Barclays confident on dividend prospects at Lloyds

Volatility in markets since the start of 2016 has apparently led investors to seek cover in those lenders' shares whose dividend payouts seem more secure, analysts at Barclays said.

This "marked preference" for dividends that can be seen (ie near-term) versus those that need to be estimated (ie medium-term) has grown more accentuated thus far in the new year, the broker said in a research report sent to clients.

With that in mind, and on the basis of the broker's expectations for 2015, it said it felt confident on the outlook for dividend payments in the likes of high-yielding lenders such as Lloyds, ING, Swedbank, Danske Bank, Intesa San Paolo and ABN AMRO .

The analysts had placed an 'overweight' on all those names.

They were also "reasonably confident" of the 2015 dividend at HSBC and SEB; both of which had been tagged with an 'equal-weight' recommendation.

However, they said they were less confident in the case of Nordea, SocGen, Caixabank, BNP, UBS and DNB - all of which were at 'underweight'.

In the case of Lloyds, they added that: "we have a high degree of confidence on FY15 ordinary dividends, and expect there to be a special dividend at FY15 - but recognise that there is debate amongst investors on the scale and timing here with concerns around Basel IV, PPI claims and the UK government's planned retail offering as potential reasons for not paying out all of our estimated 3.6p per share surplus over a 13% CET1 ratio as a special with FY15 results."