BNP Paribas is proudly squeezing costs in its investment bank

28 October 2025

3 minute read

As we've noted here before, BNP Paribas has been cutting costs in its investment bank and in its equities business in particular. In today's third quarter results, BNP proudly paraded how it's doing more with less.

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.

As the chart below shows, the cost-income ratio at BNP Paribas' corporate and investment bank (CIB) has gone down and down in the past nine years. It's now 60%, which is below the 60.6% for the BNP Paribas group as a whole, and there are plans to get it even lower.

article-image-Sbf6qNwrTMquHpHTZ1RK

Source: BNP Paribas

Reducing a cost income ratio isn't just about squeezing costs, though. Revenues can rise too. This has also been occurring, with revenues across the BNP Paribas CIB increasing at a compound average growth rate of nearly 5% every year since 2016.

article-image-f7qNCPdSqQ5mk7p7946g

Source: BNP Paribas

Recent growth applies equally to the equities sales and trading business, where revenues fell 15% year-on-year in the second quarter, but rose nearly 18% in the third quarter.

Not all the French bank's businesses are thriving, though. BNP is known for its macro trading business, and although other banks' macro teams had a good third quarter, BNP's did not. BNP said today that revenues in its fixed income business rose only 3.7% year-on-year in Q3. It said this was thanks to the repo and credit desks, and was despite an unspecified "credit situation" that led to a spike in risk. BNP had the lowest growth in fixed income trading revenues of any bank to report so far. It probably doesn't help that risk weighted assets in the CIB fell 7% in the first nine months of the year.

Nor did BNP's investment bankers do well in Q3: combined revenues from M&A and capital markets fell 2.6% on last year.

None of this would seem to bode well for BNP's 2025 bonuses. The French bank said today that expenses in its markets business specifically are being "contained". Despite these efforts, for the first nine months of 2025 as a whole, profits in the corporate and investment bank rose by only 1.6%.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.