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The chief executive of Natwest has said the bank could return to full private ownership in the first half of 2025, a move that would draw a line under the government’s bailouts of lenders during the financial crisis.
Speaking at the Financial Times’ Global Banking Summit on Tuesday, Paul Thwaite said he was “delighted with the momentum of the share reduction”, noting that the Treasury’s stake has fallen from around 38 per cent in December 2023 to just under 11 per cent now.
“I think it’s reasonable to expect that, absent some big kind of dislocation in economic events, we’ll be back to private ownership next year, maybe as early as the first half of the year,” Thwaite said.
“The great thing about that is we’ve started to change the investor base,” he continued. “We’ve now got a lot international, long-only investors who are interested in the future of the bank.”
The government has sold down its stake through ongoing trading plan run by Morgan Stanley, while Natwest has also made two directed buybacks this year for a combined £2.24bn.
After consulting with shareholders earlier this year, Natwest won permission to buy back bigger tranches of shares from the government.
Despite Natwest’s share price surging 87 per cent this year to around 412p, the taxpayer has still incurred a loss from the government’s bailout, which saw it take an 84 per cent stake for an average price of 502p per share during the financial crisis.
The government has committed to returning Natwest to private ownership by 2025 or 2026.
Thwaite said privatisation would be a “great moment” and “really symbolic for all of us at the bank”.
“It means we can talk about the future of the bank, and the potential of the bank, rather than having to talk about its past,” he added. “I think we’re on a very fast trajectory to private ownership.”
Of the other lenders nationalised during the crisis, Northern Rock was sold to Virgin Money, while the government fully exited its stake in Lloyds Banking Group in 2017.
