It’s been nine years since the Royal Bank of Scotland was rescued by British taxpayers.
And it’s been nine years since the once titanic bank turned a profit. The latest loss, reported Friday, was £7 billion ($8.7 billion).
The taxpayer-owned lender has now accumulated total losses of £58 billion ($74 billion) since the financial crisis.
RBS, formerly the largest bank in the world, warned Friday that more pain is ahead: It doesn’t expect to turn a profit until 2018.
The British government now owns 73% of the bank, which is still dealing with the fallout of the financial crisis.
RBS has set aside £5.8 billion ($7.3 billion) to pay potential fines and legal costs. That includes more than £3.1 billion ($4 billion) to resolve allegations that it sold risky mortgages in the U.S. prior to the 2008 crisis.
“These costs are a stark reminder of what happens to a bank when things go wrong and you lose focus on the customer, as this bank did before the financial crisis,” CEO Ross McEwan said Friday.
Michael Hewson, chief markets analyst at CMC Markets, described that as “an understatement.”
“So far we’ve had nine reminders of the costs of what happens when things going wrong, and Mr. McEwan like the rest of us must be hoping that we don’t get a tenth,” he wrote in a note to clients.
The bank is now trying to slash costs by £2 billion ($2.5 billion) before the end of the decade. It has shut hundreds of branches and cut at least 60,000 jobs since 2007, but more reductions are on the way.
The bank’s shares were trading 3.6% lower in London after its annual results were released.
In November, RBS failed stress tests conducted by the Bank of England. The central bank assessed that RBS “remains susceptible to financial and economic stress.”
