Royal Bank of Canada (NYSE:RY) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Derek Neldner: Sure. Thank you for both those questions. From a market share perspective, as you noted, in our advisory and origination businesses is in Investment Banking, we can get very real-time market share data. And so as you pointed out and as Dave highlighted in his comments, we did have a very strong quarter in what was a tough environment, we did gain share and moved up in our rankings. To your question on Global Markets, the data that we can get is not quite as real time. There’s a little bit of a lag, and so we’ll be waiting to get some of that data. But when I look at a variety of different information we can access and just anecdotal data points, I do think that our performance this quarter reflected both a benefit from some of our business mix.

We are, as we’ve talked about in the past, have a larger credit business. That business performed very well and a very large rates, FX and commodity business. And those businesses all had a constructive environment. But away from the mix, I do think we picked up share in a number of businesses in Global Markets, which I think is a reflection of a number of the new strategic initiatives we’ve been implementing in that business. Over the last couple of years, but in 2022, in particular. To your question on pre-provision pretax, obviously, we’ve discussed in the past that we think in a normalized environment, we could contribute $1 billion plus a quarter. When we look at the resegmentation and the addition of Treasury Services and Transaction Banking plus combined with our ongoing growth initiatives, we do think that we can lift that bar to $1.1 billion.

And so again, I would caveat that we are in a cyclical business and that depends on a normalized quarter. But in a relatively normal environment, that’s the goal that we’ll continue to be shooting for is $1.1 billion plus.

Operator: The next question is from Mehmed Rizvanovic, KBW Research.

Mehmed Rizvanovic: Derek, if I could just follow up, I wanted to ask a question about the trading line. Obviously, a great quarter for you guys. I’m wondering, in an environment like this, did you just get paid better for your transactions on the trading side just given some of the numbers that we track just to try to get a look ahead in terms of the volume that comes into the market overall, it seems like this is still an outsized quarter. We really see the volatility spike. We didn’t see trading volume spike and yet here you are sitting at $1.4 billion trading, which was a great number. Anything to suggest that maybe it was outsized a little bit because you’re just getting paid more or maybe not as much volume.

Derek Neldner: Sure. Thank you for that. A few different comments. I mean, overall, I would say, it was a very strong quarter for our trading businesses, and I would describe it as a very clean quarter. So there weren’t any notable onetime items or anything. It was just really good client volume, a constructive market backdrop. And I think our teams managed risk and executed very well against that backdrop. A few observations, though. I think, one, fiscal Q1 for us always tends to be a seasonally strong quarter for the trading businesses. We do get some benefit from the calendar year-end and how some of our clients are managing their balances and how other banks are managing their balances. So Q1 always tends to be seasonally a stronger quarter for us.

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