Nick Slape the chief executive of the Co-op Bank has reported soaring profits on the back of interest rates and by being more “nimble” than the other big five high street banks.
Slape said that they pass back around 60% of every interest rate rise to their customers and hailed a second full year of profits.
Their pre-tax profits hiked by more than fourfold to £132.6 million in 2022 compared to £31.1 million the previous year.
Slape told the PA news agency, “The big five banks have got huge amounts of liquidity because of their market share. I am at the whim of the HSBCs and Lloyd’s – if they wanted to write mortgages at really tight margins then they could do that. They need to feed their machines.
“It is something we have always had to contend with. But we can actually be a lot more nimble, we can nip and tuck. We can pull certain products if we need to, if it’s not competitive.”
He added, “What I have seen is that some of the bigger players have passed on interest rates to savers but only on products that are open at the moment to customers, not to those that can no longer be opened.
“What we have done is we have passed on rate rises to both on-sale and closed book products, so to all our customers, because we think that’s the right thing to do.”
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