Barclays under its new chief executive Jess Staley has reported an improved business performance, helping drive the shares up more than five per cent.
Reporting 24 hours after Lloyds signalled a drop in profits and fired the gun on 3000 job cuts and 200 new branch closures, beset by uncertainties over the UK economy where it is now solely focused, Barclays benefited from becoming a ‘transatlantic’ bank focused on the US as well as UK.
Mr Staley in March set out a strategy to simplify the bank's structure and seek higher shareholder returns through the sale of the bulk of its Africa business and other assets. The bank said profits from its core businesses, including consumer and commercial lending, credit cards and investment banking, rose 19 percent to £2.4 billion pounds in the first half.
Group pre-tax profit fell 21 percent to £2bn, largely due to a loss of £1.9bn on the non-core assets which the bank has recommitted to offload, despite prospects of a possible economic downturn following the vote to quit the European Union.
Mr Staley told analysts: "Our assessment is that the Brexit vote in the UK will have no effect on our ability to run down non-core at an accelerated pace and we therefore remain confident in reiterating our goal of closing non-core in 2017.”
The bank booked a £372m impairment on the French retail banking business it is in talks to sell to AnaCap Financial Partners.
Other assets earmarked for sale include its Barclaycard consumer payments business in Spain and Portugal as well as almost all of its stake in its Africa unit. It has already sold its Asia wealth operations and Italian banking business.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here