STANDARD Chartered said it would hand back US$1.5 billion more to shareholders as it reported fourth-quarter earnings that beat estimates, boosted by a strong performance in its trading and wealth business.
The London-headquartered bank announced a fresh buyback which would bring total shareholder distributions to US$4.9 billion since 2023, it said in a statement on Friday (Feb 21).
“We are delivering what we promised our shareholders, which is sustainably higher returns from a high growth business,” chief financial officer Diego De Giorgi said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “We have had good performance – but we’ll keep our eye on the ball and continue executing and hope the market will continue to reward us. But there is more to do no doubt.”
January marked a major milestone for chief executive officer bill Winters as shares in the bank finally rose above the level they were at when he first took the CEO role about a decade ago. Last year, he had called the bank’s share price “crap” for languishing for far too long.
The stock’s value has almost doubled since then and is now trading at £11.40 – higher than the £10.41 level at which it had closed on Winters’ first day on the job back in June 2015.
Standard Chartered’s adjusted pretax profit came in at US$1.05 billion for the three months through December, surpassing the Bloomberg-compiled analyst estimate of US$1.02 billion.
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Operating income from global markets jumped 45 per cent in the fourth quarter, thanks to a strong performance in macro and credit trading, while it rose 36 per cent in wealth solutions. The lender said 265,000 clients were on-boarded in 2024, and it lured US$44 billion of net new money, driven by strong international flows.
“Our strategy of combining differentiated cross-border capabilities for corporate and institutional clients with leading wealth management expertise for affluent clients is firing on all cylinders,” Winters said in a statement announcing the results.
The bank, which makes most of its money in Asia and the Middle East, is in the midst of a corporate cost-saving programme known as “Fit for Growth” that is forecast to see it invest about US$1.5 billion in a range of initiatives to make it more efficient.
About 10 per cent of the cost of the programme was accounted for in 2024, and a half is expected to come this year, according to De Giorgi. Since the launch of the programme, the bank has mobilised over 200 projects during 2024, the lender said.
Standard Chartered posted a restructuring charge of US$441 million last year, which was mainly tied to additional redundancy charges. About US$156 million of that was related to the “Fit for Growth” programme. Throughout 2024, it also recorded a US$561 million impairment related to the write-off of software assets.
Winters is the longest serving boss of a major UK bank and during his tenure he has led several rounds of restructuring, an emergency rights issue, dealt with historic issues with US authorities over sanctions violations and fended off a takeover attempt by one of the UAE’s largest banks.
On his watch, Standard Chartered’s underlying return on tangible equity has more than doubled to 11.7 per cent in 2024 from seven years earlier. With higher interest rates partly boosting earnings, the lender has focused on investor returns with buybacks and dividends, helped by exposure to Asia’s fast-growing economies. BLOOMBERG
