Shawbrook Bank generated pre-tax profits of £302m over the past year, with its purchase of Bluestone Mortgages in May 2023 helping contribute to its growth.
This is an significant increase on the £238m pre-tax profit delivered the year before.
The bank saw its annual loan book increase by 24% to £13.3bn. This include £3.3bn of mortgage lending through The Mortgage Lender (TML) and Bluestone Mortgages brands. Shawbrook lends into the buy-to-let, commercial investment and bridging markets.
Publishing its full year results Shawbrook says that the UK property market endured “significant volatility” last year as a result of rapidly rising interest rates.
It adds: “However our customers have proven resilient to date. As such we will continue to seek opportunities to support the market whilst maintaining a firm focus on our robust forward-looking risk framework, leveraging digital and data.”
It adds: “As the professional real estate market continues to adjust to a new trading environment, we remain alert to attractive risk-adjusted opportunities in our specialist segments, while continuing to support the changing requirements of professional landlords.
“Our focus on the wider needs of professional landlords, either already operating at scale, or seeking to grow, provides us with a clear target customer to serve.”
It adds that for the year ahead the bank will also look to enhance its customer retention offering, to maximise the lifetime value of these customer relationships.
Over the past year Shawbrook says it had launched a new ‘next generation’ underwriting hub, introduced a large loans relationship team to support its broker network and had become the first UK bank to complete a limited company remortgage case on the PEXA platform, using automated valuation models to speed up the conveyancing journey.
Shawbrook director of specialist lending Claire Rankin says: “We’ve continued to build on our evolving digital strategy, adding to existing innovations such as MyShawbrook portal, which provides automated underwriting decisions.
“Extending PEXA to limited companies is a further example of us delivering against our technology ambitions, removing the unnecessary friction of manual completion payments, which will now benefit more Shawbrook customers.”
Shawbrook CEO Marcelino Castrillo says: “Our approach has delivered a strong set of results, generating an underlying profit before tax of £302m and underlying return on tangible equity of 20.2%.
“While the macroeconomic landscape continues to evolve, we are encouraged by both the resilient performance we have delivered to date and the improving sentiment seen across our markets.”
