Metro Bk Hldgs Plc (MTRBF) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Welcome to MetroBank's Half One 2025 results presentation. I'm Dan Frumkin, CEO of MetroBank. Half One 2025 shows the strategic pivot we started 18 months ago, refocusing on MetroBank's relationship banking ethos is working. The strong financial performance combined with the actions taken, positions Metrobank to deliver best-in-class returns over time. You're going to hear from me this morning a bit of an overview. Then we'll go into Mark, who will give you more detail on the financial performance. And then I'll talk a bit about the strategy driving the future through 2027 and beyond. And then we're always happy to take your questions. So let's start. Revenue was up 22% year on year. It's up 22% even though the Bank of England base rate is down 100 basis points. We also shrunk the balance sheet by 24%. So we managed to grow revenue while shrinking the balance sheet and living in a lower rate environment. We also managed to reduce costs to reduce costs by 8% year on year. That gave us a JAWS of 30%. It led to a 45 million pound underlying PBT. That is treble what we did in the second half of 2024. On the upper right, We did a billion pounds of commercial and corporate lending. That's twice what we did a year ago. We have an 800 million pound credit approved pipeline. The credit approved pipeline is more than all of the lending we did in 2023. You can see we expanded NIM in the bottom left by over 100 basis points in the year. The 295 exit NIM is very close to our year-end guidance. And we've created real capacity for growth through our capital actions in the first half of the year, both the unsecured personal loan sale and the 250 million pounds of AT1 we raised. And we believe and we expect to be reclassified a transfer bank under the new EMRA regime And when we're r...