Davy Morning Equity Briefing
Oct 30, 2026
Irish banks
Banks monthly: Individual Investment Accounts
Individual Investment Accounts (IIAs) should provide a welcome tailwind to Irish retail investing. We expect adoption to be gradual with flows captured at the margin from existing alternatives. The onboarding and administrative requirements for IIAs should favour established providers over smaller, more niche providers, resulting in the Irish banks as natural beneficiaries. IIAs will present opportunities to deepen relationships and increase fee income, initially modest but compounding over time.
CRH
New $6bn share buyback and Velocity initiative launched
While CRH’s Q3 results are slightly ahead of our expectations, FY26 guidance has been lowered, with the new midpoint broadly in line with our current expectations. The company has launched a new multi-year $6bn buyback programme and a transformation initiative aimed at delivering $400m in annual benefits by the end of 2028. The stock remains cheap at current levels, and we reiterate our ‘Outperform’ rating.
Irish economy
Double-digit growth in housing output in Q3
As we saw in Q2, we are encouraged to see Q3 house completions very close to our forecast. While our apartments forecast was higher than the outcome, these are inherently volatile. For both apartments and houses, we expect a seasonally strong result in Q4 as homebuilders seek to avail of subsidies; securing these requires that homes started two years ago must be built by the end of this year. We trim our full-year forecast for 2026 to 42k from 43k previously but still expect 2027 output will increase to 44k. We think upside risks also remain for our 2028 completions forecast, which currently stands at 42k.
