Barclays showed its confidence in future earnings today by restoring its full dividend, despite lacklustre investment banking income, restructuring costs and US tax reforms hitting the bank's 2017 bottom line.
The British bank said it would resume paying its full dividend of 6.5 pence per share, which it halved in March 2016 in order to provide extra funds to pay for restructuring.
"It is our firm intent, over time, to return a greater proportion of our earnings to shareholders, both through the annual dividend and in other ways," Barclays chief executive Jes Staley said in a statement.
Although Barclays posted a pretax profit of £3.5 billion for 2017, up from £3.2 billion a year ago, this was worse than the £4.7 billion average of analysts' forecasts compiled by the bank.
Those forecasts excluded conduct charges, with the bank taking a £700m hit for mis-selling of payment protection insurance and a fresh £240m charge relating to alleged foreign exchange manipulation.
Barclays reported a £1.9 billion attributable loss, after a £901m tax writedown in the US and a £2.5 billion loss on the sale of Barclays Africa.
But it gave no update on a Financial Conduct Authority inquiry into Staley over his attempts to unmask a whistleblower who had raised concerns about a Barclays executive.
However, it said the financial watchdog had begun a new probe into its systems and controls for the handling of customers with troubled unsecured loans. It said it could not yet estimate the financial impact of this.
CEO Jes Staley has championed an aggressive push in investment banking that has so far largely failed to bear fruit.
Profit in the Barclays International division was down 22% in 2017, driven by a 4% fall in income from its investment bank and rising impairments, the bank said.
"We have strong plans in place to address that underperformance in 2018," Staley said.
Staley later told reporters that plans to improve the division's performance include investment in "people, technology and balance sheet," without giving further details.
The CEO's pay was down 8.5% from the previous year.
Barclays' investment bank has struggled to keep pace with US peers in recent quarters, despite plans announced in October to shift some £20 billion in assets from corporate lending to riskier but higher-yielding trading activities.
The bank's chief financial officer Tushar Morzaria said that the bank had gained market share, with business down in dollar terms by 10% compared with 20% at its biggest US rivals.
Women in Barclays investment bank earn half as much on average as men
Barclays pays women in its international division on average half of what men earn, the British bank revealed today, underscoring how major financial firms still have far fewer female employees in senior roles.
The mean gender pay gap in Barclays International, which houses the bank's investment banking unit, is 48%, Barclays said, meaning the average hourly wage for a woman is just under half that of a man.
Barclays joins a handful of major financial institutions that have disclosed gender pay gaps.
The UK government last year said it will require all companies with more than 250 employees to publish their gender pay data by April 2018.
At Barclays, the difference is largely the result of the proportion of women working in more junior roles, rather than a breach of pay equality rules that require people working at the same rank to be paid the same regardless of gender, it said.
The bank reported a gender pay gap in its other main unit, Barclays UK, of 26%.
Others organisations to have made such disclosures include US investment banks like Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, and also the Bank of England.
Lloyds Banking Group said earlier this week that it would publish its pay gap before the April deadline.
