NatWest Group PLC (NWG) Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to the NatWest Group Q1 Results 2025 Management Presentation. Today's presentation will be hosted by CEO Paul Thwaite and CFO Katie Murray. After the presentation we will take questions. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. As usual I'll start with a brief introduction before Katie takes you through the financial performance and then we'll open it up for questions. Against a background of heightened global economic uncertainty, we continue to focus on advancing our strategy through three key priorities. Discipline growth, bank-wide simplification and active balance sheet and risk management. Examples of our recent progress include the completion of our Sainsbury's bank transaction yesterday, which adds around a million new customer accounts with about 2.5 billion of unsecured lending and 2.7 billion of savings. We launched a new mortgage enabling first-time buyers to combine incomes with a family member or friend, while retaining independent ownership to help them get on the property ladder sooner. In business banking, we marked the 10th anniversary of our Accelerator programme, which has helped to grow and scale 10,000 small businesses across the UK by setting a new ambition to support a further 10,000 businesses in 2025. We also upgraded our ambition to lend £7.5 billion to the UK social housing sector between 2024 and 2026 and announced that we're deploying £500 million to retrofit social housing stock supported by a financial guarantee from the National Wealth Fund. On bank-wide simplification, we are the first UK-headquartered bank to collaborate with OpenAI in order to meet customer needs faster and increase productivity. And as we simplify the organisation, we are moving our private banking investment operations from Switze...