Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A. (NYSE:BBVA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Martha, I really encourage you, I’m sure you looked into it in the past. But if you take 10 years, 20 years, or earnings profile of BBVA, or more importantly, organic capital generation of BBVA. Again, 10 years, 15 years, long enough period. Even five years, you can do it because it gives more or less the same messages. What you see is that BBVA always faces a problem here and there. We’re a diversified global retail bank, 1 year it’s the elections in Mexico and the fluctuation that comes with it. The other year, it’s Argentina. The other year, the Spain, there’s a problem with mortgage floor closures and so on. Now these days, it’s Turkey. And we have seen a lot of innovation on how to manage macro economy, given our presence in these different countries.

We have seen a lot. I mean some of the things that we see in some of the countries that you mentioned, we really have seen them because BBVA, we do have the experience. We had a 164-year-old bank and so on. But to cut the long story short, given the fact that we are used to this, even in that context of different crisis here and there, our organic capital generation capacity has been proven to be resilient and more importantly, the fluctuation, the standard deviation of our earnings of our capital generation has been very limited compared to pure European banks, for example. In that context, when you look into our, again, goal of 11.5% to 12%, let’s take the upper end, 12% as a reference year. as compared to our requirement of 8.60, 340 basis points is the gap.

That gap is also one of the highest. It’s higher than the average of the large European banks. Given the fact that our requirement is that low, and it goes back to that fluctuation or the organic capital generation variation from one year to another, in my view, we do think that 11.5% to 12% is already a very comfortable target. So I wouldn’t be adding this and to that number because we have, in our modeling and our planning, when we look into different countries and figures, we do think that 11.5% to 12% is the right capital target to have. And in that sense, in my view, you should not be adding the 40 basis points, but obviously, it’s your call.

Operator: Our next question is from Andrea Filtri from Mediobanca. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Andrea Filtri: Just a very small follow-up, really. On capital, if you could also update your Basel IV impact and give us a bit more color on the plus 14 basis points from other items in Slide 18. If you could break it down, please, because it looks like there is very large swings within that. On NII, again, a follow-up, if you could please provide us when which forward curve have you used abate to set your interest rate expectations in each geography. And if you could provide us by geography, the betas, deposit betas today and where you expect them to be in ’23 and ’24 on average so that we can make our own assumptions rather than taking just the guidance as reference. And finally, what do you expect in terms of inflation in Turkey for ’23.

Onur Genc: You did ask all the parameters of your model, but it’s very fair and they are all the right parameters to look into. The forward curve, what forward curve do we use, we use it basically at the end of the year planning period. So it’s the December forward curve that you see. But the forward curve of today, again, what matters there is the Mexican peso. At the end of year number versus today, a month from the planning, it didn’t change too much as far as I know, the currency curve. Then the Basel impact, Rafa, do you want to comment on the Basel impact?

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