NatWest Group plc (NYSE:NWG) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Alvaro Serrano: Just really a follow up on deposit balances and the outlook. When I loosely benchmarked your offerings, term deposit in particular, I’m talking about now versus your peers. It does seem like you’ve stepped up your offerings during June with a 5% term. First of all, do you recognize that it’s coming through balances, so maybe that’s fair. And post that increasing remuneration after the last rate hike? Are you seeing the migration accelerate? Or what trends are you seeing? Maybe in July, you can speak to that to give us a bit more color. And related to that. Maybe the second question is, how do you think the visibility is — how much — how confident are you in the visibility? Obviously, you’ve lowered the NIM guidance today. And I’m not sure if you can reassure us of giving us some current GAAP granularity around how low the mix on noninterest bearing balances can go. Thank you.

Katie Murray: Lovely, thanks very much, Alvaro. So if I look at it. When I look to see what’s kind of happening in terms of those customer deposits, what we do see is this kind of catch up in customer deposit rates and that there was a — that was very much because of the impact on some of the pricing changes that we did during the second quarter. Effectively if you look at those last couple of rate rises, we pass through 75%. So that was a bit higher, that’s taken our cumulative pass through to-date to kind of 50% of all of the rate rises. We do think we’re now competitive on rates as we move through. When you look at our sensitivity in terms of what we think of the impact of that competitiveness would be — we have changed the structural hedge sensitivity, which I’m sure we’ll talk about more later and to your 60% pass through rather than the 50% model that we had done previously.

So I think that kind of reflects a little bit more. As I look at what’s happening in July, it’s all the mix and move is kind of in line with our expectations, I think it would be a brave person to say today where we think the IBBS and NIBS might land. It has been interesting for us in the last number of courses, there was so little movement, but then what we saw as customers really then moved into the fixed term that we did see a movement from that 40% down to the 37%. And that was people really moving straight from noninterest bearing kind of all the way into term deposits. So that’s kind of why we saw that that step up happening in that space. But I’m probably not going to look to call in terms of where I think that that might go, I think it will take some time to kind of get there.

Alvaro Serrano: And just a follow-up, because in the past, I think you and other banks have said that the big shifts typically happen around rate hikes. And that’s when all the noise happens. And when the mix happens, do you still think that will be the case, i.e., if we’re very close to the peak, it will be much more stable progression later or this year, next year, in terms of mix shift.

Katie Murray: I think that’s definitely a theme. And I think we certainly expect this shift to kind of slow as we kind of approach that peak. I think there’s other things that are happening as well that you’ve got to be mindful of, if we look within our own product offering, we’ve opened up our new-to-bank. So therefore, it’s a whole of market offering, which we didn’t have before that will attract some funds as well. I think there’s also the kind of the rollover, that when we saw people starting to tie their money up in Q4 last year, what offers are available now and how that kind of moves around. So I think we’ll see a little bit of that. And then, Alvaro, you’re obviously very familiar with the TF SME funding piece. And I think as that starts to get closer for repayments, you might start to see people behaving in a slightly different day.

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