Tushar Morzaria
Management
Good morning and thanks for joining our Q3 call. As you heard yesterday, Jes Staley will be joining us in a month’s time as our new Group Chief Executive. He is had a distinguished career to date, with hands on experience across a number of business lines. And we’re very lucky to have Jes on board, and I’m looking forward to working with him again. For now though, I’ll use this call to take you through our recent performance and our immediate financial objectives. Let me first take you through the highlights of the year to date. I’m pleased to report further progress on our strategy and good performances from all our operating businesses, with standout Q3 results from Barclaycard and PCB. In the first nine months of 2015, we increased Group adjusted profit before tax by 4% to £5.2 billion and Core PBT improved 7% to £6.0 billion. All our Core operating businesses increased profits and improved ROE’s, and again we achieved positive jaws at both the Group and Core level. We delivered a double-digit adjusted Core ROE of 10.5%, and this was on an average equity base that was £6 billion higher at £47 billion. We continued to run down Non-Core successfully. RWAs are down by £20 billion since the start of the year with £2.5 billion of further capital released to the Core. Capital strengthened again in Q3, even after taking legal provisions of £560 million, as we made progress with legacy litigation and conduct issues. With the increase in RWAs, mainly in PCB and the Investment Bank, our fully loaded CET1 ratio stayed steady at 11.1%, while the leverage ratio increased to 4.2%. Our ongoing strategic cost program reduced total operating expenses by 5% to £12.5 billion year-to-date. Now let me take you through our Summary…