Barclays, which has agreed to buy Dutch rival ABN Amro in the biggest ever bank takeover, said on Thursday it had made a strong start to 2007 and it had seen "good growth" in U.K. retail bank profit.
Britain's third biggest bank said in a trading update that its market share of new UK mortgages had improved, it was on track to improve its UK banking cost/income ratio this year and the bad debt charge for its Barclaycard unit had fallen.
Barclays confirmed earlier comments that pretax profit in the first quarter was 15% above a year earlier, and rose 10% excluding property gains, and Barclays Capital had its best quarter ever.