking and markets, I believe we are uniquely positioned to connect clients between West and East, which was evident in our market-leading performances in markets like the Middle East and businesses like Global Foreign Exchange. We have clearly got a strong international franchise. As you can see, we facilitated more than $850 billion of trade last year, with the diversification of supply chains leading to revenue growth opportunities for HSBC. We are ranked second globally by revenue in our payments business, and processed around $500 trillion of electronic payments.
And we have been number three globally by revenue in FX since 2021. But I believe there is significant amount of untapped opportunity still to go for, which can drive revenue growth in the face of declining interest rates. Importantly, this potential revenue growth is not necessarily dependent on GDP, as that growth opportunity already exists within our client base, and it is often fee-based and strongly influenced by opportunities that are inherent to our international nature of our client base. To provide some evidence of this growth potential, we grew wholesale multi-jurisdictional client revenue by 29% in 2023, and the revenue multiplier for multi-jurisdictional corporate clients in commercial banking was five times that of an average domestic-only customer.
I am pleased that international isn’t just a wholesale story. We are doing more with our WPB customers as well. Building our wealth business to meet the rising demand for wealth management services, especially here in Asia, has been a strategic priority in recent years. So I am pleased that we attracted net new invested assets of $84 billion last year, compared to $80 billion in 2022 and $64 billion in 2021. This is a good indicator of future revenue opportunities, which again is often fee-income and should benefit in a lower interest rate environment as investors shift from cash reserves into invested asset classes. Another trend is the growing demand for seamless cross-border banking services. Innovation is key here, and we hadn’t innovated enough in this space in the past, which meant we weren’t offering our customers what they wanted.
But we are now. Global Money has more than 1.3 million customers, up from 550,000 a year ago. We also launched a new, strengthened international banking proposition. Overall, we grew revenue from WPB international customers by 41% last year, from $7.2 billion to $10.2 billion. And while you might assume this was driven solely by higher rates, I am pleased to say there was a 43% jump in new-to-bank international WPB customers last year. Again, these are higher revenue generating customers, bringing in three times as much revenue as an average domestic-only customer. Next is the continued growth in our two home markets. Our leading propositions in Hong Kong and the U.K. provide us with deep liquidity and a differentiated proposition. These two pools of liquidity underpin our exceptionally strong balance sheet, which gives us the safety and security that our clients trust us to provide.
Hong Kong and the U.K. are both highly connected global financial centers. We have increased our market leading share of trade finance in Hong Kong by 6.6 percentage points over the last three years. This included a 2.4 percentage point increase last year alone. We are also ideally positioned to capitalize as the mass affluent population in Hong Kong and mainland China continues to grow. Driven by rapid urbanization across mainland China and the increased use of the connect schemes between mainland China and Hong Kong. We grew new to bank retail customers in Hong Kong by 36% over the last three years, including by capitalizing on the significant increase of visitors from mainland China post reopening. In the U.K., we also have good traction in commercial banking.
In 2023, we were the number one bank for U.K. large corporates, as well as the best bank in the U.K. for SMEs, according to Euro Money. And we are continuing to grow in wealth and personal banking. We attracted over 1 million new to bank customers in the U.K. last year. And we’ve had steady mortgage growth, increasing our market share of U.K. stock to 8%. As economic conditions improve and we continue to invest, we’re confident in our ability to grow our business further in these critical areas. Next, I showed a slide like this last year to demonstrate how we’ve gone from a business that depended on our home markets for the vast majority of our profits, while the rest of the franchise underperformed, to one with broad based profitability across markets.
This slide shows the increasing profitability of these diversified growth opportunities. The number one rankings speak for themselves. And I especially want to call out the great work that the global banking and markets team are doing in the Middle East. They now topped these rankings three years in a row in a region that presents significant growth opportunities going forward. India, mainland China, excluding associates and Singapore all contributed more than $1 billion of profits in 2023. With Singapore doing so for the first time. This underlines why HSBC was named best bank in Asia by Euromoney. But there was strong growth across all these markets. The next slide underlines that we have reshaped our portfolio to reinforce strengths while exiting areas of underperformance and/or lower strategic priority.
Over the last 12 months, we’ve announced exits in a number of our smaller markets. This is one way that we expect to take out further costs alongside our continued focus on improving the internal efficiency of the bank. And by making savings, we can invest in the areas on the left that help us to drive growth. Before I move on, I want to mention SVB UK. Everyone knows that HSBC is an international bank. But we also have a long history of supporting innovative entrepreneurs. And the acquisition of SVB UK enabled us to build a bigger proposition that can help us to become known as the go to bank for innovation companies. It’s encouraging that innovation banking had its best ever quarter for customer onboarding in the fourth quarter of 2023. I’m also encouraged by how many of those innovative companies want to take their capabilities cross border.
The next slide sets out how we’re investing in technology to make customer experiences better, sell process is more efficient and our cost of execution lower. I’m pleased to see more of our personal and corporate customers are mobile and digitally active. HSBC has traditionally grown by cross-selling products to our existing banking clients, but innovation also enables us to open up growth avenues that are beyond our traditional customer footprint. Zing is one such growth avenue because it offers cross-border payment capabilities, but critically it is targeted at non-HSBC customers. Our embedded finance joint venture announced with Tradeshift last year is another such growth avenue. It’s still early days for both, but they will allow us to break outside of the existing business model.
I will also briefly cover our final two pillars. There isn’t a conversation I have with a client where the net zero transition doesn’t come up. Our first net zero transition plan shows how we intend to finance and support the transition to net zero and collaborate globally to help enable change at scale. It will be a complex journey, but we have exactly the right geographic footprint where the need and opportunity are greatest. Finally, energize. Over the last four years, we’ve increased the pace of execution across the organization. The management team is confident about the business, but it’s even more important that our colleagues are confident, because when they are, we stand a much greater chance of succeeding. So I’m pleased that our 2023 staff survey showed the number of colleagues seeing the positive impact of our strategy was up 11 percentage points from 2020 to 73%.
And I’m also very excited by the number of quality new hires we’ve been able to bring into the organization over the last 12 months. It’s also a vote of confidence in our strategy and the momentum we have built over the last four years. In summary, I will go back to what I said at the start. I’m really pleased with how we performed in 2023 and the contribution that our people made. We reported $30 billion of PBT for the first time and a mid-teens RoTE. There was good underlying growth in the fourth quarter, excluding the impact of notable items and Argentina hyperinflation. Our profit before tax was $7.3 billion. We distributed $19 billion of capital returns to our shareholders in respect of 2023. This included the best full-year dividend since 2008 and three share buybacks.
And we still expect to have substantial distribution capacity going forward. We remain committed to cost discipline and we expect to have further opportunities to grow revenue even in a lower rates environment. We’re confident that we have the levers for growth that allow us to deliver mid-teens returns in 2024. With that, let me hand over to Noel for Q&A.
Unidentified Company Representative: [Operator Instructions] Okay, Gurpreet.
Gurpreet Sahi: Thank you. Gurpreet Sahi from Goldman. Two questions, if I may please. The first one is on FY 2025 and beyond. We note that the RoTE guidance for this year, but if there can be any comments regarding the RoTE for 2025 and beyond. In particular, if the banking NII sensitivity for the next 100 basis points of trade cuts can be guided to us. The second one is around the gain, the implied improvement in the capital from the gain in Canadian operations. And that remains at around $10 billion of which $4 billion can be special dividend. So the $6 billion, have we decided on how much between capital distribution to shareholders and then business growth? Thank you.
Noel Quinn: Thank you very much for your questions. I’ll ask Georges to cover both of those please.
Georges Elhedery: Thank you Noel. Thanks Gurpreet. So we have not at this stage given guidance for full year 2025. I point you to the guidance we’ve given for full year 2024 of at least $41 billion in banking NII and mid-teens return on tangible equity. In terms of banking NII sensitivity, we do have a slide at the back end of the deck, which I can point you to, which shows for the further 100 basis point and for future years what’s the impact. What I can point you to is number one, we continue to intend to increase subject to market conditions, but as of today to increase the structural hedge. Second the volume of the structural hedge. Second, we continue to intend to increase the weighted average life of the structural hedge, having now reached 2.8 years and with the intent to take it to about three years, both of which should give you a sense of how we’re mitigating rate impacts into 2024 and 2025 from the structural hedging activity.
