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Paris - French bank Societe Generale said on Thursday its third-quarter earnings leapt 56.6% to €836m, beating expectations in large part due to reduced risk costs.
The bank was able to cut its provisions, money set aside to cover possible loan losses, from 1.1 billion to 642 million.
Net banking income slid 1.8% to €5.9bn when excluding re-evaluation of the value of debt, but operating income jumped 82% to €1.2bn and operating expenses were trimmed by 0.7%.
The bank's chief executive Frederic Oudea said the quarterly results confirmed the good "commercial momentum of the Societe Generale Group's businesses".
He said the good result was "thanks to good control of operating expenses and the confirmed decline in the cost of risk despite a lacklustre economic environment."
The bank raised its common equity Tier 1 ratio - a measure of the capital it has available to absorb losses - to 10.4% at the end of September, an increase from 10.2% at the end of June and 9.9% on year ago.
For the first nine months of the year, Societe Generale's net profit was up 17.7% to €2.2bn, while net banking income rose 4.2% to 17.4 billion.
Societe Generale's share price dropped by 2.3% to €37.13 in morning trading.
