Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mike Santomassimo: Yeah, thanks. I’ll take that, it’s Mike. Broadly, I’ll start on the broader point on CRE and then I’ll come back to office. I think we’ve gone through the multifamily portfolio in quite a lot of detail. And I think — no, I’m talking about the broader portfolio first, right? And so you talked about apartments in some cities. And so I think when you look at the broader portfolio including multifamily, it’s all performing quite well. And I think you’ve seen certainly a slowing of growth rates in rents, but they’re not declining in most cases. You’re seeing good occupancy rates in many of the new construction that’s coming online. And so overall, it feels quite constructive still for multifamily. And that same theme really applies to the rest of the portfolio.

On office, that’s the place where we’re certainly seeing weakness. And as you think about the allowance we put up, we do have some very specific borrower loan level estimates of what we think could play out over the next quarter — next couple — next few quarters and that’s embedded in the allowance. And then as you look at the rest of the office portfolio, we’ve gone through a number of stress scenarios and feel like at this point we’re appropriately reserved to be able deal with what could be a number of different scenarios depending on how it plays out over time.

Ebrahim Poonawala: Got it. And I guess just a separate question. You obviously have ample capital. Just Charlie, from your standpoint, how impactful is the asset cap today given the squeeze on the rest of the industry, I would think Wells would actually be gaining market share. But is the asset cap and all the regulatory issues, I’m not going to ask you to give us a timeline, but is that still a meaningful challenge in terms of your ability to take market share?

Charlie Scharf: Well, I mean you can look at the size of our balance sheet and see where it is relative to the asset cap, which is a $1.952 trillion, I think?

Mike Santomassimo: That’s the asset cap.

Charlie Scharf: Yeah, that’s the actual cap, remember, which is a daily average over a couple of quarters. So relative to where we are operating today, we feel like we still have plenty of balance sheet to serve our customers and it’s not standing in the way of that. Hasn’t always been the case, but I think that’s where we are today. But putting just the pure economics of the asset cap aside, it is something that, when we look at the work we have to get done, the fact that it’s there is a statement of the reality that we still have more work to do. And so it’s critical that we continue on our road to complete that work. And so that’s the way we’re thinking about it today.

Mike Santomassimo: And maybe I’ll just add one thing. When you look at some of growth opportunities we have, Charlie highlighted some of the investment banking hires we’re making. In large part, we already have exposure out to the client base there. So now it’s about making sure we got the right people to go after the fee opportunity, not necessarily extending a lot more balance sheet. The wealth management, the growth opportunity there, same theme. End even in the card space as we look at, the refresh product line is doing really well. We’ve got more to come there. And I think we’ve got plenty of room to continue to support many of the growth opportunities we have even if we didn’t put out more — have more exposure to support it.

Ebrahim Poonawala: Good color. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. The next question will come from Steven Chubak of Wolfe Research. Your line is open, sir.