NatWest Group plc (NWG) Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-05-02 16:37:05 ET

NatWest Group plc (NWG)

Q1 2025 Results Conference Call

May 2, 2025 4:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Paul Thwaite - Group Chief Executive Officer

Katie Murray - Group Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Sheel Shah - JPMorgan

Benjamin Caven-Roberts - Goldman Sachs

Chris Cant - Bernstein Autonomous

Andrew Coombs - Citi

Aman Rakkar - Barclays

Amit Goel - Mediobanca

Ed Firth - KBW

Jonathan Pierce - Jefferies

Guy Stebbings - BNP Paribas Exane

Robin Down - HSBC

Alvaro - Morgan Stanley

Presentation

Operator

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.

Paul Thwaite

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 the background of heightened global economic uncertainty, we continue to focus on advancing our strategy through 3 key priorities: disciplined 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 1 million new customer accounts with about GBP 2.5 billion of unsecured lending and GBP 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 program, which has helped to grow and scale 10,000 small businesses across the U.K. by setting a new ambition to support a further 10,000 businesses in 2025. We also upgraded our ambition to lend GBP 7.5 billion to the U.K. social housing sector between 2024 and 2026 and announced that we're deploying GBP 500 million to retrofit social housing stock supported by financial guarantee from the National Wealth Fund.

On bank-wide simplification, we are the first U.K. headquartered bank to collaborate with OpenAI in order to meet customer needs faster and increase productivity. And as we simplify the organization, we are moving our private banking investment operations from Switzerland to the U.K. and relocating their data and technology teams to the U.K. and India. On active balance sheet and risk management, we made further progress optimizing RWAs in the quarter. And in an uncertain environment, our prudent risk management gives us a competitive advantage.

So let's turn to the financial headlines for the first quarter. We made a strong start to the year. Customer lending grew 0.9% to GBP 375 billion. Customer deposits increased 0.5% to GBP 433 billion with growth in both Retail Banking and Commercial and Institutional. Assets under management and administration of GBP 48.5 billion, included net AUM inflows in the quarter of GBP 0.8 billion. We also provided GBP 8 billion of climate and sustainable funding and financing, bringing the total to GBP 101 billion since July 2021, exceeding our GBP 100 billion 2025 target....

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