Banco de Chile (NYSE:BCH) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Andres Soto: Rodrigo, that’s very helpful. And an additional question that I had was related to the additional reserves that you guys still have in the balance sheet. How should investors think about those at some point they are going to become part of your capital? Or are you still considering the possibility that they could be returned to shareholders? And under which circumstances that will be the possibility for those reserves to be an extraordinary dividend?

Pablo Mejia: Thanks. Well, we have — as you know, during the pandemic, we accumulated up to CLP700 billion in additional provisions. So with a coverage ratio of about 2.7 times. Today, we still have these additional provisions on the balance sheet. We didn’t implement any of dividend provision, any more additional provisions in 2023. Now there’s no direct time line or trigger that we can mention of releasing these provisions, but what’s been mentioned in the past, and it’s true today is that if we don’t need to do traditional provisions, a portion of these may be reversed and may be used for different purposes, but there’s no clear guideline on when this will occur or the factors that would have to be occurred? Rodrigo?

Rodrigo Aravena: Yeah. So important to be aware of the still existence of source — of uncertainty that we have in Chile today. We have different uncertainties from the rest of the world. We will know that China, for example, is our major partner, there are some uncertainties related to the economic growth for this country for this next year. Internally, we have different discussions in Chile. Probably, there’s going to be discussions about taxes, pension funds. This year also there will be elections for municipal elections as well. So even though the improvement in the economic cycle, in the private consumption, in the GDP, still we have some uncertainty. So it’s very important to have more visibility on that uncertainty, the potential impact in the long term of the key long-term figures that affect the banking system, in order to have a more specific time line for the potential decision to reverse some additional provisions.

So today, we have a lot of uncertainty that we have to pay attention to. The main thing where we have more visibility today is that there’s going to be an important improvement in the economic cycle for this year, but it’s filled with important uncertainties.

Andres Soto: Understood. Thank you guys and congratulations on the results.

Operator: Okay. Thank you very much. We see no further questions at this point. I’ll pass the line back to Banco de Chile team to conclude the call.

Pablo Mejia: Well, thank you for joining our conference call, and we’re looking forward to speaking with you for the first quarter results of 2024. Bye.

Operator: Thank you very much. This concludes today’s conference call. We’ll now be closing all the lines. Thank you, and goodbye.

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