[LONDON] Barclays announced a surprise £500 million (S$865.2 million) share buyback and upgraded its performance target for the year as it struck an upbeat tone about its prospects, despite one-off charges weighing on its third-quarter profit.
The British bank set aside another £235 million to cover a motor finance mis-selling scandal and said it had taken a £110 million charge on the collapse of US firm Tricolor, one of several bankruptcies that triggered wider concerns about banks’ exposure to private credit markets.
Shares in Barclays rose 3 per cent in early Wednesday trading as investors welcomed the buyback.
Buyback cheer, but investment bank underwhelms
The bank said it would move to quarterly buyback announcements and now aimed to make a return on equity of more than 11 per cent this year, thanks to better than expected income and faster implementation of cost savings plans.
That allowed it to bring forward plans to distribute excess capital to shareholders, CEO CS Venkatakrishnan said in the update.
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“We have been robustly and consistently generating capital for our shareholders consecutively over the last nine quarters,” he said.
Barclays reported a 7 per cent drop in third-quarter pretax profit to £2.1 billion, in line with analysts’ average forecast.
“Barclays’ latest results show a bank quietly outperforming despite headline noise,” said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst, Hargreaves Lansdown. If the motor finance provision was stripped out, profits were 13 per cent ahead of expectations, he noted.
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Barclays’ investment bank, however, had a mixed three months.
Income at the unit grew 8 per cent year on year, with its global markets business rising 15 per cent. But fees from deals fell 2 per cent, contrasting with Wall Street rivals that showed double-digit gains as corporate confidence rebounded, driving mergers and fundraising.
In a media call, Venkatakrishnan said the underperformance was not because Barclays was investing too little capital in the unit, but because the quarter “was dominated by a few large deals that we were not fortunate enough to be on”.
Private credit exposure
Concerns are growing about weakening lending standards including in the private credit market, a less regulated industry where companies have borrowed heavily in recent years, after a number of US firms collapsed.
Venkatakrishnan said Barclays had no exposure to First Brands, an auto parts maker that filed for bankruptcy, and had turned down doing business with it because of concerns about its financial projections.
Barclays said exposure to private credit accounted for £20 billion, or 6 per cent, of its overall loans, with 70 per cent of that exposure in the US.
The CEO also said banks in Britain were “more richly taxed” than elsewhere when asked about the possibility of further tax rises in the UK in next month’s government budget. REUTERS
