NatWest Group PLC (NWG) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and thank you for joining us today. As usual, I'm here with Katie, who will take you through the full year performance. After that, I'll talk about our strategy and our new 2028 targets. But first, let me start with an overview of 2025, a year in which we delivered another strong performance and made good progress on each of our strategic priorities. Highlights of the year include a return to private ownership in May, opening a new chapter for the bank with a focus on driving growth. Continued organic growth together with successful completion of the Sainsbury's bank transaction. Improving operational leverage with a reduction in our cost income ratio of 4.8 percentage points. Together with strong capital generation, enabling total distributions to shareholders of 4.1 billion. You will also be aware that we announced the acquisition of the financial planning and investment firm Evelyn Partners earlier this week, which I'll talk about later. So let's turn to the headlines. We added a million new customers during 2025 and delivered broad-based growth across all three businesses. Lending grew 5.6% to 393 billion. Deposits were up 2.4% to 442 billion. And assets under management and administration increased 20% to 58.5 billion. This activity resulted in strong income growth of 12% to £16.4 billion. Costs grew 2% to £8 billion, resulting in positive jaws of 10%. The cost-income ratio reduced to 48.6%. This led to operating profit of £7.7 billion and attributable profit of £5.5 billion. Earnings per share grew 27% to 68 pence, dividends per share increased 51% to 32.5 pence and tangible net asset value per share was up 17% to 384 pence. Our CET ratio was 14% and return on tangible equity was 19.2%. As you can see here, these results are either in line with or ...