Truist Financial Corporation (NYSE:TFC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Mike Maguire: Yes, Ken. I’ll take that one again. Look, I’ve been very pleased by how the betas have performed so far. They have outperformed our expectations on a pretty consistent basis. We obviously are seeing some acceleration of rate pursuing behaviors and seeing pressures on balances as well, uncharted territory in many respects. We think we will get through the last cycle, perhaps even high 30s, approaching and even hitting 40% by the time we’re to the last hike.

Bill Rogers: And again, it’s Bill. The only thing I’d add is just the strength of our deposit franchise. So you said I asked about our relative deposit beta performance. But we’re really experiencing what we hope we would experience as Truist. We’re sitting in great markets. We’ve got a 21% average share, our competitors’ mainly large banks. We’ve introduced some great new product capability in Truist One. Our branch production’s up. Our teammates are really doing a great job, the ubiquity of presence, the ability to amortize your marketing and be more effective. So our just strength of our overall deposit franchise is starting to manifest itself and show itself of what we thought we could create and create at Truist.

Ken Usdin: Okay. Thank you, guys.

Operator: Our next question comes from Matt O’Connor with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Matt O’Connor: Good morning. Can you talk about your capital priorities and remind us what your near-term capital targets, please?

Bill Rogers: Yes. Matt, our priorities remain the same in terms of the top four priorities. The first is to continue to invest in our business. And we’ve seen a lot of opportunity to do that. I mean you’ve seen the asset growth in our business and RWA growth, and we feel really good about the opportunities to invest in that. The second is to have a secure and growing dividend base. That’s important to our €“ both our institutional and our retail shareholders. So that’s a critical. And then the third is M&A opportunities, inorganic opportunities. And you’ve seen we’ve been active. They have been €“ some have been smaller by nature, but we’ve seen opportunities to enhance our businesses mostly in the insurance business, but also on the technology side and some capability side and some talent side that we’ve added in those areas.

And then the fourth is the €“ is share repurchase. And for us, that just hasn’t been as big a priority because we’ve done a lot in the first three of those priorities. And as it relates to target, I mean, we’ve been sort of careful to say we really €“ we like where we’re operating right now. So we think we have got the capacity to do the things we need to do. We think given our risk profile, given our stress adjusted risk profile, we think we’re in a really strong position from a capital perspective. But also, as Mike noted in his comments, we accrete. If you think about our earnings profile, but also the fact that our MOE expenses come off, we are sort of in a unique position to accrete capital. So, we will accrete about 25 basis points worth of capital.

We have been using some of that for those first two, three priorities that we talked about. So, I think on balance, we will probably see capital increase, but we are comfortable that we have got enough capital to execute our strategies and support our businesses.

Matt O’Connor: Okay. And then so hypothetically, if you say won the lottery for $5 billion, what would you do with that capital? I don’t think you are going to change the organic growth. The dividend is kind of tapped by regulation, roughly, the last two buckets of M&A and buybacks. And if you walk into that $5 billion, what would you do with it?