NatWest Group PLC (NWG) Q3 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to the NatWest Group Q3 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 thanks for joining us today. I'll start with a short introduction before I hand over to Katie to take you through the numbers. We have delivered another strong quarter as we continue to execute on our priorities of disciplined growth, bank-wide simplification, together with managing our balance sheet and risk well. Though inflation is above the Bank of England's 2% target, the economy is growing, unemployment is low, wage growth is above the rate of inflation, and businesses and households have relatively high levels of savings and liquidity. This is reflected in the levels of customer activity we're seeing across the bank. So let me start with the headlines for the first nine months. Lending has grown 4.4% since the year end to £388 billion, in line with our annual growth rate of more than 4% over the past six years. Growth has been broad-based across our three businesses and we attracted a further 70,000 new customers in the quarter. Mortgage lending was up by more than £5 billion for the first nine months as we broadened our customer proposition with new offers for first-time buyers and family-backed mortgages and issued mortgages to landlords in collaboration with buy-to-let specialist LandBay. Unsecured lending grew £2.9 billion or 17.3% and we made good progress integrating our recently acquired Sainsbury's customers. They are now able to view their credit card, link their Nectar card and view their Nectar points from credit card spending via the NatWest app. In commercial and institutional, we delivered lending growth of 7.9 billion or...