There was a slight fall in private banking revenues, the US lender said yesterday.

Citigroup yesterday said that net income for the first three months of this year stood at  $4.7 billion, on revenues of $18.6 billion, up from $4.6 billion on revenues of $18.9 billion a year before.

At the US lender’s private bank, which serves ultra-high net worth clients, private banking revenues dipped by 3 per cent on a year earlier, standing at $880 million, falling from what had been a particularly strong first quarter in 2018. Revenue decline and higher funding costs affected the result, it said yesterday.

“We increased our return on tangible common equity to 11.9 per cent, had positive operating leverage for the tenth consecutive quarter and had strong growth in both loans and deposits in our core businesses,” Michael Corbat, group chief executive, said.

The bank’s Common Equity Tier 1 ratio, a common international measure of how much buffer capital a lender has, held steady at 11.9 per cent.