Earnings Labs

NatWest Group plc (NWG)

Q2 2011 Earnings Call· Fri, Aug 5, 2011

$15.72

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Transcript

Philip Hampton

Management

All right. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to RBS's Half Year Results at the end of another quiet week for bank stocks. And our results once more are quite a mixed bag. We've got continued good progress on the balance sheet. Again, capital funding the non-Core rundown all going very well. And our businesses are, generally speaking, performing much better. Certainly, our customer -- our retail-focused business is doing a lot better. GBM obviously suffering from the general market weakness in that area. But, once again, we've got some big charges coming through, which are effectively the continuing aftershocks of the financial crisis. In our case, Greek sovereign bonds, Ulster Bank and, of course, the PPI charge for redress. I think we're all looking forward probably on both sides of this divide to the day when our results can be simply dominated by the operating performance of our businesses rather than these materializings, which seem to be a recurring feature of our results. We're also looking forward to the publication of the ICB's final report, especially the recommendations on ring fencing. We at RBS were obviously the biggest casualty of the crisis in banking. And, of course, we did make a big ill-judged acquisition. But our losses that we've been recording since the financial crisis got going, have generally speaking, been plain vanilla credit problems rather than losses resulting from trading activities. And so, for example, in this half, we have GBP 2.5 billion of provisions in Ulster Bank, and that's a relatively simple focused Retail & Commercial bank along the lines of the ring fence activities described in the ICB report. So it will be interesting to see how an efficient, enduring ring fence structure can be identified that deals with the dynamic changes, customer needs and market conditions that are really a feature of our world. What we will never get away from is the need for effective internal risk controls, external supervision and an appropriate management culture and team. We've made great progress, I think, on our internal risk controls. We have plenty now of external supervision, and I think we've got a fine management team in place at RBS. And I'll hand you over to the top 2 of those -- of that team to talk to you more fully about the results. Thank you. Stephen?

Stephen Hester

Operator

Thank you very much, Philip. We'll go through the normal format introduction for me. Bruce will go through the numbers and then obviously Q&A afterwards, and we'll try and make it brisk because I know you all want to get back to your screens and be uplifted after what I hope will be a characteristically cautious presentation from us. So in terms of running through the headlines of the business achievements, and, obviously, most of you will have seen this in our press release, I think we feel that RBS has delivered a solid performance in the challenging market positions. You've seen the operating profit up year-on-year whether measured in the first half year or the second quarter on second quarter. Clearly, the Retail & Commercial businesses are the stronger performers, as you would expect in this kind of market, with U.K. Retail our strongest contributor. But we are seeing turnarounds in the areas we needed to see, and I'll talk about that more lately. And even in GBM, which is going through the most difficult time, a first half return on equity of 15% is really not too terrible. We'd like it to be better and may not be for a while, but I think we feel that there are many good things in that business line as well. You've seen some of the key business metrics. Our net asset value per share confusingly went up when there was a bottom line loss, which has really to do with the movement on available-for-sale securities. Bruce will take you through that. Our Core Tier 1 I think, again, is standing us in very good stead, and, of course, we still have the remainder of Non-Core to come down and to further support our capital ratios. We've been increasing our provision…

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

Thank you, Stephen, and good morning, everyone. Let me start off with a brief review of the second quarter financial performance. Looking at the consolidated group financial highlights for the quarter, our group income was down slightly versus the prior quarter, as GBM's income declined in a tough market environment after a seasonally strong first quarter. On the other hand, the Retail & Commercial business maintained its strong performance, with underlying income of 2%. Expenses were down versus Q1 and versus a year ago, reflecting both the lower GBM income and strong cost discipline. Our claims cost continued their improvement, both on a prior-quarter and a year-on-year basis, as the insurance division's derisking strategy is paying off. The profit before impairment losses, or PBIL, was up about GBP 100 million versus the first quarter and GBP 350 million versus the year-ago quarter. Impairments ticked up in the quarter in Non-Core, which reflected a targeted provision to Irish land values and a few single-name corporate impairments. The so-called "below-the-line" items increased in the quarter to GBP 1.5 billion. That included a PPI provision of GBP 850 million and a GBP 733 million provision against our Greek sovereign exposure, which resulted in a bottom line loss of GBP 897 million in the quarter. Nonetheless, the Core Tier 1 ratio held steady at 11.1%, and our TNAV strengthened to 50.3p. Looking at the detail of our P&L categories. The net interest income was down 2% versus the prior quarter, with Retail & Commercial flat. Note that 87% of our net interest income comes from Retail & Commercial. The group average interest earning assets were up by about GBP 3 billion. That was driven by GTS in Retail & Commercial, as well as group treasury's expansion of the liquidity portfolio. On the right side…

Philip Hampton

Management

Thanks, Bruce. Usual basis, which is you put your hand up, we'll identify targets, and if you can announce your name, rank and serial number, that will help everybody.

Tom Rayner

Analyst

It's Tom Rayner at Exane BNP Paribas. I wonder if it's possible to get Slide 4 up because it's quite hard to read in the back here. But my question was just going to be looking at your liquidity portfolio versus your short-term wholesale funding. And if the market is worrying about possibility of another sort of short-term funding squeeze in the market, I'm just wondering how significant is that, the fact your liquidity portfolio is now actually greater than your total short-term wholesale funding? I mean, can you run that portfolio down materially if you needed to?

Stephen Hester

Operator

The answer to that is yes. Obviously, we hope not too, but we built it out for a reason, for the same reason that we did more term funding than the pro rata amount earlier in the year. And that's standing us in good stead at the moment. Clearly, these are difficult markets, but for the moment, so far, so good.

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

Actually, Tom, the number is slightly incorrect. The short-term wholesale funding, excluding derivatives collateral, is GBP 148 billion. The liquidity portfolio's GBP 155 billion. Those derivative positions are netting. They're shown broad, so we've excluded that in the calculation, so we actually do have more liquidity than we do short-term wholesale funding.

Thomas Rayner - Exane BNP Paribas

Analyst

That's what I thought the slide showed actually. Okay. Just one other quick question. The GBP 7 billion of disposals in Non-Core, what were the losses, if any, associated with that disposal?

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

They were quite modest because we've taken -- remember in the fourth quarter, we had a very big pipeline and we've been pulling through that pipeline, so a bunch of that disposal loss was already incurred previously and recognized in prior periods.

Michael Helsby - BofA Merrill Lynch

Analyst

It's Michael Helsby from Merrill Lynch. I've just got a question on the stress test, actually. You guys came out relatively quite bad, so I'd just invite you to comment on that. And also just hypothetically, clearly, everyone's extremely worried at the moment. If that scenario came to pass as a group, would you be -- I wouldn't use toward happy, but would you be comfortable to see your Core Tier 1 run down to that level? Or is that a level which would require additional capital?

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

The first part of that, I think it's been well chronicled that there was a real straitjacket that the EDA applied in terms of the rules around that stress test, which one of the ones that was particularly, I think, inappropriate for a bank like ourselves was the limitation of trading income to the average in the past 5 years, given the sizable loss that we took earlier in the crisis and then putting a stress loss on top of that, which basically moved us to a negative income position in trading. So that alone was worth 80 basis points. Adjusting for that would put us much more back in the pack. Now there's quite a few other things which have also been well chronicled, which I think the way insurance was treated, for example, the way some of the Non-Core rundown was not permitted even though we have a pipeline but it wasn't a mandate like with the EU. So there's some other adjustments that we would make which would say, I think, our performance was somewhat misleading in terms of the bottom line. Having said that, we do still have a big balance sheet, and we do have exposures, and so we're very mindful and careful of how we're managing the risk, and we're trying to obviously derisk and delever as quickly as we can. Stephen, you want to take the broader one?

Stephen Hester

Operator

I think that on the broader one, obviously, it's hard to second-guess circumstances. We are certainly working towards a point that when we're done, and we're not done now, we would want to be able to keep our Core Tier 1 over 7% in the future, even in extreme stress, but we're not at that point yet, and that would be on the Basel III. But I think as Bruce has indicated, our Core Tier 1 is higher today than it was in December for the European stress test. The European stress tests were very idiosyncratic and hit us in a disproportionate way in a way that we didn't think will happen in real life, so at the moment we're feeling fine on this front.

Rohith Chandra-Rajan - Barclays Capital

Analyst

Rohith Chandra-Rajan from Barclays Capital. A couple of questions on GBM, if I could. First, just on cost flexibility. Given your outlook for a tough, understandably tough, revenue environment, comp ratio picked up to 39% in the quarter despite some reduction in those costs. Just wondering how we should think about that going forward? And secondly on GBM, GBP 7.5 billion RWA reduction in the quarter. What degree is that one-off or part of an ongoing program?

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

Okay. Sure. On the comp, there is a fixed element to the comp pool, so there's clearly salaries and then there's deferred compensation from prior periods. So just mathematically, as revenues go down, you're going to see a ticking up of the comp ratio, but we did certainly lower our current projections for the annual award to GBM in line with the lower revenues. So I think what you have to look out from here obviously is that you're in a protracted period where you think revenue is going to be lighter, you probably have more capacity in the plant that you need and so you have to look hard at your headcount and see if there's opportunities to reduce heads. So that would be the first one. The second one, on the VAR decrease, we did get a benefit, as Stephen indicated. Some of this is related to time series data, so when markets were highly volatile, you go back in historical reference point and you pick that up. That's been rolling off. We might be replacing it in the current environment with new volatile data points. And so that might net out. But at this point, a portion of that reduction looks like it will just flow through, provided the markets stay reasonable here. And then the other part of it was discretionary on the part of GBM to take down risk. And then assuming the markets got firmer, we would dial off the risk a little bit and capture the revenues that we'd see in terms of the increased flows in the business. I can't give you the exact split, John. I don't know if you have a -- if it's 50-50 or what the split is, but there's clearly -- some of that is the time series data, and some of that is the risk dialed down.

Rohith Chandra-Rajan - Barclays Capital

Analyst

Just briefly on Non-Core. Are you slightly paring back your asset disposal aspiration for the year? You previously guided to GBP 96 billion. It's now a little bit softer, less than GBP 100 billion.

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

No. We're still targeting GBP 96 billion.

Robert Law - Nomura Securities Co. Ltd.

Analyst

Robert Law of Nomura. Could I explore a couple of areas, please? Firstly, on the capital side, I mean, I know you're looking at the risk-weighted assets, gross of the EPS amount. Could I ask you to comment on the capital on a stressed position, assuming you were to exit the APS. And I know the FSA is obviously looking at capital in a stressed position rather than on a regulatory side. And assuming you exit the APS, can you advance us on your thoughts on where you progress in terms of capital distribution at a later point, obviously, given where the stock price is now in relation to the conversion of these shares? That's the first area.

Stephen Hester

Operator

Sorry. Could you be a bit clearer on what you mean by distribution? So effectively, we will be working with the FSA through the stress test process at the later part of this year. They run 2 scenarios a year, and they'll have a fall scenario that we need to run probably off of the third quarter data, and then we'll have to roll that forward to the year-end data. So I would anticipate that no decision by the FSA will be made on the exit until we get through that process, which given the amount of crunching that takes place around those numbers, you're probably looking at sometime in the first quarter. I don't know if it'll be by results. I'd like it to be by results, but it's hard to say if it will be at that point. And so, clearly, one of the views is the stress scenario that they develop based on how the world looks then and then where our capital position is, which we've been trying to maintain a very robust position clearly given the current situation. So we're still stating that it's our public desire to exit APS in October of 2012. We don't want to put any new money up beyond the GBP 2.5 billion minimum, and we're working very hard to accomplish that. Clearly, beyond that, how much additional capital we have to turn on the coupons and then ultimately do something on the DAS and then ultimately put the dividend back in place will depend on how we do financially. We believe we'll have some of the capacity to do that in a reasonable time frame, although that could elongate, and that obviously will impact the timing of the privatization.

Robert Law - Nomura Securities Co. Ltd.

Analyst

And the second area was on Non-Core. Could I ask you to comment on the trends in the margin in Non-Core, given what's happening in funding markets at the moment? And, overall, given the -- with the RWAs, I think you still have there GBP 125 billion, the shrinkage in the quarter and losses were bigger than the capital release. Could you comment on whether you think Non-Core rundown will be capital accretive over the period?

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

Okay. So in the margin, with respect to the margin, we are seeing a bit of an eroding margin. I think it went from 90 basis points to 87 basis points in the quarter. And so we're a, selling off loans that have high yield in some instances; and b, as we've improved the term structure of the wholesale funding, they have a big funding gap. They're largely a wholesale funding so that gets passed through to them. So we could continue to see erosion in that net interest income. I wouldn't worry about that so much frankly, because we run Non-Core overall on a budget, if you will, or if necessary, will. And so that also expands or contracts based on everything in the P&L. And so if we have a little bit less net interest income, we try and make it up elsewhere as we go down through the P&L. So what I'm trying to get people to focus on here now is the Retail & Commercial NIM, ultimately the NII that's associated with Non-Core goes away and disappears, and the key number to stay focused on is retail NII, which at this point seems rock solid, was GBP 322 million versus GBP 321 million in the first quarter. The second question was, just refresh me.

Robert Law - Nomura Securities Co. Ltd.

Analyst

Capital accretion over the runoff of Non-Core.

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

Yes. We are doing this to very much focus on getting a bang for our buck in terms of delivering capital and having the losses. We look at the size and shape of the losses going forward relative to the capital that's generated, and it most definitely will be capital accretive. One of the reasons for the little blip in the second quarter is we are also doing some derisking in our market risk positions, which doesn't have a TPA impact. It will have on RWA impact as we work through the trades to do that which are somewhat complex. We can see and actually encounter RWA move for a period of time before all of those trades novate off, which is what you saw in the second quarter.

Leigh Goodwin - Citigroup Inc

Analyst

Leigh Goodwin from Citigroup. 2 questions, please. One on insurance, which was a good performance quarter. The combined ratio is now below 100%. I wonder if you could give us an idea whether you expect that, whether that's -- you see continued improvement in that, I mean, not withstanding volatile weather-related type of issues. And my second question is just really if you could give us a comment please on July trading, particularly in relation to GBM. Also, on the sovereign exposures.

Stephen Hester

Operator

Paul, do you want to pick up the insurance?

Paul Geddes

Analyst

Yes. The second quarter is always a good quarter for insurers. Homes tend not to get flooded by snow and the drivers aren't hit on the roads. So it's a great quarter, and it was a particularly good quarter for us. So whilst our longer-term ambitions are to have a double-digit or even triple-digit Core, 99% is a good performance, and we wouldn't expect that to necessarily be maintained through this year, but that's more in line with our longer-term expectation.

Stephen Hester

Operator

On GBM trading and sovereign exposures. As you can see, our sovereign exposures on the chart that Bruce put up are not material, so they're not the ones, if you like, that are particularly worrying us. July trading was poor in GBM, not big losses but just the revenue rate was poor. I suspect it would have been everywhere else.

Peter Toeman - HSBC

Analyst

Peter Toeman from HSBC. Your 15% ROE target that you've had for the last 2.5 years is now sort of under threat from regulatory intervention. Obviously, there's a sort of a minimum ROE below what you can fall and have to pay sort of realistic dividend to shareholders and organically finance balance sheet growth. So I was wondering if you might be able to steer us towards what you feel this sort of minimum ROE might be?

Stephen Hester

Operator

Well, I'll just have to repeat what I said earlier on that I think any business needs to exceed its cost of capital. And if it can't, it needs to keep restructuring and keep changing things until it does so that will be what we do.

Philip Hampton

Management

Right in the middle.

Chris Manners - Morgan Stanley

Analyst

It's Chris Manners from Morgan Stanley here. I just have a couple of questions on the Retail & Commercial division. Firstly, just on the net interest margin. Obviously, you managed to increase it by one basis point in the quarter. Given what we're seeing in wholesale funding markets and presumably deposit competition is likely to heat up, should we be expecting a sort of flat progression? Or do you think it should actually just sort of nibble down a little bit as we go through the rest of the year? And secondly, just on Core loan growth in the Retail & Commercial division, it seems to be only growing 1% also on a year-on-year basis. U.K. Corporate loans fell in the quarter. That's below normal GDP. I mean, is there a potential that we could actually some more meaningful growth in this division or...

Stephen Hester

Operator

Okay. As I said, I think the Retail & Commercial NIM, we would expect that to be stable. So what are the kind of cross currents? We still have a modest amount of asset repricing although we're largely through that. That's somewhat offset by a business mix kind of tightening, if you will. So for example, in retail, we're doing more mortgage origination and less personal unsecured origination so that tends to work against the margin and negate that asset kind of repricing benefit. And then on the liability side, we've been, I think, reasonably stable. We are not out competing aggressively for deposits but we are seeing some growth in pockets like GTS and wealth in terms of deposits so I think we'll continue to see stability there in the second half. The volumes is really a hard call, particularly if the economy is on the cusp of a double-dip or a recession -- a recessionary environment. The hard part has been demand is to stimulate demand is to certainly open and hoping to land. And I think we've been out aggressively on the corporate side and on the retail side trying to hit our lending targets. In the U.S., we're actually seeing a pickup. We indicated in the prepared remarks, in the U.S. on the commercial C&I side of the business, and that's been helpful so the pipeline is pretty strong there. But I think it's going to be spotty, and it's going to be challenged to see any kind of loan volume growth until the economy gets stronger.

Manus Costello - Autonomous Research LLP

Analyst

It's Manus Costello from Autonomous. I noticed that you've had to delay the closing of the Santander transaction to the end of 2012. Should we assume that you just keep profits for the second half of 2012? Or will there be a change in the terms of that transaction? And is there any risk if conditions deteriorate in the market further that, that transaction doesn't happen at all?

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

No. I think the likelihood is this transaction gets done, probably closes sometime in Q4 at this point, and so we retain the incidence of ownership up until that point. So we own the RWAs and we get the profit in the business until it closes. Now clearly, there'll be some to-ing and fro-ing contractually actually on -- there's going to be, I think, a bigger separation effort and transition effort over to Santander and how those costs are absorbed are things that we're working through Santander. But I think we're in a pretty good space with them in terms of having that sorted out at this point.

Michael Helsby - BofA Merrill Lynch

Analyst

It's Michael Helsby again from Merrill Lynch. Just a couple of follow on questions. Firstly in GBM, I guess there's been a couple of banks now that have said that they're going to sort of scale back on risk and not necessarily focus on just the driving top line revenue in that business. If you think back 3 years ago, what categorized that period was you saw quite a big expansion in margins as banks sort of looked to widen a bit of the office spread. I guess the question is, do you think that can happen again? And at what point do you start putting your prices up to your customers to try and capture the more volatile environment? And second question is just, I guess looking for a bit of perspective from you guys. Clearly, your share prices are as low now today as it was sort of not quite as low but it's not being as low since the depth of the crisis. I was wondering if you could maybe just wrap up by giving us a perspective of how you see things at the moment? Bruce, you just said we're on the cusp of a recession potentially. It doesn't look when I look at your numbers like you've seen at the moment, clearly, everyone's worried about the future. I was just wondering if you could give us a bit of perspective today versus where we were maybe in 2008. And maybe just by again clearly, we're seeing on the screens but using this opportunity to reiterate where you are today versus where the bank was in 2008?

Stephen Hester

Operator

Quite an arousing speech. Let's see if I can hold down on the job. Look, my own view is that it is always important to be able to be calm when people around you aren't being calm. And normally, that's the right thing to do. And I think that the transmission mechanisms between market upset and real economies are normally less strong than markets fear. And so my end view is that the greater probability is that economies do continue to on balance recover, that doesn't mean say they do every single quarter, but we have always thought and planned and that's one of the reasons I've always struck a cautious note. We've always expected the process of the world working through it's imbalances to be a slow and difficult one even if it's one with a generally an uphill slope to it, and that would still my view and I think that's becoming more apparent. Within that, our expectation is that the derisking and balance sheet recovery that we have already accomplished will stand us in very good stead, and that most of our businesses can create solid returns, even if they're not the returns that we would ultimately like but can do a solid job in this kind of environment. So I think that's the mainstream for me as it relates to RBS is that the RBS story goes forward a bit slower than we wanted with a bit of a flatter trajectory than we wanted, but nonetheless, noticeably goes forward. Now we're not blind and stupid, and of course, there are scenarios where some of those debts will be off the table. I think they are low probability scenarios but they require a lot of concentration. And obviously, one of the things that we're seeing now is that instead of people talking about a banking crisis, which is what they talked about before, I think we're now realizing that actually from the very beginning, what we've had was yes, a banking crisis but that was a subcomponent of a bigger set of world issues in terms of macroeconomic management, and that's becoming back in view and both the macroeconomic management of individual countries in the instances where it's weak and now, it's going to be under huge pressure to improve whether the U.S. or some countries in the Eurozone and similarly the mechanism is strictly in the Eurozone for dealing with liquidity for countries rather than for banks and the framework. We're going to be in the hands of the democratic process to try and come up with some good response and hopefully they will. It won't be a perfect process. And so it would be stupid not to be cautious. It would be stupid not to be alert to those significant risks out there that can turn bad. But I think the probabilities are that the world doesn't turn overnight from a place that's slowly recovering to a place that's a disaster area. That's my view.

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

And just a follow-up on that. I know -- I said the markets are indicating we could be on the cusp of recovery if you look at some of the yield curves and things. But again, our view is that we'll find a way to try to power, maybe not power but muddle through and get back and stay in growth, and then it'll just be a kind of an elongated timeframe before we get back to stronger growth than we had originally envisioned. If you look at the company though, 2.5 years into the plan versus where it was, there's been a huge amount of progress, and I think we have certainly very good people on the board and in the management leading the company. We have a very strong vision of what -- where we need to get to and we're making progress in all dimensions in terms of investing the Core franchises, making the business more efficient, more customer-friendly, increasing the risk awareness and in terms of the decisions that we make in how we run the business, that's come -- it's really night and day from where it was 2.5 years ago. So a lot of progress in the Core, the Non-Core's less than 1/2 the size of when it started, and we've done it in a way that's been friendly to preserving shareholder funds. And so again, I feel quite good now the stock markets going to move around based on fear, and there's not a lot we can do about that. What we need to do is just stay focused on executing the plan and doing the best we can. And ultimately, I think that will be manifest in the stock price once people have some conviction that some of these macroeconomic difficulties have been sorted.

Stephen Hester

Operator

The stock price clearly assumes that we are not right and we'll see.

Michael Helsby - BofA Merrill Lynch

Analyst

And just on the GBM margins, any comment on that will be really helpful.

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

Well, I think this is a really hard one because clearly to some extent, what you were able to have in 2008 was interest rate falls, which helped and straight compressions and so on and so forth so you're not in quite that position now. And so I think we would err on the side of cautiousness. My end view would be you're likely have single-digit ROEs for a while in investment banking as you work through these kind of market conditions. That would be my own view. But even if it's just, there's no point torturing yourself. I've said this many times here on a quarter-by-quarter predictions for these business lines.

Stephen Hester

Operator

I think the combination of our transparency and the end of the long week is perhaps reducing the number of questions. We have got room for some more.

Leigh Goodwin - Citigroup Inc

Analyst

It's Leigh Goodwin again from Citi. Actually, I just wanted to follow-up on Mike's question about in the context of the current crisis. And I wondered if you wanted to comment on the ICB process and the headlines we saw this morning suggesting a rather tough ring fence might be imposed. I mean, it feels as if the ICB are making up proposals or recommendations in a different world to the rest of us. But I mean, I wonder whether the extent to which the potential risks of a, if you like, suboptimal policy outcome from this have increased as a result of what's going on in the world? And whether that's a factor you think will be taken into consideration by those who finally make a decision?

Stephen Hester

Operator

Well, I couldn't possibly comment on your views on the world the ICB live in and so you must have your own views to that. But what I do think is that we and I think many other people have been engaging intensively, not just with the ICB but with the regulators with the government. And I do believe that people are genuinely trying to be thoughtful, they're genuinely listening, they're genuinely trying to consider the different issues. They're also, of course, in a tough political spot in terms of coalition parties, not the least. And so unfortunately, I believe that there must be a possibility of an outcome that is the wrong form at the wrong time. But it won't be for want of thought if that's the way it comes out. And obviously, however it comes out, we'll deal with it but I think the market is right to apply some discount factors to bank prospects in the U.K. until that's becomes clear.

Leigh Goodwin - Citigroup Inc

Analyst

And would you be able to quantify that in terms of your ROE target? I mean, in terms of the.

Stephen Hester

Operator

It's such a difficult thing because there are -- first of all, there are so many flavors of ring fencing and the devil does lie in the detail. And secondarily, even if you knew the flavor that you're assuming, you then have to understand what the impact of that flavor will be in the eyes of your creditors and rating agencies and then what response you need to take to that and then the long-term impact in the eyes of your customers of the competitiveness that you have as a result. And so this could be something that plays out over quite a few years before you really know whether it ends up being just a negative but one that you can deal with or bigger or worse than that. It's really a tough thing and it's not that we've got a secret dossier that has the answer that we're refusing to tell you. It's just -- it's the second and third-order effects that concern us. The first-order effect's fine. We'll be able to adjust the structure and do what we have to do but the second and third-order effects will be a bit unclear for one.

Paul Geddes

Analyst

There are some forms of ring fencing which are completely uncontroversial, either financially and from the other point of view. We spent the last year really in an intensive dialogue with U.S. regulators about structuring the RBS Americas, which is both retail and wholesale investment banking operations. The American regulators, just want to know what our ring fence activities in America are so that they can control it and understand it, understand the risk, understand the government's processes and so on. That is completely uncontroversial to us. Ring fencing activities create a whole host of extra challenges and problems and costs.

Edward Firth - Macquarie Research

Analyst

Ed Firth from Macquarie. Sorry. Being out here on the right wing. And that also poses a detailed question but in Ulster Bank, you mentioned that one of the reasons for your provisions improving was recalibration to do with the mortgages, I think. Could you just be clear, is that like a one-off in this period? Or is that a new lower base that we should see going forward?

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

No, the one-off was really referring to the first quarter, which is where we did the recalibration, and so the second quarter was more a truer number than the first quarter was. Similarly, in Non-Core, in the quarter, we looked very hard at the land values we were carrying in the development book, and so we did a very detailed analysis region by region, looking at concentric circles from major cities and trying to estimate what that land was really worth. So again, you had a bit of a one-time nature to the entry in the second quarter there in Non-Core. And so given the significance of the non-performing loans in Ireland, we will, on a regular basis, be reviewing this with intensity so I'm not going to say there won't be more adjustments down the road but I think we're pretty much now on the front foot, both on the residential side and on the development book side at this point.

Stephen Hester

Operator

If there any would-be any palmists in the room, we've got some development land for you going cheap.

Bruce Van Saun

Analyst

Don't seem to be any takers, Steve.