Virgin Money UK PLC: First quarter 2020 trading update
Virgin Money UK PLC (“VMUK” or the “Group”) confirms that trading in the three months to 31 December 2019 was in line with the Board’s expectations.
David Duffy, chief executive officer:
“The Group continues to perform well. In a difficult market, our own performance has remained on track and we continue to make strong progress on our ambition to disrupt the status quo.
“We are attracting relationship deposits and delivering growth in customer balances across business and personal, while maintaining our discipline in a competitive mortgage market.
“We have also now delivered on our commitment to lend £6bn to SMEs over the three years to the end of 2019, with £6.5bn lent in total. This included lending of £1.3bn in Scotland, £0.9bn in Yorkshire, £0.9bn in the North West and £0.5bn in the Midlands, demonstrating our support for SMEs across the regions of the UK.
“We’ve launched the first Virgin Money digital personal current account and unveiled three new Virgin Money concept stores as planned in December. We are also progressing at pace with our plans to launch new and exciting Virgin Money products for personal and business customers throughout 2020.
“While sentiment improved following December’s election result, the UK banking market continues to face competitive pressures and uncertainty over the final Brexit settlement. However, we continue to focus on supporting our customers in their everyday lives, delivering on our strategic priorities and meeting our medium-term financial targets.”
Q1 Performance Summary
Balance sheet mix optimisation continues in line with the Group’s strategy
- Customer deposit growth in Q1 of 1.6% to £64.8bn with good relationship deposit performance
- Q1 Mortgage book reduction of 0.8% to £59.6bn as we remain disciplined in a competitive market
- Q1 Business lending growth of 2.5% to £8.1bn reflects good organic business lending growth and a strong contribution during the period from customers switching from RBS
- Q1 Personal lending growth of 3.7% to £5.2bn primarily due to high quality credit card growth
- Net cost of risk of 23bps with asset quality remaining resilient
