The Coventry Building Society has reported that its new mortgage lending increased by 8% to £8.0 billion in 2015.

Mortgage assets increased by £2.5 billion (9%) to £29.4 billion, five times the rate of market growth.

In addition, savings balances grew by £2.0 billion (8%) to £25.4 billion.

Meanwhile, pre-tax profit increased by 7% to £216.0 million

Mark Parsons, Coventry Building Society chief executive, said: “I am pleased to report another successful year for the Society.
The highlights are a performance that is financially strong and which maintains a successful record of growth based on low risk and low cost operations. This is, of course, important, and we are pleased to report strong results. However, it is as important that these results are achieved by doing the right things for our members, whether new to the Society or those who have been with us for many years. We describe this as ‘Putting Members First’.

“Central to this is providing long-term value to members. It continues to be a tough time for savers and in a low interest rate environment it is important that we provide competitive savings products not just today, but reliably and sustainably into the future.

“We are achieving this. At the end of 2015 our average savings rate was 1.97% compared to a market average of 1.11%. Furthermore, at the end of 2015 our average variable rate on cash ISAs was nearly two and a half times the market average.
Our ability to do this, whilst maintaining a very competitive mortgage portfolio, is underpinned by the high quality of our mortgage lending, which results in extremely low impairment charges, as well as low cost operations. We continue to lead the sector in cost-efficiency, with our management expense ratio of 0.42% remaining significantly lower than that of our peers.”