Banco Santander, S.A. (NYSE:SAN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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But again, we are giving cost-income guidance because of inflation and uncertainties there. So there’s some space. But as you saw, Spain, for example, cost came down around 5%, if I remember correctly. It was 5% for the whole group. In the U.K., we had good cost control. We expect that to continue going forward. So it depends very much on the countries. And in Lat Am, South America, I believe, is sort of flattish. U.S. is flat to down, and Mexico will be up, but Héctor, you can help me here. Deposit franchises. I mean this is important, and we have grown deposits in many of our core markets, including in the U.S. This is really important. We do believe increased competition. But again, here, what’s important is the net interest margin. We expect that to expand, not just because of the fact that we are not paying a lot of our deposit franchises.

Remember, we’re retail. We’re not paying retail franchises when rates were negative. At some point, yes, we will start paying for deposits, but we’re in a strong competitive in-market position, and we believe the structural changes in the model with better service and better digital capacity will help us to do better there. So I don’t know if you want to add anything there on the cost control in Lat Am, Mexico, U.S. or other countries, Héctor.

Hector Grisi: Yes. Just in cost control. I mean, as you can see, I mean, Latin America is much more difficult, given that people are used to it and a lot of it is indexed of what we do, but we have been able to maintain it below inflation in most of the countries. The important fact here and the important change of what we used to do is that we’re working together much more. And we are developing a lot of our software together and decreasing the amount of risk that we are — sorry, the amount of expenses that we are generating in all of the countries. As our Chair has explained, for example, I mean, the acquiring platform was developed by Getnet and is being used in the rest of the countries. Also, the important fact is that the way we are handling the different expenses is very much controlled, and we have implemented one of the main drivers that is basically all what we do in infrastructure, and we’re maintaining it to the minimum.

So in that regard, we believe that we’re going to be able to control costs below inflation, which is, I believe, the most important point and to maintain, as we have said, under the guidance that we have given. In terms of the deposit franchise, I can give you some of the beta deposit that we have. In Spain is around 25% to 30%. The U.K. is around 30%. The U.S., around 40%, and Brazil is around 80%. It’s very automatic. But what also we can tell you is that in the last quarter, we have been able to also increase deposits in some of our most important markets. Take a look, for example, deposit growth in the U.S. was 20%. Mexico in the last quarter outpaced our competitors in that sense. And we have been — we’re going to be very much focused on that in the whole franchise and in the different parts of the bank to really enhance our deposit-gathering business.

Operator: The next question is coming from Alvaro Serrano from Morgan Stanley.

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