Barclays has unveiled plans to accelerate its use of artificial intelligence (AI) following a cost-cutting drive, as the boss of the bank was handed a \u00a315 million pay package.<\/p>\n
The banking group set out new targets after revealing that its annual profit jumped by 13% last year.<\/p>\n
Chief executive CS Venkatakrishnan, known within the bank as Venkat, said AI was a core part of Barclays\u2019 plans to make the bank more efficient.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo me, the promise of AI is not just efficiency\u2026 it\u2019s not just an end in itself,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat it does is it makes some of the more routine aspects of people\u2019s jobs easier to accomplish, and frees them up to do much more in their internal time faster, better and in a more streamlined way.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is early days and how we realise that we will have to work our way through, but that is the objective.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new focus comes after Barclays said it made cost savings worth \u00a3700 million during 2025, bringing the total to \u00a31.7 billion over two years.<\/p>\n
It is targeting savings of around \u00a32 billion between 2026 and 2028.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Venkat was awarded a pay package worth more than \u00a315 million for the year, incorporating fixed pay and bonus awards.<\/p>\n
This increased from the \u00a311.6 million he took home in 2024.<\/p>\n
Barclays also revealed that the bank\u2019s bonus pool increased to \u00a32.2 billion for 2025, up 15% on the previous year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis level of incentive funding for 2025 reflects performance across the group, and enables us to reward colleagues for the outcomes they have helped to achieve,\u201d the bank said.<\/p>\n
The banking giant generated a pre-tax profit of \u00a39.1 billion for 2025, a 13% increase on the \u00a38.1 billion made in 2024.<\/p>\n
Income from all its divisions increased, with total group income jumping by 9% year-on-year.<\/p>\n
This soared to 16% for its corporate bank, with firms both depositing more cash and borrowing more, and 11% for the investment bank, as activity in the global financial markets accelerated.<\/p>\n
Barclays said it wants to hand out more than \u00a315 billion to shareholders between 2026 and 2028 through dividends and share buybacks.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, total costs for the group increased by 5% last year, partly due to the acquisition of Tesco Bank.<\/p>\n
It also reflects the bank setting aside an additional \u00a3235 million to cover the estimated cost of compensating motor finance customers under the financial regulator\u2019s proposed redress scheme \u2013 bringing the total provision to \u00a3325 million.<\/p>\n
Barclays said it considers it \u201cmore likely than not\u201d that the compensation scheme will be implemented by the Financial Conduct Authority, which is expected to be set out this month or next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barclays has unveiled plans to accelerate its use of artificial intelligence (AI) following a cost-cutting drive, as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":418251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,16820,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-418250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-barclays","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/418251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}