Royal Bank of Canada (NYSE:RY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So I think from all those perspectives, it’s going to — we’re watching we’re — it could be in any one of those lines of businesses, but between wealth and commercial and other spaces that we’ve talked about. But yes, over the medium to longer term, we are very much interested in growing our U.S. franchise. And one of the reasons we asked Derek to take over the overall integration of those 3 businesses is to simplify our business model in the United States, simplify our technology infrastructure and reduce duplication and make us more profitable and amenable to a strategic move forward like that. So all of this is laying the found work to a long-term multiyear investment in the United States.

Operator: Thank you. There are no further questions registered at this time. I will turn the call back to Asim Imran. Back to you.

David McKay : Yes. I’ll just take the call from here, this is Dave. So thanks very much for all your questions, very good questions, as always. Just to summarize kind of my takeaways from the messages through your Q&A today and what I’d like you to focus on, enormous balance sheet strength and liquidity strength with capital at 14.5%. You can see the clear path towards being able to absorb HSBC continue to build capital and allocate capital for growth and to start returning capital to shareholders in the near future. So that strength of capital build and organic growth is core to one of our investment themes, as you know, and the return on that capital. You’ve heard us and you’ve asked a lot of questions about cost control. You’ve seen us move core expenses down to that 5% mark and the commitment to continue to move it down next year in 2024.

We feel very good about that, a number of initiatives that we’ve already executed and more that will make to continue to manage that. I hope you noticed a very strong client volume performance, whether it’s Investment Banking, Global Markets, Canadian retail deposits, Canadian retail lending, Canadian business lending, Asset Management and into Wealth Management, U.S. Wealth Management, a very strong core client compete and that’s going to continue to flow through and good revenue growth for us and cross-selling off those clients, particularly new clients to the bank is very, very strong. And then our PCL with all that growth, our PCL looks to relatively outperform as well. So net-net, we feel very good about how we’ve turned the corner. We wrote off some noncore assets.

They were a little noisy. We don’t do that very often, but we did it this quarter. Really poised to take advantage of whichever way the macro environment goes in ’24, we’re poised to do well in that environment. So thank you very much. Have a great year-end and a good holiday season, and we’ll see you in Q1.

Operator: Thank you. The conference has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.