Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Whether it’s really across the board in home lending, auto, card, personal loans, really every single one of them had some credit tightening. And it’s been a bit incremental over the last 4 or 5 quarters. And so I would still sort of think of that as like taking that last 1% or 2% or 3% of origination out that doesn’t make sense in what could be a more difficult economic environment. It’s not wholesale shifts in sort of the approach or the underlying box that we’re operating in. It’s really sort of modest and incremental. And then on the…

Charles Scharf: Just on — and just to be clear, I mean it’s — and it’s the very basic stuff. It’s just upping the lower FICO boundaries, it’s layered risks. And so it’s just as you continue to make these changes, you just — we’re just continuing to do the same types of things without just wholesale exits or anything like that. It’s just kind of a smart tightening.

Michael Santomassimo: Yes. And then outside the consumer space — outside of consumer, really the only place that we’ve meaningfully tightened credit over the last couple of years or a few years is commercial real estate. And other than that, I think there’s probably some minor tinkering, but we haven’t really changed the appetite much outside of commercial real estate.

Matthew O’Connor: Okay. That’s helpful. And then just a clarification on the severance costs. Can you give us what the absolute amount was this quarter? I think you gave us the change versus a year ago and linked quarter. But what was the absolute level this quarter?

Michael Santomassimo: Yes, there wasn’t a lot a year ago, so it’s not far off of the total. So a small difference, but it’s — there wasn’t a lot.

Matthew O’Connor: Okay. So about $200 million?

Michael Santomassimo: Yes. And again, that will sort of evolve as we go. I mentioned that in my script as we look at next year and the attrition rates that we’re seeing.

Operator: The next question will come from John Pancari of Evercore ISI.

John Pancari: On the commercial real estate front, I know you cited the increase in the office loan loss reserve from — in the CIB from 8.8% to 10.8%. Could you just comment there in terms of what were some of the anecdotal drivers for the loan loss reserve increase? Do you think you could have incremental increases here? And maybe cite some of the office revaluations you’ve seen as you have seen with the underlying collateral change hands or reappraisals, if you can give us some color there as well.

Michael Santomassimo: Yes, sure. When you — the hard part of office right now is that there aren’t a lot of trades happening yet, right? There’s a few in certain cities, and they’re all a little bit different in their complexion. So you still have somewhat limited information in price discovery in a lot of places. And so we’re doing — we do a lot of our own work to try to evaluate each of the underlying properties and what they could be worth in a bunch of different scenarios. And then it’s feeling like the appraisal market is starting to kind of catch up, where they’re — we’re seeing appraisals that are more realistic and more updated. So that’s certainly bringing in different data points as we look at it. And as we looked at the quarter, we sort of look at all those data points and the underlying loans and try to do our best to come up what we think the different range of loss could look like here, and that’s what’s embedded in the results.

Hopefully, we end up being conservative. But nonetheless, it’s possible that this plays out this way. And so we haven’t really seen any losses of significant yet — significance yet, but we will. And it just takes some time for it to play out for each of these underlying situations, probably longer than any of us would hope to — you’d hope that you could bring some of this stuff to resolution maybe faster than it really takes in real life. But it’s really looking at all the data points, the limited sales, the new appraisals that are coming through and then our own analysis for each of the underlying properties.

John Pancari: Got it. All right. And then separately, also within commercial real estate, we’re getting more and more questions around multifamily exposures and just how well they really are holding up given some supply issues in certain markets. Can you just comment there? Are you seeing any noteworthy stress or any changes to underlying reserve for that book?

Michael Santomassimo: Yes. Not a lot. I mean you certainly see certain markets that might appear to have some oversupply in condos in certain places. But it feels like that will work itself out over a period of time. We’re not seeing real systematic stress in the portfolio at this point.

John Pancari: Got it. If I can ask just one last one. On the head count cuts, you mentioned you look at every business pretty much. Are any head count cuts occurring yet in the risk area or anything? Or any changes with the contracts with consultants in the risk overhaul area at all?

Michael Santomassimo: Yes. No. Look, the only thing I’d say on the risk and reg work is that we’re going to spend whatever we need to spend and put the resources we need against it to get it done. And we’re going to continue to do that towards…

Charles Scharf: Just to be clear, like we’re not cutting head count related to that. In fact, it’s probably the opposite when you look over the past bunch of quarters. The only thing which goes up and down is depending on where we are with work with outside consultants, that number will go up or down in a given quarter. But we’ve also said, if we can use outside resources to help get the work done sooner, we’re going to. So as we think about — just as we think about our efficiencies, that is just not in scope at this point or for the foreseeable future.

Operator: The next question comes from Erika Najarian of UBS.

Erika Najarian: My first question is on the revenue side. As a follow-up to Chubak’s line of questioning, I think not only the trading numbers come better this year but also investment banking. And so I hear you loud and clear about the cyclicality of the trading business. But I guess, help us get a sense of if the industry wallet, for example, return to 2019 levels, do you think that you’re going to have generally a higher share of revenues in capital markets versus 2019? And sort of the sub-question to that is, as we think about the investments you have already made, what are the other businesses that could potentially surprise us to the upside, where it’s not quite optimized yet in terms of its revenue production? And obviously, everybody is thinking about — you mentioned card, and also everybody is also thinking about wealth management and investment advisory revenues.