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LONDON (Alliance News) - Barclays PLC on Tuesday confirmed it will sell down its 62.3% stake in its African subsidiary, amid a broader strategic update that will see the bank pay a reduced dividend in 2016 and 2017 to help boost its financial strength.
Jes Staley, the bank's new chief executive, said there is more work to do to restructure the bank in 2016. He set out plans to focus the group on two "sibling" divisions, which he identified as Barclays UK and Barclays Corporate & International, the latter of which includes its investment bank. The UK arm will become Barclays' UK ring-fenced bank by 2019, focused on retail banking.
In addition, Barclays will aim to reduce its cost to income ratio to below 60%.
The update came as Barclays said its pretax profit fell to GBP2.07 billion in 2015, from GBP2.26 billion the prior year. Its net loss widened to GBP394.0 million from GBP174.0 million.
Adjusted to exclude one-off costs, pretax profit fell to GBP5.40 billion from GBP5.50 billion, coming short of company-compiled analyst consensus of GBP5.77 billion.
Barclays maintained its dividend for 2015 at 6.5 pence per share, but said it will cut the payment to 3.0p in 2016 and 2017. Together with the selling down its stake in Barclays Africa Group, the reduced dividend will help bolster the group's common equity tier one ratio, a key measure of financial strength. Barclays reported a CET1 ratio of 11.4% at the end of 2015, up from 10.3% one year earlier.
By Samuel Agini; samagini@alliancenews.com; @samuelagini
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