Discover Financial Services (NYSE:DFS) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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John Greene: …or overall? Yeah. So I’ll start with marketing and I’ll focus on the client second. We haven’t made a decision to pull back on marketing. We still see opportunity to generate positive returns from the customers that we’re targeting in that prime revolver segment. And we’re also putting money towards helping people understand our deposit products and hopefully find that we’re compelling there. We also have the campaign on the cash back debit program slated for the second half of the year. So the marketing dollars, how we thought about them at the beginning of the year remains consistent with where we are today. And frankly, I think it would have been short-sighted to pull back in order to manage to a particular number given the high returns we’re able to generate there.

In terms of the compliance cost, what I was referencing was 2019 to where we are in 2023. And so about a month ago in a public forum, I said that that increase from ‘19 to ‘23 was about $250 million. As we’ve looked at the work in front of us, we are dedicating an incremental, call it, $20 million to $30 million, maybe as much as $50 million over and above that here. So it could be the delta from ‘19, not $250 million, but maybe as much as $300 million, year-over-year, so ’22 to ’23, we’re up about $200 million in total compliance and related cost. Does that provide clarity?

Arren Cyganovich: Yes. Yes, I got it. I got it now. Thank you.

John Greene: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. We’ll take our next question from Dominick Gabriele with Oppenheimer.

Dominick Gabriele: Hey, great. Good morning, everybody. So When I look at your loan growth guidance, you talk about low to mid-teens. And to me, that means 14% basically. And so if you think about 14% or that range that you’re discussing, it would indicate the second half loan growth would be roughly 7% and given the trajectory of loan growth in general, it would end spending being at 2.5% this quarter moving to 1% in the most recent month. It would suggest the fourth quarter’s loan growth would be probably low single digits or something along those lines to make that guidance range. And so I was just curious if that’s the right math that you are thinking about or roughly? If we could talk about that, that’d be great.

John Greene: Yeah. I learned a long time ago not to give quarterly guidance because I found that I was not as accurate as I would have liked and other people would have liked. So the range of, kind of, the double digit growth that we talked about, you can take a look at the portfolio. We made some comments on what was driving it. So new accounts and certainly new account growth ‘22 to ‘23 has slowed. Sales, while still very robust at an absolute level, have slowed into July. We’re doing targeted promotional activities to drive high generating, high returning accounts. And the comp in the fourth quarter of ‘22 versus prior quarters is certainly a tougher comp. So your math is certainly your math and I don’t want to get into any more specifics than what I just did.

Dominick Gabriele: No problem. Thanks a lot. And then, there are some signs that the national unemployment rate could start to move higher if you look at some of the state data. If you saw a seasoning and the unemployment rate rising at the same time, could it have a more additive effect for ultimately higher net charge-offs than otherwise to book without the seasoning effect? And maybe just to relate to that, your loan fee income has been quite robust in its growth and it beat our expectations by quite a lot this quarter. Is that kind of an indication of the seasoning effects that are going on with the late fees in that bucket?

John Greene: Yeah. So —

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