NatWest Group Plc (LON:NWG) has announced its H1 2025 results.
Chief Executive, Paul Thwaite, commented:
“NatWest Group’s strong performance in the first half of the year reflects our consistent support for our customers and, in turn, delivery for our shareholders. We have today upgraded our income and returns guidance for 2025, as well as announcing a 9.5p interim dividend and a £750 million share buyback.
The role we play as a trusted partner to over 20 million customers is fundamental to our strategy and we continue to focus on helping them achieve their ambitions, with lending, deposits and assets under management once again increasing in H1 2025. With positive momentum in our business, we are ambitious for the future and see clear opportunities for further disciplined growth. This is complemented by our focus on bank-wide simplification, as we quietly revolutionise how we operate, enhancing our tech and AI capabilities in order to better meet and anticipate the evolving needs of our customers.
Having returned to full private ownership in Q2 2025, NatWest Group is well placed to step up and play its part in supporting economic growth across the UK and, in doing so, to create sustainable value for all our stakeholders.”
H1 2025 performance
We have delivered a strong H1 2025 performance with continued balance sheet growth, an attributable profit of £2.5 billion, with earnings per share of 30.9 pence, up 28% on prior year, a Return on Tangible Equity (RoTE) of 18.1% and a cost:income ratio (excl. litigation and conduct) of 48.8%, compared with 55.5% in the prior year.
This drove strong capital generation pre-distributions of 101 basis points which allows us to announce an interim dividend of 9.5 pence per share, 58% higher than the prior year, and we intend to commence a share buyback programme of £750 million in the second half of 2025.
– We continue to be disciplined in our approach to growth, deploying capital where returns are attractive. We are pleased to have added 1.1 million new customers in the first half of 2025, both organically and through the Sainsbury’s Bank transaction which completed on 1 May 2025. In the first half of 2025 we delivered broad-based balance sheet growth, with net loans to customers excluding central items up by £11.6 billion, including £2.2 billion of balances acquired from Sainsbury’s Bank as we added scale to our unsecured business. Customer deposits excluding central items increased by £4.5 billion, including £2.4 billion of balances acquired from Sainsbury’s Bank.
– We are making good progress on becoming a simpler bank, delivering efficiencies from our investment programmes as seen in the 6.7 percentage point improvement in our cost:income (excl. litigation and conduct) ratio, compared with the prior year. We are digitising more customer journeys and deploying AI to improve our productivity and customer experience which is reflected in our improved NPS scores across all three businesses. We announced new collaborations with OpenAI, AWS and Accenture to accelerate our data simplification and enable greater personalisation for our customers.
– We continue to actively manage our balance sheet and risk, delivering £2.9 billion of RWA management actions as we created capacity for growth. Our Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) ratio of 13.6% was in line with Q4 2024 and c.20 basis points lower than Q1 2025. TNAV per share in H1 2025 increased by 22 pence to 351 pence.
Outlook(1)
The following statements are based on our current expectations for interest rates and economic conditions. We will monitor and react to market conditions and refine our internal forecasts as the economic position evolves.
We have strengthened our guidance and in 2025 we expect:
– to achieve a Return on Tangible Equity of greater than 16.5%.
– income excluding notable items to be greater than £16.0 billion.
– Group operating costs, excluding litigation and conduct costs, to be around £8.1 billion including £0.1 billion of one-time integration costs.
– our loan impairment rate to be below 20 basis points.
– RWAs to be in the range of £190-195 billion at the end of 2025, dependent on final CRD IV model outcomes.
In 2027 we continue to expect:
– to achieve a Return on Tangible Equity for the Group of greater than 15%.
Capital:
– we continue to target a CET1 ratio in the range of 13-14%.
– we expect to pay ordinary dividends of around 50% of attributable profit from 2025 and will consider buybacks as appropriate.
(1) The guidance, targets, expectations and trends discussed in this section represent NatWest Group plc management’s current expectations and are subject to change, including as a result of the factors described in the NatWest Group plc Risk Factors in the 2024 Annual Report and Accounts and Form 20-F and the Summary Risk Factors in this announcement. These statements constitute forward-looking statements. Refer to Forward-looking statements in this announcement.
