Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Steven Chubak: Hi, good morning.

Charlie Scharf: Good morning.

Steven Chubak: So wanted to start off with a question just on the NII outlook. Certainly encouraging to see the guidance increase. But you noted, Mike, that it does contemplate a modest level of loan growth. And just parsing some of your other comments where you alluded to credit tightening, signs of slowdown in the broader economy, what gives you confidence around some inflection in lending activity, especially given the flattish loan growth that we’ve seen this quarter?

Mike Santomassimo: Yeah. Well, I think we’re seeing — we’re certainly seeing growth in card. So I think we would expect that to continue. And then in the rest of the portfolios, we see a little bit of growth in the asset-based lending and leasing business in the commercial bank. Middle market is kind of flat, but at least this quarter, and then you can see the consumer items. So I think — we’re hopeful that we’ll see some growth as we go into the second quarter. But as always, Steve, what we try to do with guidance is give you guidance that it doesn’t necessarily require every assumption to go in our favor. So the bigger drivers of uncertainty around NII for the rest of the year continue to be the same ones we’ve been talking about now for the last couple of quarters. It’s really going to be deposits and deposit pricing. The loan story will matter, but not anywhere near to the same degree.

Steven Chubak: No, it’s helpful color. And just a follow-up on expense, you cited the headcount reductions and higher severance cost driving some upward pressure this year. But just wanted to better understand how we should be thinking about the exit rate on expense. Once the headcount actions that you cited are fully captured in the run rate and whether there’s any plans maybe redeploy some of the NII windfall to reinvest back in the business as we think about some of the potential benefits in the higher NII guidance you cited?

Mike Santomassimo: Yeah, I think our focus on expenses really hasn’t changed over the last quarter or two. As we’ve talked about now for a while, we’re going to continue to be very disciplined around the expense base. I think we’re very much focused on making sure we execute and achieve the efficiencies that we’ve talked about. And as we get to year end, we’ll sort of look at — and after we do our work around the budget for next year, we’ll go back through all the ups and downs like we normally do and give you some perspective there. But really the thinking around it hasn’t changed.

Charlie Scharf: And let me just add, Steve, if that’s okay. I think when we laid out our expense guidance, we got a series of questions about how we think of the variability of that number and the environment and will the rest of our results impact that number. And I think as we look at how we’re performing, I think we — it wouldn’t be hard for us to make a bunch of decisions to hit an expense number. But to the point is, we — our results have been relatively strong. And so we are doing a series of things. I don’t think about it as one-time expenses, but we have — there is a fair amount of subjective expenses that relate to business development, product enhancements and things like that, that we do have the ability to each year, each quarter look at how we’re performing and decide how much we want to spend.