Below is transcript of the Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC)’s Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings conference call, held on Thursday, January 15, 2015, at 8:30 am EST.
Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC) is a bank holding company and a financial holding company. The Company is a financial institution, serving individual consumers, small and middle market businesses, institutional investors, large corporations and governments with a range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk management products and services.
Company Executives:
Lee McEntire, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations
Brian T. Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer
Bruce R. Thompson, Chief Financial Officer
Analysts:
Betsy Graseck, Morgan Stanley
John McDonald, Sanford Bernstein
Brennan Hawken, UBS
Glenn Schorr, Evercore ISI
Jim Mitchell, Buckingham Research
Matt O’Connor, Deutsche Bank
Steven Chubak, Nomura
Eric Wasserstrom, Guggenheim Securities
Guy Moszkowski, Autonomous Research
Paul Miller, FBR
Marty Mosby, Vining Sparks
Mike Mayo, CLSA
Nancy Bush, NAB Research
Operator
Good day, everyone. And welcome to the Bank of America Earnings Announcement Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode, but later you’ll have the opportunity to ask questions during the question-and-answer session. Please note this call is being recorded. It’s now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Mr. Lee McEntire. Please go ahead.
Lee McEntire, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations
Good morning, thanks to everybody on the phone, as well as the webcast for joining us this morning for the fourth quarter results. Hopefully you guys have had a chance to review the earnings release documents available on the website. Before I turn the call over to Brian and Bruce, let me just remind you, we may make forward-looking statements. For further information on those, please refer to either our earnings release documents, our website or our other SEC filings. So with that, let me turn it over to Brian Moynihan, our CEO for some opening comments, before Bruce Thompson the CFO goes through the details. Thank you.
Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Lee and good morning and thank all of you for joining us to review our fourth quarter results for 2014. As we think about the year we’ve accomplished a lot, including resolving many significant legacy issues that were overshadowing the underlying progress in our financials. Solving these issues obviously came at a cost and drove a decline in year-over-year net income. But importantly it settles through the uncertainty for all of us — for investors, regulators, rating agencies and others, allowed us to focus on the core business and operation of the company going forward.
As we move to Slide 2, you could see that we have a simplified and stronger company. Today we reported earnings of $3.1 billion after tax. The company is simpler and more straightforward with improved risk profile. Everything we do now is focused on driving the company forward delivering for our customers and clients. On this slide you can see some of the important results. This year we completed probably the industry’s largest ever cost savings program which achieved $8 billion of annualized savings.
Let’s think about that. We started that program in 2011 when we had around 290,000 FTEs and over the last three years since then driving it the right way, we completed 2014 ending the year with around 220,000 FTEs. Non-interest expense excluding litigation declined $4.4 billion compared from 2013 to 2014 and is down more than $8 billion the last couple of years, and yet we have more work to do ahead of us. We further strengthened an already strong and liquid balance sheet and increased our common stock dividend during 2014 for the first time since 2007. As you can see on this page, our credit costs are at a decade low level. So notwithstanding the headwinds our industry faces with rates on an ongoing global economic sluggishness, we’ve built a platform for growth, especially in the context of continuous improving of US economy. We have built a company with leading market positions across every core customer base and our task now is to continue to build on that foundation and the progress we’ve made.
