Neeraj Kapur
Group CEO & Executive Director
Welcome, everyone, to our H1 2026 results presentation. James Hopkinson, my Group CFO, will be taking you through the numbers a bit later on. But I’ll go straight into it. It’s a good story to tell.
So the headlines, GBP 68 million of income, which is 31% up from last year, and the EPS has also grown 157% from H1 of last year. The return on target capital is 26%, which is up 15 percentage points. The number that really matters, and it’s our first interim dividend paid since IPO is 2.1p.
Now this comes after a journey of more than 3 years where we have created some real value. And the dividend policy today isn’t just about paying an interim dividend, but it is about saying that we will look to pay a 40% dividend of adjusted profit after tax for H1 2026 and then progressively improve upon that from 2027.
And why are we doing this? Well, it’s a genuine belief in the durability of our earnings. Clearly, the market has helped us this half, but really, the execution is all ours. And the importance there is that it’s really repeatable. And what that does is give us real confidence in reaffirming our medium-term guidance.
There are really only 3 drivers of our strategy, and it’s deliberately simple. The first is about scaling more offices in more locations, more correspondent banking relationships, more central banking relationships. These are the engine rooms of our growth. And that’s more of what we’re really good at and doing that in more places.