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Bloomberg
Standard Chartered Plc is buying back ordinary shares for the first time in more than 20 years as Chief Executive Officer Bill Winters seeks to put misconduct and profitability woes behind the Asia-focussed lender.
The $1 billion purchase plan comes weeks after a settlement between the bank and US regulators over its repeated violations of sanctions with Iran. Standard Chartered also on Tuesday delivered its latest quarterly results, which put it on course to deliver its key targets for shareholders. The shares jumped as much as 6.1 percent during morning trading in London, the most since October.
“The resolution of our legacy conduct and control issues means we can now manage our capital position more dynamically,†Winters said in the statement. Chief Financial Officer Andy Halford told journalists that the bank is “done†with legal expenses for the time being.
Winters has been fighting a near-constant stream of misconduct issues old and new in his four-year tenure at the lender, which operates in more than 60 markets including Angola, Indonesia and Hong Kong. The scandals have overshadowed his efforts to turn around the bank and weighed on the shares, which have fallen by about a third since he took the helm in mid-2015.
He has also been under pressure to cut costs at the bank and the latest results showed a 2 percent drop in operating expenses to $2.4 billion, the lowest quarterly figure in two years. The lender also said that income had risen faster than costs in the first three months of the year, achieving so-called positive jaws. Standard Chartered also said it would “invest significantly†in its business with a focus on its digital services.
“We’re funding that as we go through, fundamentally changing the bank, opening up new digital operations in different countries,†said Halford during a Bloomb-erg TV interview. Standard Chartered said its first-quarter return on tangible equity, a key measure of
financial performance, was 9.6 percent.