Barclays said strong investment banking helped limit a fall in profit in the third quarter and it expects bad debts to peak earlier than it had previously expected.
Britain's second-biggest bank said today it would restart dividends next month with a payout of 1p per share, as it reported a third-quarter profit of £1.56 billion, down from £2.8 billion a year ago.
For the nine months to the end of September it reported a pretax profit of £4.5 billion, down from £5.6 billion a year ago. Profit excluding gains on acquisitions, debt buybacks and other one-off items more than doubled to £4.4 billion, the bank said.
Barclays said impairment charges and other provisions hit £6.2 billion pounds in the nine months, up from £3.8 billion a year ago, as a fragile UK economy and rising unemployment led to more borrowers defaulting on loans.
Impairments reached £1.4 billion pounds in the third quarter, down from £1.8 billion in the previous three months.
Barclays said it expected impairments for the full year to be around the bottom end of the previously referenced 2009 consensus range of between £9 billion pounds and £9.6 billion.
October trading was "generally consistent" with the overall trend in the first nine months of the year, it said.
Profit at the investment banking arm Barclays Capital reached £1.4 billion in the nine months, or £2.7 billion excluding a charge on its own debt.
BarCap is reaping the benefit from last year's purchase of the US operations of bankrupt Lehman Brothers and the build-up of its equities and M&A advisory business in Europe and Asia.
It joins a batch of rivals reporting strong third-quarter results as capital markets and trading activity have remained lively, including US rivals Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan along with Europe's Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas.
Reuters