NatWest has revealed its profits swelled to top \u00a32 billion in the first quarter of 2026 as it expects to be boosted by interest rates staying higher, despite cautioning over a worsening outlook for the UK economy.<\/p>\n
The banking group, which also includes Royal Bank of Scotland and Coutts, reported an operating pre-tax profit of \u00a32 billion for the first three months of the year.<\/p>\n
This was about 12% higher than the \u00a31.8 billion it made over the same period a year ago.<\/p>\n
It grew its lending book and customer deposits increased while the bank said it had made more than \u00a3100 million of extra cost savings in the first quarter.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, like other high street lenders, NatWest expects to be bolstered by interest rates staying higher for longer, meaning it can generate more from loans.<\/p>\n
As a result, it was now expecting to generate income at the \u201ctop end\u201d of its guided range of between \u00a317.2 billion and \u00a317.6 billion for the year.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the group revealed it had set aside more cash for bad loans after updating its forecasts for the UK economy, recognising that rising energy prices caused by war in the Middle East had weakened the outlook.<\/p>\n
Credit impairment charges more than doubled from \u00a3136 million last year to \u00a3283 million for the latest quarter.<\/p>\n
However, this was significantly less than the \u00a3823 million that Barclays set aside.<\/p>\n
NatWest said it was now expecting UK economic growth to slow, inflation to rise to around 3.5%, and the unemployment rate to increase to peak higher than 5.7%, while interest rates are held at their current level for longer.<\/p>\n
Paul Thwaite, NatWest\u2019s chief executive, said: \u201cWe have started the year with positive momentum, underpinned by healthy customer activity \u2013 growing all of our three businesses, expanding our capabilities to meet more of our customers\u2019 needs and further improving productivity as we use AI at scale across the bank.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NatWest has revealed its profits swelled to top \u00a32 billion in the first quarter of 2026 as it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26284,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2103,7955,11748,5,431,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-26283","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"tag-interest-rates","9":"tag-natwest","10":"tag-royal-bank-of-scotland","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-uk-economy","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116498080881383959","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}