Mortgage lending growth has slowed since 31 December 2017 after higher mortgage redemptions and lower mortgage gross new business following ‘intense mortgage competition’, the lender noted.
Its mortgage market share was 11.5% in Q2 2018, the bank confirmed.
RBS/NatWest also confirmed profit before tax of £1.8bn and said its digital strategy, including its paperless mortgage process and online mortgage application continued to deliver high net promoter scores from customers.
Six million app users
In personal and business banking, RBS has six million regular mobile app users, 20% higher than H1 2017 and 1% higher than December 2017. It said this is a 70% digital penetration of active current account customers.
Total digital sales increased by 27% in H1 2018 representing 42% of all sales and 57% of mortgage switching is now done digitally, compared with 34% in H1 2017.
In business banking, 88% of current accounts were opened digitally in H1 2018 and 60% of loans worth less than £50,000 were originated digitally.
After a New York Attorney General investigation which finished in March 2018 into Residential Mortgage Backed Securities (RMBS) RBS Financial Products paid £73m to the State of New York and a further £94m in ‘customer relief credits.’
In July 2018, RBS Financial Products Inc. paid £15m to the State of Illinois after a similar RMBS investigation and RBS released a provision of £241m to cover a judgment in favour of the US Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) as conservator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
RBS CEO Ross McEwan said the bank still managed to achieve profits despite the RMBS pay outs reported over the period.
“We’ve got a lot of work still to do. The bank is getting there but we have a lot of work to do to make it better for our customers,” he said.
