National Irish Bank has reported underlying pre-tax profits of just over €38m for last year, up 27% on the 10 months from March 1 2005, when the bank was taken over by Danske Bank.
This figure did not include heavy investment in the bank's relaunch and costs linked to its transfer to Danske Bank's technology platform. This brought pre-tax profits down to €3.5m, compared with a €14.2m loss in the 2005 period.
NIB's loan book jumped by 51% to €6.9 billion, with mortgage lending up 54%. The bank says its loan to value mortgage, launched in October, attracted €500m of applications in its first eight weeks and accounted for a fifth of its mortgage book by the end of the year.
Personal and business lending were also up more than 50%. Customer deposits increased by 27% to €2.9 billion.
CEO Andrew Healy he was encouraged by the levels of new business NIB was receiving from customers of other banks. He said its new mortgage showed that Irish consumers were prepared to switch.
NIB said it wanted to improve its distribution network and planned five new branches this year. It also announced that Denmark's largest private insurance and pensions company, Danica Pension, would open an Irish subsidiary by the end of 2007. Danica is also part of Danske Bank.
