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Barclays has insisted it has the right controls in place to manage a £20bn exposure to the under-fire private credit industry despite warnings from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank of England.

The bank’s chief executive, CS Venkatakrishnan, said it ran a “very risk-controlled shop” and was comfortable with its lending standards for the private credit industry.

That was despite taking a £110m loss over the US sub-prime auto lender Tricolor, which collapsed amid fraud allegations last month.

Losses stemming from the dual collapse of Tricolour and the US auto parts company First Brands have raised fears over potentially weak lending standards in the private credit industry. There are concerns that the potential fallout could destabilise traditional banks that issue loans to the shadow banking sector.

The governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, said this week that the recent failures had worrying echoes of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that kicked off the global financial crash of 2008. Last week the IMF warned that a downturn could have ripple effects across the financial system, given banks were increasingly exposed to a largely unregulated private credit industry.

Venkatakrishnan said: “There are obviously connections between what non-bank financial institutions do and what banks do.” However, he suggested that the IMF report was pointing out probabilities and was ultimately “subjective”.

When asked whether he agreed with the JP Morgan chief executive, Jamie Dimon, who said last week that more “cockroaches” could emerge from the private credit sector, the Barclays boss quipped: “I’m not an entomologist.”

He said: “Whatever forms of lending you do, you should do it carefully and with the right controls.” When it came to private credit, he said Barclays limited lending to private credit loan portfolios “constructed by some of the largest, most experienced managers with a strong track record.

“We have controls over them … [and] we think we run … a very risk-controlled shop when it comes to it, and that’s something we’ve instituted for a long, long time.”

Venkatakrishnan said Barclays even turned down potential exposure to First Brands despite being approached multiple times.

Venkatakrishnan said the loss on Tricolor itself was not a surprise. He said: “The surprise was the fraud. Now fraud is no excuse; we take our credit risk management very seriously at all points in the cycle.” However, he said lenders always had to be prepared for “all outcomes including fraud”.

While Barclays revealed a £20bn exposure to the private credit sector, Venkatakrishnan noted it was a “relatively small” compared with the £346bn of loans currently issued to consumers and business customers across the bank.

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His comments came as Barclays reported a 7% drop in pre-tax profits to £2.08bn in the three months to the end of September, down from £2.2bn during the same period last year.

Alongside the Tricolor loss, Barclays’ earnings were also hit by a £235m provision to cover compensation over the car loan commissions scandal. It makes it the latest high street bank to put aside extra cash in response to the Financial Conduct Authority’s proposed £11bn redress programme.

It takes Barclays’ total compensation pot to £325m. The company no longer provides car finance but is dealing with the fallout for the remaining loans on its books

However, that did not stop the bank from announcing fresh payouts for investors – another £500m worth of share buybacks. The bank also plans to switch to quarterly payouts for shareholders, rather than waiting for half-year and end-of-year earnings.

“I continue to be pleased with the ongoing momentum of Barclays’ financial performance over the last seven quarters,” Venkatakrishnan said, adding that he was upgrading the profitability guidance – under a measure known as return on tangible equity – for the full year.

The hack of Jaguar Land Rover has cost the UK economy an estimated £1.9bn, potentially making it the most costly cyber-attack in British history, a cybersecurity body has said.

A report by the Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) said losses could be higher if there were unexpected delays to the return to full production at the carmaker to levels before the hack took place at the end of August.

JLR was forced to shut down systems across all of its factories and offices after realising the extent of the penetration. The carmaker, Britain’s biggest automotive employer, only managed a limited restart in early October and is not expected to return to full production until January.

As well as crippling JLR, the hack has affected as many as 5,000 organisations across Britain, given the wide extent of the carmaker’s complex supply chain. While JLR has been able to rely on its large financial buffers, smaller suppliers were immediately forced to lay off thousands of workers and contend with a painful pause in cashflow.

“This incident appears to be the most economically damaging cyber event to hit the UK, with the vast majority of the financial impact being due to the loss of manufacturing output at JLR and its suppliers,” the CMC’s report said.

The CMC is an independent non-profit organisation made up of industry specialists including the former head of Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, Ciaran Martin. Martin said it looked like the most costly UK attack “by some distance”, and added that organisations needed to work out how to react if vital networks were disrupted.

JLR, which is owned by India’s Tata Group, will report its financial results in November. A spokesperson for the carmaker declined to comment on the report.

The luxury carmaker has three factories in Britain that together produce about 1,000 vehicles a day. The incident was one of several high-profile hacks to affect large UK companies this year. Marks & Spencer lost about £300m after a breach in April forced the retailer to suspend its online services for two months.

JLR, which analysts estimated was losing about £50m a week from the shutdown, was promised a £1.5bn loan guarantee by the UK government in late September to help it support suppliers. However, before receiving that cash, the carmaker launched its own efforts to support its supply chain, paying for parts upfront.

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The CMC, which is funded by the insurance industry and categorises the financial impact of significant cybersecurity incidents affecting British businesses, ranked the JLR hack as a category 3 systemic event, out of a scale of five.

The £1.9bn estimate “reflects the substantial disruption to JLR’s manufacturing, to its multi-tier manufacturing supply chain, and to downstream organisations including dealerships”, the report said.

Government ambitions in space are approaching what some may still think of as science fiction. In August 2025, NASA set a 2030 target for construction of a lunar nuclear reactor to support the US-led and EU-supported Artemis program’s plan for a permanent moon base.  While this target faces significant technical and financial challenges, it reflects a real sprint to outcompete autocratic rivals. China and Russia are coordinating on a similar “International Lunar Research Station” powered by a nuclear reactor for completion in the mid-2030s.

Emerging technologies are key drivers of this new space race. Analysts with experience at the European Space Agency, NASA, MIT, and in the private space sector argue that these technologies could make a cislunar economy—economic activity spanning Earth, the Moon, and the space between—feasible by mid-century, though experts debate when key capabilities will mature. Key technologies include:

• artificial intelligence (AI), which could facilitate autonomous in-space servicing and assembly (ISAM), enabling individually-launched modular components to self-assemble into mega-structures such as next-generation telescopes and orbital refueling stations. Even factories could be built this way, leveraging microgravity and space extremes to produce items impossible to make on earth, with applications in fiber optics, semiconductors, and novel materials. The first pieces of this world are already here: US-based Varda Space Industries uses microgravity for biopharmaceutical drug development.
• quantum technologies, which could safeguard military and commercial data in space using a network of quantum-encrypted satellites. Space-based atomic clocks developed by the European Space Agency could synchronize these systems and allow greater autonomous navigation in deep space. Emerging quantum sensors measure tiny gravitational fluctuations to identify more-and-less dense materials below the Earth’s surface, enabling satellites to map aquifers and critical mineral deposits. The same measurements could identify high-value sites for mining on the Moon.
• biotechnologies, which could be key to sustaining long-term human activity in cislunar space. Researchers are engineering lightweight, self-healing composites made from fungi to serve as radiation shields for space stations and Moon bases. Near-future synthetic biology applications could reduce the need to resupply space habitats through the use of bioregenerative life support systems that generate oxygen and food.

The United States and the EU already support these industries; the EU’s draft Space Act and the Trump administration’s August executive order on commercial space development each signal backing for the industry. Yet, staying ahead of China demands more. Allies should leverage complementary strengths by investing in each other’s commercial space sectors and reducing barriers to integrating advanced capabilities. These steps will not suffice by themselves, but they would materially boost competitiveness—positioning the United States and the EU to outpace China and unlock the cislunar economy.