Citizens Financial Group, Inc. (NYSE:CFG) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Manan Gosalia: That’s very helpful. Thanks for the fulsome answer. Just to move on to capital. Is there any color you can share on what drove the increase in the stress capital buffer this year? I know that mortgage was something that was a little bit of a headwind for the whole group, but any other information you glean from your conversations with the Fed. And then maybe what you need to do to bring that down in future years?

Bruce Van Saun: Yes. I – we haven’t really had the full debrief. So we are getting that set up so we can go through and kind of understand their models better. I think that’s been one of the concerns of the industry that it’s not that transparent to us. But kind of when we look at the results, there’s a couple of things that could have been a factor. So one is the build of the allowance when we took relatively high charge-offs we had a significant build was built into their models, which we didn’t have in our models. And that alone probably cost us 30 basis points of a 60% increase or something like that. So that’s one thing that we’ll want to talk about and understand better. And then questions about we did a deal and did the onetime expenses get incorporated or we’ve done a lot of hedging in the falling rate scenario are our hedges getting full benefit.

So we just have some questions that we want to poke at. But in any case, I think the bigger point here is that we can roll with this 8.5% and we have plenty of capital, and we have an appreciable buffer versus that capital. So it really doesn’t affect kind of our capital management strategies. But we would like to see it get kind of back into line. We think it’s a bit elevated relative to where it should be, and we’ll be having those conversations with the Fed in the coming weeks.

John Woods: Yes. I think that as you get past this year, where we have those integration expenses, and there’s a hypothesis that, but that will roll off as you get into next year. And we’ll have another bite at the apple next year given the fact that we’re going to be doing this again. And in the end, the SCB is not our constraint. Our constraint is our own view of what capital we need to be prudent to support our business. And frankly, where the Fed and the regulators are headed with required kind of levels outside of the SCB is going to be our constraint. So we’re going to be, as Bruce mentioned earlier, about 200 basis points over the SCB by the end of the year and probably heading towards earlier compliance with whatever the Fed comes out within most. So we’re feeling pretty darn good about the capital position, notwithstanding the SCB.

Manan Gosalia: Got it. And the BSO should have a positive impact on your risk-weighted assets. Should that also have a positive impact on the SCB?

John Woods: No, it will – it might. I mean, I think more importantly, it will – it gives us flexibility to rotate RWA capital into relationship lending and return that capital. To the extent that those front book opportunities are not there, we probably have the opportunity to do both, where we rotate that capital into relationship lending and provide an ability to buy back. It doesn’t have a direct impact on the SCB.

Manan Gosalia: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question will come from the line of Vivek Juneja. Go ahead.

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