Barclays' record £7.14bn despite rise in bad debt

Published on Tuesday 20 February 2007 11:59

BARCLAYS, Britain's third-biggest banking group, today kicked off the bank reporting season by unveiling record pre-tax profit for the year, despite a rise in its provision for bad debt.

The bank said profit rose by 35 per cent to 7.14 billion, from 5.28bn the year before, driven largely by its investment arm and fund management units.

Analysts had feared Barclays may not be on top of bad debts on unsecured lending, but the bank said the consumer credit performance for Barclaycard was beginning to improve.

Overall group income rose 25 per cent to 21.6bn, outpacing a 20 per cent rise in operating costs to 12.7bn.

Barclays is the first of the "big five" banks to unveil results for 2006, contributing to combined profits expected to total more than 38bn.

The bank said its bad-debt charge was 2.15bn last year, up 37 per cent from 2005, as UK borrowers struggled to pay back loans at its Barclaycard credit card unit. But it said it believed it had "passed the worst" in Barclaycard UK's impairments in the second half of last year. Barclaycard's profits fell 40 per cent to 382 million.

Profits at the Barclays Capital investment-banking arm jumped 55 per cent to 2.22bn and Barclays Global Investors reported a 32 per cent rise to 714m.

UK retail banking profits rose 17 per cent to 1.21bn, helped by a seven per cent rise in income. Barclays said it had a UK net mortgage market share of four percent in the second half of 2006.