Charles Scharf: Yes. Well, let me take a shot at that. I think — listen, I think the answer is, to your question on share, without getting overly specific, yes. We think when you look at where we stand on our growth in our Corporate Investment Banking share, whether it’s on the trading side or whether it’s on the fee-related side, our shares have grown. And certainly, on the — within the fee-based side of the business, we do hope they continue to grow. That’s driven by the investments that we’re making, and investments meaning people in terms of growing our capabilities. And we’ve got clear goals and targets by person that we bring on in terms of what we expect, and we’re going to be tracking to that. And just a reminder, certainly, when we brought some of the people on, they bring some — a lot of clients with them, some new transactions in the short term.
And we’ve been beneficiaries of that over the last couple of quarters just as we brought some people on. But these are relationship-based businesses, and transactions don’t occur every single quarter. So we would expect our share to continue to grow. And I just — as a reminder, without taking any additional risk overall because we’re taking the risk today relative to the exposures that we have. When we look at where we can see growth coming overall across the entire company, we just go business by business. Absolutely, in our consumer small business — small and business banking segment because — we’ve basically been treading water there as we stabilized that business going back to the issues that we had there, which was an incredibly difficult thing to do, and we did.
And we’ve not been our — we’ve not been on our front foot in that business. We’re going to do it in a very different way than this company did it historically, but there are opportunities to be on the front foot and actually grow share on an organic basis. And so incredibly excited about that opportunity. Not excited, as I said, about growing share in mortgage. That’s not where we’re after, and it’s — we’ve talked about where we’re going there. Auto, it’s about returns, not growth. So don’t look for a lot of growth there unless the dynamics change in the business. Mike spoke about card. We’re incredibly energized by the evidence that shows with our brand and our relationships. When you put a great product out there, we get positive selection and real growth.
And by the way, look at our spend numbers. I mean, if you want to see like the impact of what it means, just look at the spend that we’re seeing, which is much higher than the industry levels. Our wealth business, as you pointed out, no question, also treaded water for a long period of time. We’re attracting people and teams. We’re rolling out new products. So we feel really good about the opportunities that are there. And in the middle market segment, where it’s a little bit more business as usual because it is such a strong franchise for us. Even there we look back at our asset-based lending businesses and the things that we acquired from GE. They ran as stand-alone businesses here for a long period of time, and we didn’t bring the entire product set of Wells Fargo to those customer bases.
Under Kyle Hranicky, Kristin Lesher and MK DuBose or Mary Katherine DuBose are diligently working through that and bringing the Investment Banking product to that entire Commercial Banking product. So I could go on. I just — it should be broad-based. Most of it, by the way, I’ll point out, in terms of when we see opportunities, it is fee-based growth, not because we’ve dictated that but just because we focused a lot on NII as a company historically. And we just have a lot of opportunities that we get excited about that will play out over a period of time.
Erika Najarian: Got it. And I think that excitement is clear, Charlie. And my second question is, given all of that and taking a step back, I totally think it’s too early, I agree with you, to give anything on ’24 expenses. But more broadly discussing, do you feel like the company is in a little bit of an inflection point? Because on one hand, Mike was saying that very few parts of the bank are optimized. On the other, I think you guys mentioned that the head count is not going the other way, and perhaps it’s really some of the outside consulting fees that could go up and down. But I’m wondering if you get asked about expenses in a framework of flat, but then all of this momentum on the revenue side seems to be on the comp. And I’m wondering how you think about as you budget for the company and as you think about just getting to that 15% ROTCE.
Let’s just put Basel III Endgame aside in terms of the denominator, how do you balance some of the shareholders and the analysts that are asking you about expenses in the context of flat versus the revenue momentum that obviously would need expenses to keep sustaining versus that revenue momentum that you seem to be so excited about?
Charles Scharf: Let me start. And Mike, you either come in at the end or just make your comments along the way as well. So I think, first of all, we think about it as 2 separate exercises that we go through. And we’re — and it’s very timely because we’re in the middle of going through the exercise for next year as most other companies are, which is this company is not efficient, like period, end of story. And I’ve described this, even with all of the reductions that we’ve made, it’s not surprising because as you peel the onion back, other things present themselves. And so you go in order of things that are more obvious and things like that. But when we sit around as a management team, we feel great about the progress. And there’s no clearer way to see that than in the head count numbers, which ultimately drive the expense of the company.
And if I — if we stood here and told you we were going to drive the head count down that much in this period of time, I’m not sure you’d have believed us. And so when we say we’re going to do something, we really do mean it. And so when we sit around as a team, there are many more efficiencies to get, and we’re diligently working through those. And then separately from that, it’s when we talk about making investments in the place, are we getting the payoff for it. And so whether it’s the marketing in the card business, where we’re spending more money on marketing than we had in the past, and we feel great about, as Mike pointed out, not just the volumes that we’re getting but the underlying quality relative to how we had modeled that. And so we’ll do that with each and everything.
And ultimately, we need to make a decision as we finalize the process of the budget on just much more of a tactical basis of how those things net out. We’re well aware of what shareholders are looking for. We’re well aware of that the expense side of this company is an important equation in what investors look at us in terms of where — unlocking value, and we hear it and we see it. And whatever — wherever we come out when we talk to you about our guidance for next year, we will explain why we got to where we are. It’s going to include efficiencies. It’s going to include investments. Whether it — where that turns out, we’ll explain it. And I think so far, we’ve been as clear and as transparent as we can be. And if it makes sense, you’ll like it.
And if it doesn’t, you won’t, you’ll tell us. But so far, we’ve been able to have alignment there. But overall, I would just — it’s a long way of saying it’s not lost on us that we have opportunities both to reduce expenses and to invest. But making sure that the overall expense level stays in check at this place is incredibly important to us, and we have to prove that there is revenue growth there supporting investments that we make.
