NatWest Group plc (NYSE:NWG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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And in terms of that, so I’ll probably leave you to kind of work it through, but we’re comfortable that 320 is in a good position. If we look then in terms of the book, I guess most of what our thoughts are loan growth and what we’re assuming, as we move forward, we delivered really good loan growth this year 6.7%. Overall, we do expect to grow at or above market and our chosen sectors and products and volume of the year will of course be dependent on business and consumer confidence. But for our modeling and our guidance, we’re not dependent on significant volume growth from here.

Operator: Our next question comes from Andrew Coombs of Citi.

Andrew Coombs: If I could just come back to the remark about 80% of your deposit customers having less than £5000. That is my first question, both are very simple one. How many retail customers do you have?

Katie Murray: You’re throwing us by the simplicity, Andrew.

Alison Rose: You have thrown us by the simplicity. So 80% of our deposit accounts, which is in retail have less than £5000. In terms of the numbers of customers we have in retail, we have 70 million customers, not all of them will have deposit accounts with us they will have different products across the piece. But when we look at our deposit accounts, from our customers 80% have less than £5000 which is why, we think about our strategy around helping people save and building a savings habit which is more about a long-term strategy about helping people build financial resilience.

Andrew Coombs: Okay. So my second question would be, you have 70 million customers, 80% of those are 13.6 million have less than £5000 of savings. If I look on your savings website, it says your digital regular savings product to join over 840,000 NatWest customers who save every month without regular savings account. So all of those customers is that a case of only what 6% actually are in the digital regular saver product.

Alison Rose: Andrew, I’m probably not going to give you that comment. A lot of our customers, they have more than one savings account. So they may have an instant access, they may have a digital regular saver, what we’ve seen is our fixed deposit accounts, when we launched them in January, we’re very popular, and we saw that being competitive to our customers. So it will vary. One of the things that we talk about a lot is the level of savings that exist in the U.K., one in four people in the U.K., do you have less than £100 savings in their account, helping customers build financial resilience is a positive strategy for us. Things like our round up tool which sounds very simple. Over a million people are using that on a regular basis, which helps them build savings. I’m very comfortable, we have a good suite of competitive products that allows us to compete that meets the needs of our customers and targets our long-term strategy of helping people save.

Andrew Coombs: Okay. My final question on this is, 80% of your customers have less than £5000 of savings, can you provide an idea of what proportion of the total deposit balance those 8% of customers account for? So I assume it’s a much more sort of proportion?

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