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

Page 11 of 11

Dominick Gabriele: Thanks so much.

John Greene: Yeah. Arren, the answer to both questions is yes. So the loan fee income, typically late fees and NSF fees. And in terms of employment levels, if unemployment was to increase, that would certainly impact net charge offs. But I would say this. In the cohort of folks that we typically target, there — what we’ve seen is if they are impacted by a job situation, their time of recovery is pretty quick. So by recovery, I mean, finding a new role. So the fact that this cohort of prime revolvers isn’t in the upper tier of income levels allows them to have a greater opportunity to find jobs of equal pay — equal or more pay in the current environment. So the employment — early indications of employment or some challenges in some states, we don’t see any sign of that translating into a credit situation for us.

Dominick Gabriele: Okay, great. I’m going to sneak one more in here. Is there — Discover spending growth is typically matched its loan growth trajectory over time given the stability of your business model. If we don’t see a normalization of — and meaningful fashion of payment rates, is there any reason that the spending growth and loan growth trajectories would be uncorrelated as they have been in the past?

John Greene: Yeah. So we’ll look at — we’ll look at kind of opportunities to drive loan growth. And part of that is the sales data or the spending data from consumers and reflect that in our next set of guidance that we provide. But specifically in correlation, in this form, I’m not going to get into.

Dominick Gabriele: Okay. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Operator: Thank you. We’ll take our next question from Bill Ryan with Seaport Research Partners.

Bill Ryan: Hi, good morning and thanks for working me in here at the end. Question on the personal loans business. Last quarter, you talked about that there was some marginal tightening that you did, but you had fairly robust loan growth this quarter. Could you talk about the market opportunity that you’re seeing there? And also the mix of new versus existing customers, I believe the historical mix was about 50-50, just curious if that’s still the case?

Roger Hochschild: Yeah. So in terms of overall competition, I’d say there’s been a little bit of a pullback on the supply side from, I would say, markets and others as they pulled out. But there are a good number of competitors. A lot of them are much more broader spectrum than us in terms of how far down they go. I think what you’re seeing is really strong consumer demand as rates have gone up and our product is primarily used for debt consolidation, people are looking to consolidate and pay down their credit cards. And so we’re seeing very strong demand that is giving us ability to tighten credit and even at the margin, raise our prices and still see strong demand. So it’s a product where underwriting and credit is everything. The mix is largely new, but a good amount are cross-sold to our existing cardholder base. So its customers where we also have experience with them.

Bill Ryan: Okay. Thank you.

Eric Wasserstrom: So I think we are going to conclude our call there. Thanks very much for joining us. If you have any follow-ups, please reach out to the IR team and we wish you a very good day. Thanks very much.

Operator: This does conclude today’s Second Quarter 2023 Discover Financial Services Earnings Conference Call. You may disconnect your line at this time, and have a wonderful day.

Follow Discover Financial Services (NYSE:DFS)

Page 11 of 11