Barclays





In Section 1:


Introduction Chairman's Statement Group Chief Executive's Statement Financial Performance Group Finance Director The Leadership Team
	The second core UK business is Business Banking, which is our biggest profit generator – Ł1,262 million1 of operating profit in 2002. It has over 500,000 small and medium sized business customers. It is a business where: relationships are built and maintained by, in our case, 2,400 relationship managers who have extensive sector specific expertise; and who are mobile in every sense of the word, spending much of their time at the premises of their customers; where the physical distribution base of the branch network is a vital contributor to customer convenience; and where there are risk management techniques born of years of data and cycles of experience. The industry has learnt much from the experiences of the last decade. In the early nineties, annual write-offs as a percentage of the sterling corporate loan book for the British banking industry amounted to 250 basis points. Barclays corporate loan book write-offs were 52 basis points in 2002. We have cause to remain cautious about the year ahead but the science of risk management in this part of the industry has advanced hugely, and I believe nowhere more so than at Barclays. In our third UK franchise, Barclaycard, operating profit grew by 21%1. Barclaycard is known for its customer-centricity, innovation and profitable growth. By way of example, Nectar, the loyalty scheme launched in September 2002 with Barclaycard as a founder member, has at its heart the same philosophy of innovation and convenience that drives Openplan. In the case of Nectar, customers are offered loyalty points in a way that makes it easy for them to accumulate, and which can be exchanged for a wide range of items which best suit their lifestyle. A total of 11 million active collectors were recruited in the first eight weeks after Nectar was launched. Barclaycard also continued to grow through non-organic moves. The acquisition of the UK credit card business of Providian in April 2002 was a good example of strategic development by corporate action. Providian brought distinctive and complementary competencies in the credit card environment and 500,000 new customers with balances of around Ł400 million. Barclaycard International has continued its expansion into Europe with the launch in Italy during 2002. It has issued 1.28 million cards in Germany, Spain, Greece, France and Italy. 1Operating profit excludes the impact of the restructuring charge relating to staff displacement and related costs, costs directly associated with the integration of Woolwich plc, Woolwich fair value adjustments and goodwill amortisation.	Click to go to each page