While pre-tax profit fell, underlying results were more encouraging when certain costs and litigation bills are stripped out, the bank said.

Barclays posted drop in pre-tax profit of £1.659 billion ($2.2 billion) for the first six months of this year, a 13 per cent decline, while profit after tax relating to continued operations fell to £922 million from a year-ago figure of £1.563 billion, it said today.

The bank, which no longer breaks out its wealth management figures in results, said, however, that its attributable profit was £468 million in H1, 2018, swinging back into the black after recording a £1.211 billion loss a year earlier.

The pre-tax profit included litigation and conduct charges of £2 billion mainly linked to a £1.4 billion settlement with US authorities over the sale of residential mortgage-backed securities and charges linked to compensating clients over sale of payment protection insurance. When those charges are stripped out, group profit before tax rose 20 per cent to £3.701 billion.

The bank’s cost/income ratio widened to 80 per cent at the end of June this year, from 71 per cent in June last year.

James Staley, chief executive, said the second quarter of this year was the first three-month period for some time when the bank hadn’t been hit with litigation and restructuring costs, and given the momentum of the bank, this boded well.

“In effect then, it is the first clear sight of the statutory performance of the business which we have re-engineered over the past two and a half years - Barclays' transatlantic consumer and wholesale bank - and it is a positive sight,” he said.

Laith Khalaf, senior analyst, Hargreaves Lansdown, said the bank is "moving in the right direction, but the champagne needs to be put on ice until the bank can deliver some consistency in its performance."

Barclays isn’t entirely out of the woods on litigation yet either. PPI claims have just over a year left to run and we wouldn’t be surprised to see some additional costs as consumers react to the deadline. Meanwhile the case against Barclays relating to Qatari investment in 2008 was dismissed by the Crown Court, but the SFO is now pursuing legal action in the High Court, so this could still prove a stumbling block for the bank," he said. 

Shares in the bank were down 0.39 per cent at 08:00 GMT today, at 191 pence per share.

Overall Barclays has had a good quarter, but we need to see sustained momentum to get excited about its prospects.’