Wells Fargo and Co (WFC)’s 4th Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call Transcript

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Operator:

Your next question comes from the line of Betsy Graseck with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Betsy Graseck, Morgan Stanley

I had a question on investment spend and thoughts around mobile wallet with Apple Pay obviously you did a lot of work there. Is there an opportunity to take those investments and potentially expand them into mobile wallet, real time banking, other tokenization strategies?

John Stumpf, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

We are doing a lot of work in all those things, about the so-called paperless store, and doing real time cash letters, and helping customers with real time information – not understanding which channel they are involved in. So I would say all of the above is important. What we found, which is interesting is that our most loyal customers today are the ones who use the channels most often – and most types of those channels. So, even for those customers who are very advanced in technology and use of technology – who might be dominant in that channel – still visit stores, on an infrequent but regular basis. They go to ATMs so there’s lots of things. Some of the investments we’re making is to set up an appointment with a banker using your technology. We are testing things: about being able to authenticate customers knowing they are in the stores, working on things that would authenticate at an ATM machine, may be using your mobile phone/device, so there’s just lots of things going on there.

And we’re actually learning a lot of those things from retailers and other service providers outside of our industry. So, pretty exciting stuff.

Betsy Graseck, Morgan Stanley

And do you feel that this is like, table stakes, and well, just maintain share or do you think that you’re doing things that could potentially drive share up? Drive down that expense ratio?

John Stumpf, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Well, I think about less of an expense ratio but these are more than they are table stakes in some cases, if you don’t have a mobile offering, you’re probably not going to serve most millennials today. But we think it is more than table stakes. We think it’s a big reason why we’re growing net new primary checking accounts over 5% a year. Deposit growth, we’ve had clearly is as a result of partially a result of our distribution model and the Army Channel view we have of these various channels. Not separate businesses but combined into really centric around the customer needs and convenience. So, our growth is, I think, reflective of our commitment to that.

Betsy Graseck, Morgan Stanley

I’m just wondering too on the Dillards, because, I would expect that retailers also want best in class mobile apps etc. Is this part of what we should expect? You will be delivering to Dillards and other private label portfolios that you win?

John Stumpf, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Well, I don’t want to speak about a particular situation, but I’ll just give you this. 16 years ago, we didn’t have an online offering. Today, over 80% of our customers are actively online some 28 million or 24 million customers actively online. On the consumer side, five years ago, we didn’t have a mobile offering. Today we have over 14 million customers on that. I mean, mobile is the fastest growing fastest adopted channel we have had in our history of our company. Things that customers can now do mobile and things they’ll be able to do in the next year or two, as we continue to introduce new capabilities, is really exciting. So, watch for this. It’s really important.

Betsy Graseck, Morgan Stanley

Okay. Thanks.

Operator:

Your next question comes from John Pancari from Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

John Pancari, Evercore ISI

Good Morning. I am going to kick the energy horse here again, so, my apologies. But first of all, can you just help quantify your total leverage loan book, what size it is; and then, of that leverage loan book, how much is energy?

John Shrewsberry, Chief Financial Officer

Sure. So we don’t have a leverage loan book. We have loan portfolios – in various lines of business. We have an energy loan portfolio, which would include both oil and gas, and as I mentioned it’s about 2% of our loans overall, it includes E&P companies, it includes midstream pipeline companies, and it includes services companies. It also includes some investment grade integrated oil names, but, the sum of that is about 2% of our total loan portfolio. Some of those companies will have higher leverage, some of those companies will have lower leverage but we don’t drop a portfolio line along the level of leverage.

John Pancari, Evercore ISI

Okay, and, then separately, related to that, do you have the amount of bond exposure that you may have held in your trading portfolios for any deals that you’ve done in the energy sector. Do you have that quantified?

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