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

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Onur Genc: Perfect. And then how much capital have you in different initiatives, it depends on the initiative. But as a bucket, I don’t know what you mean. But Italy, let’s be very specific on Italy, you asked about Italy. Again, it’s an investment that we are doing through our Spanish franchise, meaning we are using the infrastructure systems, people and so on of Spain to take what we have in Spain because in terms of the mobile application, we do think that we have something really unique. We took that to Italy. As such, given the fact that we are leveraging what we already have, the investments are really, really limited. I can tell you let me give this — to build that bank, it was basically less than €20 million, which is in the context of what we have is very limited.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Pamela Zuluaga from Credit Suisse.

Pamela Zuluaga: One of them was already addressed on capital distribution, but my second one is on asset quality. Is there any upside to your cost of risk guidance of 100 basis points? If asset quality remains as resilient as you’ve been flagging so far, could we see some release in provisions as tailwinds to earnings? Or alternatively, do you have some downside risk? I’ve seen that you have a rather unchanged proportion of exposures classified under Stage 2 versus what you had last quarter, around 8% of gross exposures are already under special vigilance. But is there any downside risk to your guidance from future procyclicality headwinds, or is this already embedded in your numbers?

Onur Genc: Pamela, very quickly, it’s already embedded into our numbers. That’s the guidance. Obviously, we are looking into an uncertain environment. What will happen to inflation, whether the central banks will keep increasing the rates, if that’s the case, whether that will have a secondary effect on the NPLs. And obviously, there are a lot of uncertainties, but everything is included in our planning. I should reiterate once again that since the COVID times, we have put in beyond the business as usual, the loans go bad, we take provisions. There are clear rules, and those rules are never compromised. Beyond the business as usual, we have put close to €1.2 billion of provisioning into what we call the macro modelling and also what we call post model adjustments and so on.

Some of this is clearly allocated to certain portfolios. Some of it is unallocated, but that €1.2 billion and €300 million of that is actually non-allocated, which is pure buffer. That’s another safeguard that we have regarding the guidance that we have.

Operator: Our last question today is from Chris Hallam from Goldman Sachs. Chris?

Chris Hallam: It’s a quick one to finish off. It’s just another question on efficiency improvements and it’s sort of a follow-up to Britta’s question earlier, but for 2023 costs, should we really just focus on the positive jaws comment within the guidance; i.e., a sort of stable to slightly improved to income ratio rather than solving for the cost growth in current euros? Because I think if we use the same FX adjustments on costs is on core revenue guidance and you’d get to around a 300 basis points improvement in the cost-to-income ratio, which seems like a lot, and obviously, there’s a difference in geography at FX mix on costs and on revenues.

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