Barclays PLC Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Welcome to Barclays' Half-Year 2026 Results Fixed Income Conference Call. I will now hand it over to Anna Cross, Group Finance Director, and Dan Fairclough, Group Treasurer.

Good afternoon, welcome to the Half 1 2026 Fixed Income Investor Call. I'm joined by Dan Fairclough, our group treasurer. Let me begin with a brief overview of our financial performance. Q2 was another strong quarter, with a group return on tangible equity of 16.1%. All three U.K. businesses delivered ROTI above 20%, with consistent volume and revenue growth. Investments we have made allowed us to again monetize strong markets and banking wallets in the investment bank, where ROTI increased nearly 4% versus last year to 16%, while the U.S. Consumer Bank delivered 10.5% ROTI, excluding the American Airlines gain on sale. Given the momentum and breadth of our progress, we are upgrading the group income target to circa GBP 31.5 billion in 2026, and we remain confident in delivering group ROTI greater than 12% in 2026, having achieved 14.8% in half one.

We are using additional capacity from stronger H1 profitability to structurally improve Barclays' returns. We therefore anticipate taking additional cost actions later in 2026 to create greater cost flexibility from 2027. These plans increase our confidence in delivering 2028 ROTI greater than 14% and accelerate our progress towards an all-weather ROTI beyond 2028. These actions will not disrupt the group's distribution plans or financial targets in 2026, including the high 50s cost-income ratio target. Moving to Slide 4 on credit quality. The Q2 group impairment charge of GBP 571 million equated to a loan loss rate of 51 basis points. Consumer and corporate balance sheets remain robust, and borrowers are behaving rationally. As an accounting matter, consensus unemployment expectations increased as we anticipated, consuming the post-model adjustments that we recognized last quarter in Barclays U.K. and U.S. Consumer Bank. We retained the GBP 68 million PMA in the investment bank, recognizing downside bias due to global macro uncertainty.

For 2026, we continue to expect a group loan loss rate around the top of the 50-60 basis point range. Before handing over to Dan, let me cover the economic trends in the U.K. Whilst Barclays benefits from diversification, with 40% of income generated in the U.S., the U.K. is our home market. The U.K. economy has been growing in nominal and real terms, at a faster rate than the Eurozone. This has supported real wage growth, rising house prices, and stable employment. Declining investment since the late 2000s meant that U.K. corporate debt to GDP had fallen to a multi-decade low. Corporates have had the capacity to invest, but not the confidence. This seems to be changing.

The majority of corporates we survey tell us they are confident in their prospects. Firms plan to increase investment in the next 12 months, including in technology. This is broad-based across sectors and regions, with overall U.K. corporate lending up 9% in the past year. As you can see from our results for several quarters, Barclays is helping foster U.K. growth, not just benefiting from it. I'll now hand over to Dan for the balance sheet highlights.

Thanks, Anna. Let me begin first with capital on Slide 7. We ended the quarter with a CET1 ratio of 14.3%, generating 115 basis points of capital from profits year to date. Pro forma for the GBP 1 billion buyback, the CET1 ratio was 14%, consistent with our intention to operate around the top of our 13%-14% CET1 range, pending regulatory clarity. Attributable profit growth should continue to drive strong capital generation and EPS momentum, which we amplify through share buybacks. Looking ahead, guidance for regulatory RWA inflation in 2027 remains unchanged at GBP 19 billion-GBP 26 billion. This includes Basel 3.1 changes on the 1st of January and implementation of IRB in the US Consumer Bank, which we now expect in H2 2027. Group Pillar 2A requirements are expected to reduce following each of these events, and we will provide further guidance as we get clarity.

On the broader regulatory landscape, we note the recent Financial Stability Report, but believe more can be done to drive U.K. growth. Proposed changes would reduce Barclays' Tier 1 leverage requirements modestly by eight basis points, supporting its position as a backstop measure. We continue to work closely with the Bank of England to promote international alignment and competitiveness of the U.K. financial services sector. Moving up the capital stack, on slide nine, we show our Tier 1 and total capital requirements as a proportion of RWAs. We continue to target a prudent buffer against each of these requirements, which helps us manage any RWA and FX movements, as well as our issuance and redemption profiles. Our Tier 1 ratio is 18% and total capital ratio is 20.3%, maintaining healthy headroom above our 14.6% and 17.8% respective regulatory requirements. Within these ratios, we had an AT1 component of 3.6%.

As stated at the full year results, we had a more limited issuance requirement for AT1 and Tier 2, given our lighter redemption profile. I'm pleased to report that our Plan 2026 capital issuance is now complete, following our inaugural AUD 1 billion AT1 and GBP 750 million Tier 2, both priced this quarter. Turning now to slide 10. Credit market conditions have been strong in the first half of the year, and we have completed our GBP 10 billion MREL issuance plan against this supportive backdrop. Looking forward, we may look at some pre-funding of 2027 volumes subject to market conditions. Finally, at the operating company level, we recently issued our first publicly placed Barclays Bank PLC Senior since 2020, with a EUR 3 billion offering. This was a good example of ensuring our funding sources remain active and diverse. Onto the next slide on liquidity.

Our average LCR of 158% is GBP 117 billion in excess of our regulatory requirements. Our average net stable funding ratio was 136%, and the loan-to-deposit ratio was 75%, both demonstrating a continued robust liquidity position. On slide 12, you can see that our deposit base increased by 1% across customer segments. This quarter, we saw continued growth in International Corporate Bank deposits as we strategically target growth across the U.K. and U.S. Elsewhere, our deposit base continues to demonstrate a high level of stability as a source of funding, with diversification between customer segments, geographies, and currencies. A significant proportion also benefits from long-standing operational relationships and deposit insurance. Turning to slide 13, structural hedge income growth is predictable and benefits all divisions, accounting for circa 45% of Q2 Group NII.

It will drive around half of the planned group income growth from 2025 to 2028 and remain a meaningful tailwind beyond. As a planning matter, these expectations are based on a 3.5% reinvestment yield. Swap rates were above this level again in Q2 of 4.3%, further supporting NII in future years. A quick word on credit ratings. Our target remains for Barclays PLC Senior to qualify a single A composite across all indices. This would require an upgrade from either Moody's or S&P. We believe the outcomes of our strategic plan and consistent execution to date support this objective, particularly in terms of increased profitability and greater capital generation. We will continue to engage with all credit rating agencies on this topic. With that, I'll hand back to Anna.

Thank you for your continued support of Barclays and our broader franchise. We'll now open the call for questions. Operator, please go ahead. If you wish to ask a question, please press Star followed by one on your telephone keypad.

If you change your mind and wish to remove your question, please press Star followed by two. Our first question for today comes from Lee Street of Citigroup. Your line's now open. Please go ahead.

Hello. Good afternoon. Thank you for doing the call. I have three questions, please. Firstly, just looking at your business mix, you allocate most capital to the investment bank but make higher returns in the other divisions. My question is, would it make sense to look for further inorganic growth opportunities in the higher returning business models to grow those further? That'd be my first question. Secondly, on the Bank of England proposals in the Financial Stability Report, what would it take for you to think about changing your common equity Tier 1 management buffer and potentially bring that lower, given the idea of releasable buffers? Finally, you mentioned the international alignment of capital requirements and talking to the Bank of England about that. Just in your view for Barclays, where do you think the biggest gaps are?

Or where is Barclays most disadvantaged on that level from your perspective? They're my three questions. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you very much, Lee, for joining the call. Why don't I start and then I will hand to Dan. Look, in terms of the balance of capital across the group and the relative returns, as you can see, we've been really focused on improving the IB returns through stability of capital, but also capital and cost discipline. We're happy with the structural improvement in returns, and we're not done yet. Expect those to continue to edge upwards. On the second part of your question, which is really around should we pursue inorganic growth elsewhere, we feel like we are pursuing the right pace of organic growth. We've deployed GBP 25 billion of our 30 that we expect to do in RWAs so far in the U.K. businesses.

We're growing at around 5% a year, and we think that's the right rate of growth for organic growth, underpinned by the capabilities that we're putting down across both retail and corporate banking. When it comes to inorganic opportunities, the bar is very high for us. We would want something that would deliver either additional capability or additional volume. Kensington, for example, was capability. Tesco was about volume. When we look at the returns of those businesses, we are considering those, or the returns on any acquisition, we would be considering that relative to the returns on the buyback. We're very focused on the capital hierarchy that we have, which is 1, regulatory compliance at all times. Number 2, distributions. Number 3, investment in the business. That, again, would be a high bar.

Thirdly, we would look at the type of business model that we saw in front of us, and specifically, you'll have seen that we're very much leaning towards digital opportunities or those with a digital basis to them, because we feel those business models have the greatest longevity. Of course we will continue to look at inorganic opportunities, but it's an organic plan, so expect us to keep plugging away at around 5% a year and then to sort of have tuck-ins as and when we see all those factors being satisfied. In terms of your second question, we've been fairly clear that you should expect us to operate around the top end of our range until we get regulatory clarity, and we expect to get that in two chunks.

The first, the Pillar 2A clarity around Basel 3.1 implementation, which we should receive at some point at the back end of this year. Secondly, we would expect to get a bit more Pillar 2 clarity when we land our A-IRB model for U.S. cards, which we would expect to be in the second half of next year. So those are the points at which we would reexamine the range within which we operate. Obviously, it's one input, and we would be considering other factors at the same time. Dan, do you want to add?

Yeah. Just to add a little bit on that second question. There's nothing in the FSR proposals that would change the way that we think about buffering at Barclays. So the things that Anna referred to are obviously mechanical reductions in the MDA requirements, so there's no change in stance there. Obviously, we'll watch the debate as it unfolds on the concept of a single usable buffer, but that feels like that's got quite a long way to run, and obviously will be a long international discussion. Third question I think you asked was just sort of how do we think about international competitiveness. So this is an important point for us in terms of our regulatory engagement. There were some positives that came out of the PRA Basel package on IMA.

We felt that they had listened to the industry in a number of areas, and there were a number of helpful points, particularly around simplification. More broadly, we think that there is more to be done here, both to promote growth, but also to make sure that there's a level playing field. So a couple of things that we would call out is the approach to models broadly, a specification around the use of models, and the rest of the standardized Basel package more broadly, where we feel there's more to be done. Okay. All right. Thank you.

Thank you, Lee. Really appreciate the question. Can we go to our next question, please?

Our next question comes from Daniel David of Autonomous. Your line's now open. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Congratulations on the results. I've got three questions. The first two are kind of related. Just on the leverage changes, which were kind of more targeted at the O-SIIs. Did you feel a bit harshly treated as a G-SIB? I guess, did you expect any changes to allow U.K. G-SIBs to become more competitive in the global context? I guess when I look at what's changed, it's mainly O-SIIs, as I say. I guess related to that, as QT progresses, are you seeing any noticeable impact on your balance sheet and just what you can extend to certain businesses as leverage maybe becomes a little bit more binding as central bank reserves dissipate? The final one, Dan, you just mentioned it, that kind of FPC vision of a single releasable buffer.

I guess what stands out in that is that Pillar 2B could become part of the MDA. Do you think that's where we're headed longer term? I'm interested to hear your views. Just finally, all the best in the new role, Dan. Thanks. Thank you. All right.

Look, the leverage proposals were obviously a little bit disappointing in terms of the aggregate impact. I don't think it was specifically around the O-SII point. The Bank of England was using the flexibility that they had within the Basel remit, and one of those was obviously on the CCYB. The reason why some banks got more benefit than others was because the CCYB, where the U.K. obviously is the largest component, was a bigger portion of their capital stack. I think it was more about what room for maneuver did they feel that they had, rather than necessarily targeted at O-SII versus G-SIB specifically. There's more to come from the Bank of England and overall on this reform package. The second question on QT is interesting.

We haven't really noticed any particular change in the way that we manage the balance sheet. It's obviously interesting that we do seem to be moving closer to the preferred minimum reserve level that the Bank of England have cited. I think another kind of interesting observation for the market, it's just the fact that we are seeing a significant uptick in the use of the Bank of England repo reserve scheme. That does suggest that other banks in particular are positioning around those reserves scarcities, but not impacting us particularly directly. Your final question. I think it's hard to say where this is going to go, to be honest, because I think the debate is really at the beginning.

The Financial Stability Report, again, put out a signal that it's a topic that the Bank of England wants to explore, but we still haven't seen any detail on it. I expect we will get more of that as we move into Q4, both from the Bank of England and then potentially internationally.

Okay. Thank you, Dan, for that. Can we have our next question, please?

Our final question for today comes from Rob Smalley of MacKay Shields. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Hi. Thanks very much for doing the call.

Also a three-parter. First, in terms of the IB, the performance and the balance sheet growth, we've seen your domestic competitors really grow their balance sheets and grow a number of different businesses over the past six to 12 months. At the same time, you've said that you're going to keep the capital commitment and IB balance sheet pretty much stable. Do you anticipate a growing gap between you and some of your global competitors here as a result of just the size of the businesses going forward? Is your relative needed issuance versus some of, say, the large U.S. banks who need to fund a growing IB balance sheet indicative of this as well? That's my first question. Secondly, you mentioned on the other call earlier this morning, the IPO business was mentioned and your participation in it.

At the same time, you're also looking to grow your wealth management business. One of the American banks had given some data around employees of IPO companies becoming wealth management clients at their bank. Do you have any data or at least some color around convergence from where you participated in IPOs and getting those people into the Barclays wealth management platform? Then third, just on domestic deposits. I know there's been discussion around this already. There is a lot of competition. You've done a good job in increasing deposits overall, but where does that go from here? Will you need to issue more out of the OpCo in the institutional market? Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Rob.

Why don't I start, then I will hand to Dan to make additions and pick up the third one. On the U.S. banks, our strategy is well set out here, and it's one of discipline. What we mean by that is not only running the business for returns, but with a risk posture that's appropriate for the environment. That's really what you see us doing here. We're extending a bit of balance sheet, both in terms of RWAs, more significantly in leverage. We're doing so as a means to an end to ensure that we're getting a commensurate increase in revenue over RWAs, which you can see in the quarter, but also that we manage the risk well. You'll note the VaR's not really changed. No trading loss days in the quarter.

That is really important to us, that we manage this business within disciplined boundaries. We feel like we are making good progress, so we are happy with its structural progress in terms of the consistency of that revenue over RWAs and the consistency of its cost. We wouldn't recognize that we feel like we are falling behind our expectations at all. From here, we do think that there are more opportunities both to optimize within the capital framework that we've given it, but also that much of the growth areas that we are very focused on within this business do not require balance sheet. M&A, ECM, the financing business, certainly leverage heavy but not RWA heavy, and most importantly, the International Corporate Bank.

The other good part of that is clearly they are businesses which are more recurring, more fee-based, and really address something that Lee was pointing to in his initial question, which is about the lower than group RoTE in that part of the business. To your second question, we actually believe that our wealth opportunity is much wider than that. Just to remind you that our wealth business is a U.K.-focused business. There may be somewhat of a geographical gap between where we do our IPO activity and where we do our wealth activity. Clearly, our private bank is more of an international factor, but the wealth opportunity is very much U.K.-based. We are really focused on the 400,000 clients that we have in Premier that we believe would benefit from that advice.

Think of it as probably a bit of a narrower geographical focus, Rob, but one that is much wider in terms of the pool of clients that we are going after. Dan, anything you'd want to add? The third part of the question.

No, I will just take the third part of the question. U.K. deposits, obviously that primarily relates to our ring-fence banks at BUK. That entity has a very comfortable funding position. If we felt we needed to do more funding, we would likely do that in secured form and covered. Very unlikely that we would do any unsecured issuance from BUK. Clearly, we have issued, as I said in the prepared remarks, at the OpCo level for Barclays Bank, which is the non-ring-fence bank. That is just one of a broad range of funding sources that we have available. Obviously, we raise international deposits there, we have other wholesale funding instruments across the markets.

Okay. Thank you for your question, Rob.

That's all. Okay. Sorry to interrupt you.

It looks like we do have more questions now on the line. Perhaps we could go to the next question, please.

Our next question comes from Violeta Baraboi of Société Générale. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Good afternoon.

Thank you, Anna, Dan, for holding the call. One question actually around funding. 2027 has been mentioned, pre-funding that. I would like to understand a little bit more of how I should be thinking about the quantum of that pre-funding and within what part of the capital structure. Are we talking more about senior HoldCo issuances to pre-fund your upcoming GBP maturities early January? Are we thinking about a little bit of subdebt? Also a question on the AT-1. You issued, obviously, the Aussie AT-1. I was trying to understand whether this is an on-off transaction, or are you really thinking about being more present in the market going forward? That's it on my side. Thank you. Thanks for the question.

I can take those, Anna. We generally don't give specific guidance on pre-funding, and we don't have a fully formed view on what pre-funding we would do. We will really respond there to market conditions and where we see relative value. Not too much further to add on that at this point. In terms of the AT-1, obviously when we come to market, we will look at the broad set of opportunities available to us. Obviously, we have historically focused predominantly on GBP and GBP. That's where the market is deepest for us. But we will continue to look at opportunities elsewhere, where they're attractive, they provide diversification, and where the pricing is right. We've issued in SGD as well in the past. We'll keep opportunistic on where we go in addition to GBP and GBP.

Thanks for the question. Thank you, Violeta.

Can we have the next question, please?

Our next question comes from Pran Vaidya of Crédit Agricole. Your line is now open. Please go ahead. Can you hear me?

Yes, we can. Thank you. Loud and clear. Perfect. Thank you for taking my questions.

I have two. First on LCRs. I saw that your LCR declined from 170% to around 158% at the end of this quarter compared to the end of last year. Can you please walk us through the key drivers behind this decline, perhaps if you're anticipating any material outflows in the near term, and also if you can share your target operating range for the LCR, if you share that. The second question would be on the SRTs. I noticed that you had around GBP 700 million benefit this quarter. If you can provide any forward guidance on your SRT pipeline, specifically how much RWA reduction or in terms of CET1 benefit you plan to achieve through SRTs in the coming quarters or in FY 2026. Thank you. Yeah, I'm happy to take those questions.

Thanks for those. Yeah, the LCR has declined over the past 12 months or so. This firstly relates to something that we called out probably 12 months ago now, which was a change of methodology within our prime financing business, which moved to a more conservative approach. We report the LCR on a 12-month rolling basis, so that has just taken time to come through the ratio. That was a sort of mechanical effect that we disclosed 12 months ago. Obviously it's been quite an active quarter in terms of investment banking activity and financing in particular. We've obviously leaned into that and used some of our surplus funding to support those clients. I wouldn't call anything else out, particularly in terms of where the LCR ratio will go from here. SRT. We've talked about the broad scope of our SRT activity in the past.

The vast majority of our SRT is in the Colonnade program, which provides protection on our corporate loans. That program is largely at scale, so I wouldn't call that material changes in that from a volume perspective. Then the rest of the activity that we have is relatively small. Some mortgages and some consumer loans. I wouldn't call out too much in terms of the forward pipeline. Largely that will be replacement transactions as they come up for amortization. I would say that we have issued a little bit more in the last quarter. We've just stepped into some of the upcoming amortization that we would have from those programs. It's very consistent with what we've done on the overall MREL issuance. We've just got ahead of refinancings.

The only thing I would add to that is just certainly on the BUK side, and I think that's the transaction that you are referring to. There, what you've seen us do is a series of transactions that really allow us to optimize the balance sheet and what we're retaining, and they are one by one commercial decisions that we make. I'd contrast that, as Dan says, with the programmatic nature of Colonnade, which is largely at scale. Thank you for those questions. I think that's our final question. I'd just like to thank you all for your interest in Barclays and for joining us on the call today. Whilst he really doesn't want me to do this, I'm going to say thank you to Dan for his 25 years in Barclays.

For those of you who don't know, Dan is moving to Australia with his family. Violeta, you may not see Barclays presence in the Aussie market, but you're definitely going to see Dan's. I think you'll all join me in thanking him for his stewardship and wishing him luck on the other side of the world. I suspect this is not the last time we will see Dan Fairclough. Thank you for that. We'll see you on the road.

Thank you. Thanks, Anna. This concludes the Barclays Half Year 2026 Results Fixed Income Call.

Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect your line.