Big customers desert Metro Bank over accounting error

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• had led to the departure of a “small number of large commercial and partnership customers”, contributing to a 4 per cent quarter-on-quarter reduction in deposits

• Net interest margin — the difference between what a bank pays for funds and what it earns from lending — fell to 1.64 per cent, down from 1.76 per cent at the end of 2018.

• Pre-tax profit halved to £4.3m, which the company blamed on accounting changes and interest expenses from some recently-issued debt.

• lender’s statutory profit after tax fell 61 per cent to £2.5m

• it is down 54 per cent since the start of the year

• forced the lender to cut its long-term growth plans

• Chief financial officer

• weakness in the first quarter meant its full-year deposit growth rate would be “materially lower” than the medium-term target of 20 per cent

• He also said that full-year costs would be at the upper end of previous expectations.