Bulletin: Banking Industry Country Risk Assessment Refreshed For United Kingdom; No Ratings Affected

LONDON (S&P Global Ratings) Nov. 5, 2018--Following a recent review of the Banking Industry Country Risk Assessment (BICRA) for the U.K., S&P Global Ratings has confirmed the group classification for the U.K. BICRA remains unchanged at '3', and the U.K. BICRA scores for economic risk and industry risk remain unchanged at '4' and '3', respectively. In addition, we continue to see stable trends for both economic risk and industry risk. No ratings were affected by this review. Of the factors contributing to our assessment of industry risk, we have revised down our assessment of systemwide funding in the U.K banking sector to low risk from very low risk. Although the sector's use of net external funding as a proportion of

...LONDON (S&P Global Ratings) Nov. 5, 2018--Following a recent review of the Banking Industry Country Risk Assessment (BICRA) for the U.K., S&P Global Ratings has confirmed the group classification for the U.K. BICRA remains unchanged at '3', and the U.K. BICRA scores for economic risk and industry risk remain unchanged at '4' and '3', respectively. In addition, we continue to see stable trends for both economic risk and industry risk. No ratings were affected by this review. Of the factors contributing to our assessment of industry risk, we have revised down our assessment of systemwide funding in the U.K banking sector to low risk from very low risk. Although the sector's use of net external funding as a proportion of domestic loans has been declining since 2012--and, indeed, turned negative in 2016--we now expect modest net external funding over our forecast period of 2018-2020, such that this ratio will average 1.4% over 2018-2020. Overall, our assessment of the U.K. banking sector's...

Bulletin