Capital One Financial Corporation (NYSE:COF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Richard Fairbank: Betsy, yes, we continue to — I feel very good about the traction that we’re getting in marketing. Of course, most of the marketing that we do is in the card business. We continue to see attractive growth opportunities across the business for new account origination. We have continued to expand our products and the marketing channels that we’re originating in. We see evidence all over the place of the benefits of our tech transformation that’s giving us some extra opportunity. So, we feel very good about that. You mentioned, of course, how do we feel about leaning into this in the context of the potential looming downturn. And what we do is we just continue to look all around the edges of our originations and look for places that either we would think might be particularly likely to have a challenge or be vulnerable or things that we see having any kind of performance issues, and we sort of trim around the edges.

That’s what we’ve been doing for three decades at Capital One, and we continue to do this. So there’s a little bit of trimming around the edges. But really, the net impression I would lead you on the card side is we continue to lean in. Now, of course, there’s the marketing that we do just the — to originate accounts directly through all the direct marketing media. We, of course, have our continued investments on the brand side, we — the heavy spender investments, which are particularly heavy in terms of marketing costs. We continue to get very good traction on the spender side, our growth as you sort of look at each sort of range of spenders, the — we are getting the most growth at the higher end. So, that continues to be a good sign for us.

And so, we’re leaning into that. And then the other thing on the marketing side, of course, is the national bank marketing. You’ve seen some of the success we’re having there. Everybody in banking is sort of leaning into the deposit growth side in the context of changing interest rates, and some deposits leading the banking systems. So our marketing venues to get very good traction there. So pulling way up, we continue to feel good about the marketing. We like the traction that we’re getting. And we have, of course, a very vigilant eye on the economic environment that we’re moving into.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Bill Carcache with Wolfe Research.

Bill Carcache: Rich, I wanted to follow up on your commentary around delinquency metrics. At the current pace of normalization, is it reasonable to expect that we could see DQs get back to pre-pandemic levels by the mid-2023 time frame? And then from there, does your outlook suggest that you expect delinquencies to flatten out, or are you conservatively expecting DQs to drift higher and are prepared for some degree of modest worsening in credit that perhaps goes a bit beyond normalization?

Richard Fairbank: Well, what we have said, Bill, is there are lots of metrics to look at, and I can even talk to you about a few — some of the others we’re looking at as well. But number one, that we would point our investors to look at is delinquency. And delinquency entries and individual delinquency flow rates have — we see the normalization happening there, as I mentioned earlier. And we think the there continues — it’s interesting the — when you look at the delinquencies themselves and most of the credit metrics, they continue to just keep on moving toward what we’re calling sort of normalization. Normalization, of course, is not any precise point. But there are also a number of other things that we look at that I think show sort of the strength of where this thing is headed.

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