FTSE 100 banks are facing £2.5bn of headwinds – HSBC and Barclays are in the firing line
The FTSE 100’s Big Five banks toasted a healthy profit stash in the first-quarter, but, says Samuel Norman, storm clouds are gathering on the horizon for the sector.
The London market’s five biggest banks swallowed a bitter cocktail of economic risks in the first three months of the year leaving a bumper cash haul overshadowed by a sharp hangover.
Whilst the combined profit of the FTSE 100’s Big Five – Standard Chartered, HSBC, Natwest, Barclays and Lloyds – came in ahead of consensus, turbulence in the macro showed there was bruising underneath the beat.
The cohort’s collective pre-tax profit hit £15.6bn skimmed past the £15.5bn consensus and 2025’s taking but undershot 2024’s first quarter by a whopping £1bn. The industry is now gearing up for a combined bounty of £58bn for the year – a figure that would put it above the previous year’s taking by a cool £7bn.
Yet, even after the banks themselves confirm they expect to make more income on the back of higher interest rates in the coming months, the sector still finds itself fighting to get on the front foot.
Credit for that goes to the sector-wide £2.5bn shock that laid bare the bubbling vulnerabilities that will continue to pose trouble for the year ahead.
The £600m war bill
The conflict in Iran has effectively upended the smooth road to record profits banks expected to cruise down this year.
In some sense it has handed the sector a volatile trade-off. The threat of sticky inflation has forced central banks to keep interest rates high – prompting Lloyds, Natwest, and HSBC to hike their income targets. Lloyds has even predicted the Bank of England will not begin cutting rates until the third quarter of 2027 in what would be a major boost to the lender’s interest coffers.
But the same geopolitical tension is curdling the broader economic outlook.
The Big Five set aside over half £1bn to brace for a surge in souring loans, specifically due to the conflict. Every major player except Barclays recorded an Iran war hit, which landed collectively at £601m.
But Barclays did let its updated forecasts do the talking. The bank trimmed its 2026 growth outlook to a flat one per cent, down from 1.1 per cent.
The group’s finance director Anna Cross admitted the sunnier projections were “printed in February” and have suffered “some deterioration.” She added this was reflect in the impairment charge.
Over at Natwest, chief executive Paul Thwaite addressed how the bank would manage an expected bout of stagflation, where rising inflation is coupled with slowing economic growth.
The bank’s own UK inflation forecasts crept up toward 3.5 per cent, a surge from February 3.3 per cent.
“We are seeing a lot of resilience,” Thwaite said. “The big question is how long the conflict lasts – a lot depends on the duration of the energy shock and the supply issues.”
Private credit bites
In a separate headache for the City, the private credit bug came back for another bite.
The collapse of specialist lender MFS served as the catalyst, leaving Barclays nursing a £228m hit. HSBC reported $400m hit from a fraud-related charge. Whilst finance boss Pam Kaur played coy on where the exposure came from, reports suggest it was MFS fuelling the downturns once more.
These drags left Barclays scrambling to meet profit expectations, while HSBC fell short becoming the only Big Five member to miss consensus.
Kaur moved quickly to soothe nerves, dismissing the MFS debacle as a mere “idiosyncratic” blip.
She said the bank’s total ties to the elusive private credit market were “very small” at $6bn compared to its balance sheet of $1tn.
“We’ve always been very mindful of private credit risks,” she added.
The first quarter also marked the grand opening of the Bank of England’s and City watchdog’s beefed-up reporting regime that required lenders to pull back the curtain on their Pillar 3 disclosures. This made banks explicitly detail their exposure to non-bank financial institutions like private credit funds.
Britain’s private credit market alone is estimated to have grown by 56 per cent since 2015 to $185bn (£138bn). This makes it the second largest after the US, according to a recent report by the House of Lords.