Banking group Van Lanschot Bankiers on Tuesday announced that it made a loss of €46.3m in the first half of this year compared to a profit of some €60m in the same 2008 period.

The bank said the poor performance was largely due to one-off costs including a €34.5m write-off for an IT project. On top of this Van Lanschot has added €50.6m to cash it has put aside for expected defaults on loan repayments.
Van Lanschot reported that commercial credit loans in the first half of this year rose 7% to €7.1bn. The assets of its consumer banking business (Van Lanschot’s customers are the wealthy and family firms) remained stable at €26.6bn.
CEO Floris Deckers said in a statement: ‘Van Lanschot come through the bank crisis well. The bank’s liquidity has remained high…. The fact that Van Lanschot does not need state aid and did not need it, means we can determine our own strategy and carry that out.’
Van Lanschot said it has three priorities in the ‘turbulent period’. The first is to maintain its capital position level. The second is to control costs and the third is to continue paying attention to risk management and the quality of its credit portfolio.
Van Lanschot said it was unable to give a forecast for the full year because of uncertainty about developments in the coming six months.