RBS announces £9.19bn profits

RBS announces £9.19bn profits
Press Association Thursday March 1, 2007 8:18 AM
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which owns NatWest and Churchill Insurance, has unveiled sharply higher annual profits of £9.19 billion.
The surplus from the UK's second largest banking group compared with a figure of £7.94 billion from a year earlier. The performance was also ahead of market expectations.
RBS pointed out it was one of only five FTSE 100 Index companies to have grown profits in each of the last 10 years, adding that less than £1 in £33 of profit growth came from retail banking.
RBS generates about 60% of its profits in the UK, with operations overseas including Charter One banking group in the United States, which the company bought for £5.8 billion in 2004. It recently bought a stake in Bank of China.
While much of the group's recent growth has come from acquisitions, RBS stressed that organic growth had also been healthy. One of the strongest performances came in corporate banking, with profits up 20% to £5.55 billion.
In the retail division, which includes the NatWest and RBS high street brands, profits increased 2% to £2.29 billion.
That was after bad debt charges increased 15% to £1.34 billion, although RBS said the figure had been lower in the second half than in the first.
Credit card arrears stabilised, while the rate of increase in arrears on unsecured personal loans continued to slow. The situation with mortgages remained very low, it added.
In RBS Insurance, which also operates as Direct Line and Privilege, profits were up 3% to £750 million after implementing price increases in motor insurance in the second half of the year.
RBS said the move, which in part reflected higher claims costs, would take time to feed through and added that competition on prices had been strong.