But we see the consumer activity indicating that they’re still in the game, they’re still spending money. Where they spend, it’s a little different, more in services and going out in restaurants and experiences and less on goods at retail. They’re employed. If you look at the estimates by any of you — any of your economists, the unemployment rate projected is really a modest deterioration from here, most of them in the core base case, our reserves actually set at almost a 5% unemployment rate by the end of this year, to give you a sense. So that’s good news. They’re using their credit responsibly. Much is made of higher credit card balances, but on the size of the economy, and the size — people are forgetting that economy is a lot bigger than it was in ’19 because of the inflation, everything.
And as a percentage, we don’t see any stress there. We see a normalization of that credit. So they’re working. They’re getting paid. They have balances in their accounts. They have access to credit. They’ve locked in good rates on their mortgages and they’re employed. It’s — we feel it’s good. So we think the soft landing is a core thesis. And our internal data supports what our research team sees. And they get — they see it also through our institute.
Mike Mayo: And then just as far as controlling what you can control in terms of expenses and headcount, tech investments, and maybe throw in AI as part of that, what sort of extra efficiencies can you achieve through AI, tech, and other initiatives? You squeezed a lot out over the last decade plus. What’s left to go?
Brian Moynihan: Yeah, there’s always more to go. So if you — I think we’ve got lined up. If you take what we’re doing this year and next year, meaning ’24, ’25 and enrolled in ’26, it’s a couple of billion dollars plus, which helps us to the dynamic Erika was talking about avoiding growth and expenses, keeping below inflation. Because you think of us as rolling that expense taken out back into good things. This year will be, I think, $3.8 billion on technology initiatives. That’s up from ’21 to ’22 by $500 million or more and then sort of flattish ’22 to ’23. They’re being applied in different ways. We added relationship managers across the board. We keep opening the branches. We’re largely through the rehab of the branches that we’re keeping.
And these are all spending to grow. And that’s what you’re seeing. So net new checking account, 600,000 for the year. That’s 20 straight quarters of net checking account growth. All good core accounts flows into the asset manager business, $80 billion or more. In our Merrill Edge program, the advertising has driven the business. We have 10% more customers. And those customers, which is 300,000 to 400,000 customers added in the last 12 months, those customers bring an average opening balance of $80,000 to $100,000. To give you a sense, they’re not small accounts, that’s good. So we’re just investing. But there’s a thousand levers. None of them are simple. But even this year, when we said we got to get the headcount growth back in alliance after the great resignation in ’22 and we had to hire fast, we went from 218,000 people in January down to 212,900 at the end of the year.
And in that, we’re rolling over teammates from one business to another business where we need help and retraining people and reskilling people. And as AI comes in and to the extent that we can deploy it, deploy it wisely, it’ll allow us to redeploy people. And even with our very low turnover rate, which is 7% for year ’23 and actually down from 12% in the year ’22 and I think 6% in the fourth quarter, we still can manage headcount down just by not hiring people, because that gives us an opportunity. We hired 15,000 people this year. So we hire — we can always hire a little less if we see the efficiencies coming through and redeploy the people we have.
Mike Mayo: All right. Thank you.
Operator: Our next question is from Matt O’Connor of Deutsche Bank.
Matt O’Connor: Hi. Just thoughts on capital allocation from here. Brian, I think there were some — and sorry if I missed it in the beginning, but I think there was some media coverage about you guys, are you talking about leading into markets with capital? I don’t know if there’s any way to kind of size that. And then just broadly speaking, like how you allocate capital from here or buyback levels and all that stuff? Thanks.
Brian Moynihan: Yeah. I’m not sure of the media report, but in the end of the day, Jim DeMare and team have done a great job to deploying capital and growing market share in the sales and trading business. So they’re up 7% year-over-year in revenue. FICC was up 11% for the year. Equity was down a little bit, down 1% or so. And they’ve done a great job. $17.6 billion of revenue, highest by a lot — over the last few years. And think about it, in the ’19 time frame, we were $13 billion in revenues. They fundamentally moved up. That was deploying more balance sheet, you got a little bit more capital but inherently, but not a lot. They’re not taking a lot of risk. They made money every trading day in ’23, again, I think. And so they do a great job of serving the clients.
