The chief executive of NatWest has said the bailed-out bank is on a “fast trajectory to private ownership”, with the government likely to fully exit its stake within the first half of 2025.
Paul Thwaite said it would be a symbolic moment for NatWest Group staff and the wider banking sector, allowing the industry to close another chapter of the fallout from the 2008 banking crash.
The Treasury spent nearly £46bn to bail out NatWest, then known as Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), at the height of the financial crisis. The resulting nationalisation left taxpayers owning about 84% of the lender.
A rapid sell-off – and share buy-backs by NatWest – over the past year has cut the remaining public stake in NatWest from 38% in December 2023 to just under 11% today.
“People can see the rate at which the shares are being kind of trickled into the market by the government,” Thwaite told attenders at the FT Banking Summit held at the Convene Centre near St Paul’s Cathedral in London on Tuesday.
“Absent some big kind of dislocation and economic events, we’ll be back to private ownership next year, maybe as early the first half of the year, and that will be a great moment,” he said.
At that point, Thwaite will be the bank’s first chief executive to oversee a fully private banking group since Fred Goodwin, whose excesses were blamed for contributing to RBS’s failure. Goodwin was stripped of his knighthood in 2012.
The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, scrapped a Tory government plan to sell a chunk of NatWest’s stock to the public this summer. Instead, the Treasury has continued to drip-feed shares into the open market, allowing it to benefit from a steadily climbing share price. NatWest shares were trading at 412p on Tuesday, their highest level since 2011.
Thwaite said selling the remaining government stake would allow NatWest to draw a line under a tumultuous chapter in its near 300-year history.
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“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 … all things being well. But I think we’re on a very fast trajectory to private ownership, and I’m very proud of that”, he said.