Swansea Building Society has reported record total assets as its mortgage and savings balances soar.
In 2019 the mutual saw its total assets, its lending book and property assets, increased by £61m (20%) to £370.4m. Its mortgage balances increased by £40.1m to £273.4m, a growth rate of 17.1%. Growth in net mortgage lending was funded by a £59.2m increase in retail savings balances from customers.
Gross mortgage lending hit a new high at £74.3m in 2019, up from £62.2m in 2018.
Despite increased mortgage lending, arrears remained extremely low at just £41,000, representing just 32 of its 1,761 customers on a mortgage book of £273.4m. Net interest receivable for the year was £7.4m compared with £6.9m in the previous year.
Its pre‐tax profit for 2019 was £2.3m, slightly down on the £2.6m in 2018.
However, this compares favourably to other building societies of comparable size. The society has now delivered annual pre‐tax profits greater than £2m in each of the last six years.
It also remains one of the few financial institutions in the 海角视频 that has no wholesale funding or support from the Bank of England in the form of cheap funding. Its balance sheet is funded entirely by customer savings balances and its own capital reserves built up from retained profits over many years.
Based on total assets (2018), Swansea is the 海角视频's 32nd biggest building society.
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It also remains committed to the high street, with the opening of a new flagship branch in the centre of Swansea in January 2019. Over the last five years it has also invested with new branches in Carmarthen and Cowbridge adding to its existing presence in Swansea and Mumbles.
Its chief executive Alun Williams said: “I am delighted to report that the Society has delivered a very strong performance in 2019. Our gross mortgage lending increased by 20% to £74.3m in the year, demonstrating the demand from customers for our face to face business model and our flexible approach to mortgages.
“We opened our new Swansea branch on 7 January, 2019, and it has considerably helped improve our brand awareness in view of its prominent high street location. Alongside the Carmarthen and Cowbridge branches opened in recent years, the new branch has made a significant contribution towards our overall performance in 2019.
We believe the success of our approach can be witnessed by the Society seeing a net increase of 2,817 savings members in the year, taking the Society’ total membership to above 20,000 for the first time in its history.
“We produced strong profits while delivering objectives such as the opening of the Swansea branch, and increasing our customer facing staff to ensure we continue to deliver the personal service on which we pride ourselves. We also renovated our head office administration centre in Swansea, increased our IT spend and employed additional numbers of support staff. Each of these strategic initiatives increased the society's cost base as we build our infrastructure to ensure we continue to deliver sustainable growth.
"However, the biggest impact to our profitability was as a result of the society maintaining its market leading savings rates for its members for the full year. This was despite almost all other banks and building societies cutting rates and our savings balances on which we pay interest increasing by £59.2m."
On the current financial year and trading outlook Mr Williams said: “We recently launched a new range of mortgage products to offer customers lower interest rates on residential, self-employed, lending in retirement and buy-to-let mortgages to allow more people in our heartlands to benefit from our lending propositions, and in 2020 will launch an online savings platform for our existing members which will complement our branch offering."