Credit Suisse Group AG (NYSE:CS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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And then, our group treasury would rebalance in the normal course of business on a daily basis depending on flows. And so, you make an instances where you have a momentary need in an entity and then that gets cured within a day or two or three. And so, pretty comfortable with how that was dealt with, and we’re in a pretty good position right now, as you’re seeing from the turnaround through the quarter as well as in January. On the second point, on funding costs, and perhaps I’ll address it through your deposit point first, which is that we have seen the central banks have pulled back on liquidity through the last year. We have seen a more competitive environment for deposits more generally across the industry. And so, we’re also competitive in that respect on pricing.

We’ve also wanted to rebuild our deposit base. And so, we will flex our pricing accordingly, very comfortable with the pricing levels that our RMs and our teams are going out with. And the other is, look, just once again, a recognition that deposit funding is still, on a relative basis, our cheapest source of funding and will remain so. We’re pleased that we’ve been able to reduce, as a result of the actions that we’re taking on the balance sheet, as a result of our strategy, we’ve been pleased that we’ve been able to reduce the quantum of capital market funding that we have. But as you can see, it’s CHF17 billion out of a much larger balance sheet. And so, we’re pretty comfortable that we’re setting ourselves on a path to reduce our funding costs through time as our balance sheet evolves.

Amit Goel: Great. Thank you very much.

Dixit Joshi: My pleasure.

Operator: The next question comes from the line of Chris Hallam with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Chris Hallam: Yes. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for taking my questions. The first is essentially a bit of a follow-up to Magdalena and Kian’s question earlier. One of the key pillars on the strategic update at Q3 was the pivoting of the business back to profitable core. And at the time, you mentioned the Wealth Management franchise is sort of an 18% to 20% RoTE business within those 2025 targets. But given the reduction in AUMs, and you’ve highlighted the business is expected to be loss-making in the first quarter, is there now a sort of a strategic decision to be made as to whether to either sort of, a, run the business as a profitable franchise at current AUM levels; or b, to try and regain assets and deliver the level of absolute profit contribution, which was embedded in that strategic plan?

I appreciate the comments you made earlier on this topic, but I just wondered whether those two options are essentially mutually exclusive from a cost perspective. So that’s my first question. And then, the second one is just on the strategic update, you had the objective of around $3 billion of revenues in the Markets business. And I just wonder whether that’s still an objective now.

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