Wells Fargo Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Despite all the noise that's out there, it's been quite good, in short. I think when you look at the consumer side, I've stopped using this word resilient, because it's just strong.

The activity levels have just been strong now consistently for a while. We see spend up across the debit and credit card products every week, year-on-year. Categories move around. Sometimes, as oil or gas prices go up, it shifts a little bit, in terms of the spending. That is still sort of like a 3%-5% of spend, depending on who you are. There is still quite strong spending across the board, and it has just not been changing really at all. You couple that with really good credit performance. Debt-to-income levels are quite good overall across the client base. We are not seeing changes in delinquency trends that would sort of lead you to believe there is more credit issues coming. Payment levels across the card space are quite high historically and not really changing.

I think as long as you have got the economy continuing to grow, call it 2%-2.5% this year, depending on who you sort of look at. You have got a really strong sort of employment picture, with unemployment still quite low. You have got wages keeping up with inflation for the most part across most customer bases. It is hard to see sort of what is going to be the catalyst for that to change at this point. I am not sure a small increase in rates is the catalyst at this point. We are not expecting that to be the case. When you look at the commercial side, again, still good performance. I would say that commercial banking, middle-market-type customer is still being pretty cautious and prudent. We are not seeing big increases in utilization across revolvers at this point.

I know we will talk about loan growth later, but that is not what is driving sort of the loan growth we are seeing. You look at the commercial customer base, still quite healthy. Good liquidity. We are not seeing any systemic credit issues sort of pop through. It leads you to believe the rest of the year should be quite constructive, I think, still. I think you have got to look at the obvious markers, whether you start to see changes in unemployment sort of tick up on the consumer side, and you sort of start to see stresses across the commercial side. But it is just not what we are seeing at this point. I think that leads you to believe that the second half and into early next year should be still quite healthy.

Well, first, it is a different place. You cannot say it any other way, right? I think as a lot of the work that went into it over many years to solve all the issues across the many consent orders we had. It does feel like a very different place. I think in a lot of respects, there is a lot of excitement around the growth opportunity that we have there. I think the way we have been thinking about it is the same thing we have been working on now for the last number of years. We started the investment agenda 4, 5, 6 years ago, depending on sort of the area of the product.

A lot of the growth that we are going to see across the investment bank, the wealth management business, the card business, the broader consumer franchise across the bank branches and wealth management that we do in those branches is what is going to drive growth. I think you are starting to see some of that come through. The balance sheet has grown a bunch since last year. We saw really good growth across all of the businesses last quarter, bar none, really, in terms of what we are seeing, in terms of some of the improvement. We saw a good uptick in core checking account growth. We saw good flows into the wealth management business. We saw good I-banking activity levels, good markets revenues, and activity across the client base.

We still have a ton more to do and a ton more opportunity to go after, but we are starting to see some of that come through, and it is exciting to see sort of how the team is executing every quarter and going after it.

Yeah. Look, we're super happy that we had such good growth in the first half. Whether it's card, auto, the commercial portfolios really all saw some good growth. We did see a very consistent home lending portfolio as well in the first half, after a number of years of that getting right-sized. Overall, the activity was quite good. As we said in July, we didn't expect the 12% to continue for the whole year. While we'll likely be better than where we guided in the first part of the year, it'll be a little bit lower than what that 12% number, certainly for the full year. I think that'll set us up well as we go into next year. Activity levels are still pretty good.

We're seeing good new client acquisition in the commercial bank as we've added a couple hundred commercial bankers over the last couple of years. We're seeing growth across the corporate investment bank and then just continued growth across the card and the auto portfolios. I think the growth rate will get a little bit lower than what we saw in the first half.