The Bank of Nova Scotia (NYSE:BNS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Sohrab Movahedi : Thank you. And Brian, congratulations on a very illustrious career. Phil, I have just maybe a quick clarifying question. I think you’ve talked about normalization, I’ll call it, on the PCL into the mid-30s. Can you just talk a little bit more detail on that? What sort of an unemployment rate does that assume? Where is that, performing versus nonperforming? And how does it kind of — which line items or business segments or geographies would you say you’re kind of, I guess, over earning in right now on that line? So would just be adding to performings in mortgages in Canada, or is it nonperformers in business lending in LatAm? Or just if you could give me a little bit more color as to how we get to that and what sort of assumptions?

Phil Thomas: Sure. That’s not a quick question, but I’m happy to maybe answer it and you and I can maybe spend a little bit of time together offline. But I’d go back to — we — if you look at where we were a year plus ago, this bank has done a tremendous amount of work to derisk our portfolios. And so as we head into ’23, a new normalized run rate is sort of in that mid-30s basis point range. I would say the mid-9s basis point range for International Banking. And so we continue to grow our mortgage book in International, continue to put on more secured lending. Our focus has primarily been on affluence for the higher-end segment. And as I mentioned in my remarks, about 96% of our originations in IB are sort of that higher credit quality segment now.

And so we’re really — as we normalize, it’s sort of a new normal in sense of the portfolios have really shifted. Again, higher — big focus on high investment grade at corporate and commercial lending. And so as I look out into next year, I’m confident in the guidance. And we’ll continue to work very, very closely with Dan and Nacho and Jake and James and others to make sure that we have that focus on higher quality credit moving into the year. I would also say that this bank has made a significant amount of investment in the collections. And we’ve built collections hubs. We’ve invested in technology. We’ve invested in analytics, and so we’re doing a lot of preemptive phone calls to customers who we may see had a bit of stress. And so both from a quality of the portfolio, the processes that we have in place to help our customers and from a collections perspective, we’re feeling pretty good as we go into to next year.

Sohrab Movahedi : What’s the unemployment rate in Canada behind the 30 basis point?

Phil Thomas: Yes, obviously, we stress test our portfolios on a regular basis every day. And we have a number of stress scenarios for unemployment that we put into the stress scenarios. And I’m happy to maybe spend a little bit of time with you offline, we can go into those.

Sohrab Movahedi : Okay. But the mid-30 basis points, you don’t — is it not based on an unemployment rate?

Phil Thomas: It would be based on a whole bunch of different factors, including unemployment, our outlook, how we’re thinking about our portfolios, what is performing, what are we looking at for nonperforming, where are we focused on in terms of growth of assets.

Operator: It’s all the time we have for questions. I would now like to turn the meeting back over to Mr. Porter.