Metro Bk Hldgs Plc

Welcome to MetroBank's Half One 2025 results presentation. I'm Dan Frumkin, CEO of MetroBank. Half One 2025 shows the strategic pivot we started 18 months ago, refocusing on MetroBank's relationship banking ethos is working. The strong financial performance combined with the actions taken, positions Metrobank to deliver best-in-class returns over time. You're going to hear from me this morning a bit of an overview. Then we'll go into Mark, who will give you more detail on the financial performance. And then I'll talk a bit about the strategy driving the future through 2027 and beyond. And then we're always happy to take your questions. So let's start. Revenue was up 22% year on year. It's up 22% even though the Bank of England base rate is down 100 basis points. We also shrunk the balance sheet by 24%. So we managed to grow revenue while shrinking the balance sheet and living in a lower rate environment. We also managed to reduce costs to reduce costs by 8% year on year. That gave us a JAWS of 30%. It led to a 45 million pound underlying PBT. That is treble what we did in the second half of 2024. On the upper right, We did a billion pounds of commercial and corporate lending. That's twice what we did a year ago. We have an 800 million pound credit approved pipeline. The credit approved pipeline is more than all of the lending we did in 2023. You can see we expanded NIM in the bottom left by over 100 basis points in the year. The 295 exit NIM is very close to our year-end guidance. And we've created real capacity for growth through our capital actions in the first half of the year, both the unsecured personal loan sale and the 250 million pounds of AT1 we raised. And we believe and we expect to be reclassified a transfer bank under the new EMRA regime And when we're reclassified a transfer bank under the new regime, it means MREL capital is set equal to your minimum capital requirements. Therefore, Metro Bank has no intention of raising any more MREL debt. We told you that there were four key drivers for us to deliver 2027 guidance. The first was cost discipline. As I've mentioned, costs are down 8% year on year. Our costs are now better than they need to be to deliver 2027 guidance. Our exit cost of deposits was 102 basis points. That is the best of any high street bank in the UK. Our cost of deposits is now below what it needs to be to deliver the 2027 guidance. We talked about just the passage of time that our treasury portfolio, our natural hedge rolls off and we can reinvest the proceeds when those securities mature. We have a half a billion this year, a billion in 26 and another half a billion in 27. Just the roll off and reinvestment of those proceeds under the current yield curve, delivers a 660 basis point improvement and return on tangible equity by the end of 2027. And we said we need to rotate assets. Well, you saw, and I talked about earlier, we've done a billion pounds of commercial and corporate. We have an 800 million pound pipeline. We're launching new products. and our specialist residential mortgage base, and most importantly, we saw half a billion pounds of our prime resi mortgage book run off. One of the strengths of the business plan is that we free up about four billion pounds of liquidity and significant amounts of capital because we're running off the prime residential mortgage book. You've seen this slide before. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the why we win drivers. I'll come back to those in the second half of the presentation. But I do want to spend a bit of time on the chart on the right. You've seen it before. This is our clear blue water chart. Metro Bank is in a universe of its own. We are uniquely positioned to generate outsized returns on a going forward basis. We have a funding model that delivers a cost of deposits that is better than the high street banks. And we have a lending platform that's delivering risk adjusted yields in line with the specialist lenders. That combination, driven by our relationship ethos, allows Metro Bank to win every day. And this is the guidance. Mark will come back to it. But again, as I've talked about, for the 27 guidance, the building blocks are in place now for a lot of the guidance that will be delivered in 27. And with that, I'll turn it over to Mark to go through the details of the financials. Thank you.

Thank you, Dan. Look, it's great to be able to talk about such a strong level of performance. And what I'd like to take you through today is a little bit more about the drivers and the actions we've taken and how we think they translate to forward momentum as we go forward from here. So look, firstly, let's look at the performance dashboard over a longer period of time. The first thing to notice is all of our trading metrics have improved. And let's go through those one by one. So firstly, as Dan mentioned, we have more than halved the cost of deposits from just over 2% to just over 1% versus the same period last year. That has helped increase our exit NIM along with the asset rotation strategy, which we'll come back to later, to an exit NIM of 295. That in turn has increased our revenue to $286 million, which is 22% up on the prior year on a smaller balance sheet and a lower rate environment. Combined with two things, combined with cost discipline, that improves our cost to income ratio from 95% at year end down to 82% and well on track to deliver all future guidance. From a credit risk perspective, strong underwriting disciplines in markets we already know has kept the cost of risk low, already low, and stable compared to half one, 2024. The combination of increasing revenue, lowering costs on low cost of risk means we've increased underlying profits to 45 million pounds in the period, which is more than treble the half two period in 2024. In addition to that, we are seeing convergence between our statutory profit and underlying profits with a statutory profit of 43 million pounds, which translates into a return on tangible equity of 7% in the period, which is right in line with our guidance, all at the same time as increasing our capital position. And we're going to come on to more of these drivers in depth as we go through the next section. So Dan mentioned there was four things that were important to the transformation in terms of our PPT. Let's go through them one by one. So firstly, how have we managed to reduce the cost of deposits by more than half? Well, on the left-hand side, this shows how our deposit mix has changed over time. And I'll draw your attention to the third column. And importantly, our cost Our mix of deposits, which are checking accounts or non-interest bearing, is 43% of our mix. Now that equates to a market average of 18%. So we have more than twice the amount of mix in low-cost deposits, which are born out of the relationship strategy we hold dear. In addition, we are starting from an extremely strong place in terms of liquidity, so an LCR ratio of 315% and a loan-to-deposit ratio of 65%. That means we can be very disciplined with the types of deposits we need, and as such, we have

and a price in advantage versus peers.

that most of our heavy lifting of the transformation was completed last year from a people perspective, and that's true. And as you can see in the chart, we have reduced total costs half and half by 21 million pounds in the period versus full year. But you can see our people costs are stable, reflecting the fact that all of the heavy lifting on people transformation was done last year. Pleasingly, we have further improved our operating efficiency by £21 million in our non-people costs as a result of targeted actions and embedded in our partnership with Infosys. All of this combines with the increased revenue to improve our cost-to-income ratio to 82% and well on track to deliver the guidance we set out in the plan. The third component, as Dan mentioned, was tailwinds from Treasury investments. Here you can see the effect of the nearly $2 billion of maturities as they yield from lower yielding rates onto higher yielding rates. Cumulatively, we expect 15 million pounds worth of benefit this year, which is worth 10 points on NIM. That builds substantially into 2026 to drive a 44 million pound increase, or 29 basis points on NIM. And cumulatively, over the period, it drives 660 basis points of ROTI. Now, all of this is largely locked in. We know the rates, we know the balances, and are currently performing in line with our projections of the yields they're expecting to deliver. Finally, let's go to asset rotation. What does it mean for us? On the left-hand side, this shows how our balance sheet has changed in loans and advances over the period since half 2-24. Our total loans are now $8.9 billion, down from $9.2 billion. But really, the story is in the middle block of how we're recycling runoff portfolios into targeted growth areas. You can see in our runoff books, we have run off the book by 1.2 billion from 5.8 down to 4.6. We have recycled this into our targeted areas and growing them by 0.9 billion in the period. As you can see on the right hand side, a lot of that growth is driven by our targeted acquisition in corporate and commercial lending. We did a billion pounds worth of new lending in half on 25 compared to half a billion in 24 and 0.3 billion in the same period in 23. So double 24, treble 2023 and building momentum. And as you can see, we have over 800 million of credit approved pipeline ready to complete in the remainder of this year. Again, this gives us strong confidence our growth and strategy is delivering. But it's more than just growth. It's also within asset rotation about yield management and optimizing for risk-adjusted returns. Now, in our two target portfolios, in the middle two blocks, we've split out what the yields are, spread to base for commercial and customers joining, so 357. and attrition, 333. So the combination of growing in this segment and at a better yield has improved the spread to base from 3.12 to 3.46% in the period. That is an accretive, an income earning. Likewise, in the mortgage portfolio on the right-hand side, you can see that our attrition equals our gross lending, but actually the yield of gross lending significantly outperforms the attrition. So 577 plays 460. We guided that we would generate new commercial loans over the course of the plan of 350 points over the base rate, and we are at that level, and we are at the lending volumes we need to deliver the guidance. Likewise, in mortgages, we're delivering over 200 basis points of swap rates. We continue to launch new products in this segment, and we look forward to telling you the results of those as they mature. So let's zoom out a little bit. What does all of that mean in terms of our four performance drivers on the key metrics? Well, versus half one 2024, our NIM has increased from 178 to 295, driven by two key components, the asset rotation strategy and the cost of deposit management. That exit NIM is already within five basis points of our full year guidance of three to 325 for the remainder of the year. The strategic actions taken to increase revenue and lower costs have improved our jaws by 30%, and the combination of which has improved our PBT to £45 million in the period. Now, let's just look at that £45 million and how that's emerged over the passage of time. The reason we keep talking about these four drivers is because they have a material impact on the profitability of the bank. You can see the effects of deposit optimization, cost management, treasury assets, and asset rotation as we build to a royalty of 7%, which is the midpoint of our guidance for the year. All of which has been achieved by strengthening our already robust capital position. And key significant changes on capital in the first half of this year is we've raised $250 million of AT1s. We completed the unsecured personal loan of $584 million portfolio sale. We organically generated SET1 through profits. And as you can see on the right-hand side, that now leads to an increase in our Set 1, our total capital, and our MREL to the highest point we've had to date. All of this, we further expect benefits from the changes from the MREL regime, and we'll come back with further details as more is known in the future. Finally, ending on guidance. Look, on the left-hand side, this is the halfway stage for the year. You can see where we are versus where we've said we'll be for the full year, and hopefully this brings you confidence that we are well on track to deliver, the strategies in action are working, and we expect to have a very clear path to delivering the returns we set out in our guidance. With that, I'm going to hand back to Dan, who's going to take you through our strategic drivers.

Thanks, Mark. So listen, we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about the strategy driving the future, where we go to beyond 27 and how we get to 27 going forward. So listen, these are strategic pillars that I've discussed before. These are strategic pillars that underpinned the delivery of the strategic repositioning of Metro. So as we talked about costs, we have 38% fewer colleagues onshore today than we had 18 months ago. We've restructured our frontline distribution team. We've reduced store hours, but still have the longest store hours of any high street bank. That has built a scalable platform. All of those energies, all of those efforts were put into building a scalable platform. Infrastructure. Our partnership with Infosys has given us access to new colleagues who bring something different to Metro. We've upgraded our financial crime capabilities, we've upgraded our fraud technologies, and we've redone our call center infrastructure to take advantage of AI. We have capabilities now that we did not possess 18 months ago. In terms of communications, we have increased colleague engagement during a tremendous effort in turning around the bank. The culture of Metro remains strong. And balance sheet optimization, again, we sold 2.5 billion pounds of residential mortgages. We sold almost 600 million of unsecured personal loans. We raised a quarter of a billion of AT1. All of that gives us capacity to grow. And then in terms of revenue, you saw the progress you've made on lending. You saw the new products we're launching in the specialist space. We've increased our regional expansion in the north. Two-thirds of our commercial lending is now done outside of London. That builds huge confidence in our ability to deliver in 27 and beyond. I said, I'd come back to the, why we're winning the four key pillars of why we win every day. Our local relationship led service model is a true differentiator. We're the only bank that assigns a relationship manager to every borrower of all sizes. We have 102 local business managers across our 76 stores. We are committed to those communities in which we operate, and we have physical presence to support SMEs, commercial and corporate, across the country. We've talked about cost of deposits, and Mark mentioned our relationship-led model drives a differentiator in cost of deposits because we have a much higher mix of current accounts, almost 2.5 times the market, And we have a much smaller percentage of high-cost fixed-term deposits and cash ISAs where we have one-fifth the market penetration. We spent a lot of time talking about the scalable platform and the efficiencies we've built in. Those set us up well for the future. And then funding high-yield specialist lending. Again, the bottom box in the middle, we are a local relationship led service model that differentiates us from the big banks and the breadth of our service offering differentiates us from the other challenger banks. We have a team of over 400 professionals in the commercial and corporate space that on average have over 20 years of experience. They're supported by a credit team that has over 25 years on average of experience. We have small market shares. We only have sort of a 7% market share in the SME space. And we lend into large markets. The SME, commercial and corporate, is a quarter of a trillion pound market. And the specialist mortgage market is over 50 billion pounds. we are doing niches inside those markets. But all of those give us confidence in our ability not only to deliver 27, but to continue to grow beyond 27 as we take more market share, as we take larger shares of a very large market. And back to this slide. The chart on the right means Metro Bank is uniquely placed to deliver outsized returns. And the reasons we're uniquely placed are completely sustainable. Our relationship-based model generates low-cost deposits, best in the market. And our lending teams, who are skilled and capable, generate yields in line with specialist lenders. That gives us the confidence that by 2027, Metro Bank will be generating one of the highest return on tangible equity, if not the highest, of any high street bank. Thank you so much, and we're happy to take your questions.

Thank you very much. To ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. And to ask your question, please ensure your device is unmuted locally. Our first question comes from Benjamin Toms from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open, Benjamin. Please go ahead.

Morning, both. A couple of questions from my side. Morning, Dan. You noticed in the presentation that Metro will become a transfer firm from an MRL perspective from the 1st of 1st, 2026. I appreciate the moment that you don't have all the answers, but can you speak a little bit about how you think about the arguments for and against calling the MREL debt now versus letting it mature in 2028, and how this news might impact your current strategy, particularly around targeted growth loan segments. And secondly, Metro, a profitable, comfortable capital, there's a boost to MREL coming at some stage. When's it reasonable expectation for us to start putting dividends into our model? And then lastly, if that's okay, slide 14, I can see that you're meeting your ambition in advancing commercial lending in a spread of greater than 350 basis points. The right-hand side of that slide on mortgages makes it less clear how you're progressing versus your greater than 200 basis points spread over swaps for mortgages. A quick and dirty calc suggests that you're running slightly behind on that ambition. Is that the right way to think about it in terms of front book mortgage profitability, and do you expect the spread to pick up from here? Thank you.

Good. Okay. Thanks, Ben. I'll do those in order, and Mark, I'll let you talk about the mortgage swaps. So we expect to be designated a transfer firm. You're right. We have 525 million pounds of existing MREL debt at a 12% interest rate that – we could try to buy back before its call date in April of 28. Again, we'll run the economics and the math on it, but it is trading at 114 plus. So the math around whether it's worth buying it back now and using up the set one for the premium we'd have to pay to buy it back versus using that set one to invest in the business in other ways is math we need to do. We haven't really run the math yet. We're waiting to get written confirmation of the change. And again, the new rules don't become in effect until January 1, 2026. So there's a bit of time. In terms of capital return, you're right. A bank that's generating mid to upper teens return on tangible equity sustainably, which we think we will be starting in 27, clearly needs a capital return policy. So, you know, we haven't yet had those conversations internally, but I think it's fair to assume that we will start to have those conversations as we near the 27, you know, sort of upper teens return on tangible equity and what that means. So I would think we'll be talking about capital return policy sort of in year end 26 results and we'll create clarity for what that means for 27 and 28 and beyond. I don't know if you want to talk about mortgage swaps.

Yeah, I think it's harder to show the margin versus swaps. So you're right, Ben. I think the way to think about it is we're at the volumes we need to. In terms of the margin to swaps, it actually is at about the 2%, and we've just launched new products, so we've got more to come in the second half. So we're really comfortable with where we are on the mortgage side, and it's in line with what we've guided.

And all I would add to that is remember, you know, per the guidance, we're doing a billion, a billion two a year in a 50 billion pound market. As we launch the products, there's lots of niches for us to go after to generate the yield we want.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Grace Dargan from Barclays. Your line is open, Grace. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thank you very much for taking my questions. Maybe one first on kind of loan growth more broadly. I mean, I know in the appendix you're making a point of highlighting the CAGRs as you talked about at 24. Maybe give us an update on how you're thinking about that today, what's changed, if anything. And then secondly, maybe you could give us a view on kind of what your targeted or expected RWA density is over time. I guess you've talked about that previously, so any color on that would be helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, Grace, thank you so much. And again, on page 27 of the DAC, we've laid out relatively detailed modeling guidance. And again, this is the same guidance we provided at year end 24. So, you know, some of the rates and some of that other information is slightly stale, but we wanted to be consistent. We see nothing in that guidance that we would change at this point. I think Ben's earlier question about what we would do outside of the emerald regime and what it might mean for asset mix and the fact that not being an emerald actually frees up a bit of net interest margin and And all that, all is for conversations we need to have internally over the next handful of months. But I would think the density we mentioned on this slide, as well as the CAGRs, are still pretty appropriate. Mark, I don't know if there's anything you'd like to add.

No, no, exactly. I mean, we're at 39% at half year. We said 40% for 2025. So trading exactly where I expected it to be from a density perspective.

Yeah. And I guess the point, sorry, I'm getting a little long winded, but the point that seems to be missed is we do have that 4 billion pounds of prime residential mortgages that rolls off, that frees up liquidity, but it also frees up a chunk of capital. So yes, density will increase, but the overall balance sheet doesn't grow very much over the guidance, which makes us much more capital efficient and drives much better roadies.

Okay, thank you very much.

As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Corrine Cunningham from Autonomous. Your line is open, Corrine. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Three probably quick ones from me, please. First one is just on the existing seniors. They do have a clause that would allow for a reg par call. We've kind of assumed that you can't invoke that, but is there any possibility that that could come into your liability conversations? Second one is with your dropping out of, hopefully dropping out of MREL status, do you expect the Bank of England to review your PILA 2A requirements? And then last one, just a quick one on your PBT versus your net income. Do you expect that DTA allowance to actually kick in or is the tax rate that we're seeing in the first half, is that representative of what you would be expecting for the full year? Thank you.

Sure. So listen, those are three really good questions, Karine, so thank you so much. We have looked at the clause in the agreement. We have obviously had it reviewed by lawyers, and we had the conversations before we actually issued the 525 in October 23. We believe that clause only applies if the AMRO regime were to be removed at a macro level. So if the Bank of England came to the conclusion that the whole MRL regime wasn't needed, we don't think it's firm specific. So we have no intentions of using that clause to call the debt at par. In terms of the 2A, I can't really comment. I do know we just, as everybody does, we went through our capital review with the regulator not that long ago. And I think they would have been aware of the pending changes under MREL at the time we were having those conversations. And in terms of the tax rate, Marco?

Yeah, so the tax rate on the P&L will be at the standard rate of tax, but where we see the benefit is just how much of that profit after tax we get to keep by utilizing the DTA over time. So actually, you'll see how we utilize the DTA is really how efficient we are at taking the set one benefits. So I think you'll see the P&L will still be at the normal tax rate, but the set one benefit is post the DTA usage.

Thank you.

We currently have no further questions. So now it's time back to CEO Daniel Frumpkin for some closing remarks.

Thank you everybody for taking the time this morning. I appreciate your commitment. Take care.