Bank of America Corporation (BAC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

This is Jason Goldberg, and I cover the U.S. large-cap bank stocks here at Barclays. And this is our 19th Annual Global Financial Services Conference. Moving right along, very pleased to have Bank of America up with us next. And from the company is Alastair Borthwick, who is President of Global Commercial Banking. I think more importantly, he's going to talk about the global corporate businesses more broadly. And also note, as of Friday, he was named Chief Financial Officer, a role he will be taking on in the fourth quarter. So we won't push on him on the new stuff at all. But we're going to start out with some prepared remarks and a deck, and then we're going to have Q&A. I have some questions prepared, but we're happy to take some questions from the audience. On the upper right-hand corner of your screen, there are a few buttons. One of them is ask a question. Type in the question, and we'll be happy to try and address it. There's also a button called survey. Click on that, answer some automated response, survey -- or automated questions that we have done in prior years. And at the time, we'll review those. And if not, we'll certainly publish the results tonight. I'll leave it there and turn it over to Alastair.

All right, Jason. Well, thank you very much for having me, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today as I talk about our Global Banking business. I think what we'll do is just start with our first slide, where what we're trying to give you a sense for here, we've talked about the fact that when you're a shareholder of Bank of America, you own a diversified set of businesses. Today, I'm going to put the spotlight on one of the franchises, and that is our Global Banking franchise. We think it's world-class. We also believe it's well positioned for growth. And you can see in the light blue in the top there were business banking, the commercial bank, the corporate and investment bank. And if you go on the pie chart on the left-hand side, you can see we're about $9.7 billion of revenue in the first half. And on the right-hand side, you can see what we do in terms of pretax income. We're a big, important contributor to the company. And we cover corporates all the way from $5 million in sales up to the very largest in the world with a set of integrated capabilities that we think are world-class. So I'm going to give you a sense for what that world-class franchise looks like. And I thought what we'd start with is the next slide, which really just talks about the fact that on the left-hand side, you can see we've got leading market share in what we do with a global footprint around the world and leading product capabilities. And I'll let you take a moment on the left-hand side to just take a look at some of that. And on the right-hand side, what we've laid out is if you take a look at how third parties think about us, they obviously give us high marks for offering a high-quality set of products and services. And in the bottom right, you get a sense for the way that we follow our clients around the globe and just how important is the United States, obviously, to our business. And all we're trying to figure out then is how do we take this business and grow it still further. So I thought what we would do together is just start by talking about what we consider to be our core competitive capabilities, and we've laid that out on Slide #4. So the first thing is we feel like we've got leading capabilities for clients all around the world with respect to any of the sorts of capital raising or risk management or GTS movement that they would need to do around the world. It's not just one thing. We're good at a series of things, and we can deliver that to our clients everywhere. This second bullet point really just talks about the fact that we have bankers in local markets all around the United States and around the world. And if you happen to be a CEO in Cleveland and you need to raise equity capital from the markets in Japan, we can help you with that. And if you're in Sacramento and you need to do a foreign exchange transaction tomorrow in Latin America, we can help you with that, too. We are both local delivery and global expertise. And we obviously bring that to bear with our existing clients and trying to add new clients over time. As we've talked about in this forum with many of you before, we also have a long history of investments. And I'm going to expand upon how we've taken those investments, so you get a sense for where we are in those. All of them are focused on driving sustainable growth over the next decade. And we feel like at this point, we'll talk today about our digital banking platform. You hear a lot about that on the consumer side. We've got a lot to say on the commercial side and how that impacts our corporate customers. We also feel like we have local market sales coverage in the United States that is a preeminent franchise at this point and where we continue to invest. We're going to go into digital with the spotlight on GTS, but we'll talk about it more broadly. We feel like our clients also benefit from our research platform, which ranks very highly every single year. And at this point, we believe we're well positioned for future growth. And I'm going to walk you through 5 or 6 levers that we think can help you feel like you understand where we see future growth for this part of the company. So on Slide 5, I thought we would start with just our financial performance. On the left-hand side and in the middle, you get a sense for revenue and net income. We've been reasonably good at driving revenue growth just in excess of GDP while keeping our expenses flat. That's allowed us to get the operating leverage that we're looking for every year. Obviously, that was interrupted last year with respect to the pandemic. But importantly, we feel like we're returning to BAU, and you can see that now coming through in the revenues. You can see it beginning to come through certainly in the net income. And you can see it coming through in return on capital. And we feel like underneath this, there's just a steady, slow return to the sorts of BAU results that you would expect in terms of client calling, beginning to see a return in loans growth, et cetera. So at the core of what we do on the next slide is an idea of how we've grown customer balances over time. This happens to be a 10-year view of loans and deposits. Those are our, I'd say, probably the best single example through the years of the core customer needs. And you can see, we've grown our deposits, and we've grown our loans more or less every year over the course of the past 10 years. You can see the CAGRs at the top. Our -- look, we are, as bankers, fully accepting there are going to be good economic times. There are going to be tougher economic times. There's going to be periods where we have higher rates, periods where we have lower interest rates. We don't control everything, but we do control the growth of our customer franchise. And what we're trying to do over time is to just find a way to grow balances every single year. And this is one of those concepts that Brian talks about, we must grow, no excuses. We are trying to drive a quality compounding business that can do it year after year in the context of long-term organic growth. That, I think, over the course of the past 10 years when Brian talks about a successful decade of responsible growth is kind of what it looks like. And that's what we're aiming to focus on for the next 10 years. So as I was reading Jason's comments, thinking about what he hoped we would talk about when we got together, one of the things was the outlook for loans growth. And I thought what we would do then is just recap very quickly on the following slide what we shared with you on June 30. This may be one too early. Hang on. Let's go to Slide 8 then. Let's see if that's the one I'm looking for. Yes. Okay. So in this particular slide, what we're looking at is our loans balances, as you can see really over the course of 2020, fell pretty substantially as companies had felt flush with cash on the back of monetary stimulus and consequently saw balances fall. In Q2, we saw our Global Banking balances stabilized, and that was the first time in a while. A very big driver of challenge that we've had growing loans has been revolver utilization. And you can see that pretty clearly on Slide 8 on the right-hand side. That's not news for us. That is, I think, old news for everyone at this point. We've had a real challenge with customer demand, and our revolver utilization has been lower than we'd like. Just in my part of the bank, the commercial bank, when we're down 8 or 9 points in revolver utilization, it's worth $20 billion or so of balances. So that's one of those places that we see as a reasonable chance of being poised for rebound in the future. Now I want to go back to the prior slide for a moment, please, Slide 7, because this is an important slide for us. We shared this with you all at the end of Q2. And a number of our investors said, "Boy, this is a pretty interesting perspective seeing how loans kind of flattened out in Q1 and began to grow again in Q2." Here, what we're beginning to show is just what you can expect in July and August. It sort of continued that trend. This is for our commercial loans, obviously, across Global Banking, but you can see that we're just continuing that growth. I'd say revolver during this period is sort of flattish, maybe ever so slightly up. And now the question becomes we're not going to be waiting around here for revolver utilization to pick back up. We anticipate that will happen at some point in the future. Very difficult for us to predict when. But what we can say is that we have the ability to just continue to grow loans organically as we're waiting for that revolver utilization to take place. And we've been encouraged that, that trend that we detected in Q2 has extended itself, at least through the first couple of months of Q3. And it feels to us again like we're beginning that steady return to BAU. Let's go to Slide 9 if we can, please, [ Philip ]. The next question that we obviously get always is asset quality, how are we doing? What are we seeing? In Q2, what you saw was a continuation of a pretty significant improvement in asset quality. You saw that in our charge-offs. You saw that in our charge-off ratio. And I think there are a number of our investors who have asked us at various points, how will we know when responsible growth is working? How will we know when as we go through a cycle, we know how you perform? This is probably a pretty good example of how we perform through a cycle. We feel like we spend a lot of time focused on client selection. Responsible growth isn't just a buzzword for us. It's a strategy all the way through the company. And it certainly helped us to withstand the worst of the health care crisis and the economic disruption that followed. And importantly, too, I think when you look at that bottom-left piece in terms of the CCAR results, you can see looking forward, even from a third-party perspective out of the fed, that we have a very high-quality portfolio. And that's something we're eager just to continue with. We feel like we can keep growing loans within our responsible growth framework without changing our risk appetite and put in another decade of growth like we've seen over the course of the past 10 years while doing it in the way that we think about responsible growth. So that remains our strategy and our focus. On the following slide, what I thought then I would do is begin to talk to you about the sorts of ways in which we think we can grow this business going forward. And where I thought we would start is with our GTS business. It's obviously at the very core of our customers' needs. Think about our customers, probably about 2 and 3 borrow money in any given year, but all of them need transaction services advice, every single one, 100%. And as you can tell, we've got a leading global business, one of the best franchises around the world. And we're growing it. As you can see with that 3-bar chart in the top right, you can also see we're on a path to grow it again this year in terms of volumes and values. The other thing that we've talked about in this forum and many others before is that we have a tremendous opportunity right now to harness the power of digital, not just for our clients but for our shareholders and for our employees. And I thought when we gave you these examples in the middle, it gives you a sense just in terms of some of the year-over-year numbers for how quickly this is developing now. And it's not just in GTS. So I'll talk about some of the other areas of the Global Banking business in a moment. But these are, in some cases, new technologies that we put in place. But in some cases, they are existing technologies that we've had in place for years where our customers are now adopting them in a commercial context much faster. So for example, if you look at that mobile check deposit volume, in your personal life, you've been able to deposit checks now for many years, but you may have chosen to adopt that a year ago or 2 years ago or this year for the first time. But particularly in a pandemic environment where people have tried to limit their excursions out of their office or their home, suddenly, adoption for some of these things has picked up very, very dramatically. And when we see check deposit volume go up on mobile, obviously, our clients are spending less time at the financial centers. That saves them time and money. It saves us time and money. And it's expense saves that we can then use to invest in our future or to repay capital. Okay. I lost our slide. So I'm going to see if that can come back up again. Jason, do you see it?

I did, and I just had it disappear.

Okay. So maybe I'll pull up mine. That might be the better way to do it.

There we go.

Okay. All right. Now I want to go back to that slide prior, please, if I can for one moment. Go back to Slide 10. Okay. So mobile is a big piece of this. You can see our CashPro Mobile sign-ins. You can see the mobile payment values. It's all the various ways that corporate treasurers now can move money around. And it's more and more about mobility. It's less and less about paper. It's less and less about manual. And on the right-hand side, you get a sense for the sorts of things that we're now doing with AI and intelligent receivables matching, et cetera. Digital is at the very heart of our GTS franchise right now, and it's transforming our business. It's making things cheaper, faster, more secure for our clients and ultimately, I think, a better set of shareholder returns as well. Our biggest challenge, obviously, is we have to create a new environment. We then have to transition the clients from the old environment into the new environment. And then we can remove all the costs associated with paper or physical. But it's a 3-part story. In many cases, we're in that adoption part of the curve now. And we feel like there's expenses that will drop out of this in the future that we're excited about. Final thing I'll say on our GTS platform, very similar to the rest of our platform. We regularly win awards for the quality of our franchise. And again, I think if you're a shareholder, you know we have a terrific business in GTS. It's not just -- digital isn't just about GTS, though. That's why I thought on Slide 11, we might go into just talking to you about digital innovation more broadly. As I talked about, increasingly, as clients are using digital more and more in their personal lives, they're beginning to expect it in their business lives. And it's all about just making it easier and faster, cheaper, more secure for them as they go about doing the business that they've always done. And as you can see at the bottom of this slide, we've got 75% or more of our clients now who use digital in some form or capacity. And we're trying to get that to 100%. You can see that we've got credit loans getting priced digitally now. You can see that we're using AI. The same thing, Erica, that you will be familiar with on the consumer side, we use that for customer increase. We've taken Erica and deployed it in the commercial part across Global Banking, so that all of our treasury and relationship managers can query Erica for information that they're looking for. And already in a short period of time, we saved 25,000 hours of search time. That's the sort of thing that as we roll it out more and more, it saves our relationship managers from time spent searching for stuff and allows them to spend more time on advisory and sales work, which is what they enjoy doing. It's more value added. And it's using a proven technology that the consumer side of our bank developed and has tried and true over the course of the past 3 years. So we're really excited about the use of AI. We're in the beginning steps there. But all of these things are on a path towards 100% digital. And in some cases, that's the mark that really becomes important for us because, obviously, once we get to 100% digital, we can remove all the manual. We can remove all the physical and all the cost sometimes that goes with those things. So on the next slide, Slide 12, I just wanted to remind everybody, we don't have to do all of the digital development ourselves. We do, do CashPro, our hosting system, our cash management platform. That is almost entirely built in house. But we at least have the humility to know that in some cases, we should partner with others, and we do. We partner with financial technology companies across the board. We're not going to go through all of these. Axia is a pretty good example. They have a terrific set of payment solutions for health care clients. We have a lot of health care clients, and putting those 2 things together allows us to maximize value together. But when we put CashPro and all of these little fintech ideas together, what we're essentially doing for our clients is giving them one integrated solution, where we're making sure it is interoperable rather than having to sign up with 35 different fintechs. It is a safe, cyber secure environment, and it's one where we're curating the client experience. So we're able to partner with fintechs in some cases, use them for a neat little idea and still keep the interoperability that our clients expect so that it's very easy for them to do all the things they need to do. On Slide 13, another big growth opportunity for us is Investment Banking. Tom talked about this the last time he was at the Barclays conference. We're very excited about what we're doing here and the investments we're making. You can see on the left-hand side, starting in 2018, we talked about the fact we wanted to gain share here, and we saw a pretty good opportunity for that. Matthew and his team have done a terrific job working with our teams across the country and across the world. Big focus, as Tom talked about, was the middle market investment banking piece, which is where I and my colleagues have tried to help Matthew and his working together. And we've had some success there. And in particular, the piece that we have continued to drive has been hiring local investment bankers in 23 North American cities in what we call our emerging growth and regional coverage group. We have very significantly invested in that area. You can see our headcount is up over 400%. And you can also see the revenue growth over time up 227% in the last 2 years, basically up 100% or so this year. We're going to keep investing in that business. That is what's largely driving the middle section of this chart, which, in turn, is also driving the piece on the left. Now there are a lot of places that we can grow our Investment Banking franchise all around the world, and Matthew and his team are on that. But this just happens to be one where we're marrying commercial banking clients that we have already in middle markets -- middle market companies all around the United States with existing product capabilities in Investment Banking and really beginning to see the returns. And we're excited about it. We think we're still in the very early stages of this, and we're looking forward to growing it still further going forward. Slide 14 lays out our local coverage footprint. Tom talked about that, too, a couple of years ago. Just to give you some sense, when we talk about investing, we've added 385 bankers over the course of the past several years. Those have mainly been in Business Banking and in Commercial Banking. That has allowed us to onboard and add a lot more clients. It's also made sure that instead of calling 27% of our prospects, which we were doing in 2014, we're up to 82%. Now this is on a base of 14,000. So it takes a lot of bankers to call all these companies. But as we've invested in our sales force, as we've invested in local market coverage, it's allowed us to make sure that we're maximizing our growth opportunity. We think there's more we need to do here, but we're beginning to get to the proper size sales force, and we're excited about that. I won't cover the regional Investment Banking piece because I did already, but they're investing in the same cities we're in and making sure that our teams are integrated and working together. Another growth area for us that we talked about a couple of years ago where I just want to give you an update is our international subsidiary banking business. That's on our -- on the following Slide 15. On the left-hand side, you get a sense for -- we don't disclose this necessarily externally. So we just indexed this for growth. But you get a sense for every single year, we are growing our international subsidiary business, both in the commercial bank and in GCIB. GCIB was a little more disrupted by just the sheer amount of world trade disruption last year, but we're already back on driving future growth in international subsidiary banking. And I can go into this in more detail later on, but the combination of our having a local banker in local cities all across the United States and world-class international capabilities in GTS and in lending and in risk management through our global markets business makes us a very compelling partner for companies who have international subsidiaries. And the same is true for those who are headquartered overseas where their subsidiary is in the United States, which in many cases is the sort of growth we see in GCIB. But this again remains one of those places where we feel like as we keep investing, we can continue to compound our growth in excess of GDP and do that every year. And the final thing I just wanted to cover is something that Lee always reminds me we've got to talk about when we get together. That's on Slide 16. And that's the importance of our local market integration, what we're doing in local markets with market presence around referrals. Many of you hear about our referrals internally, and we make millions of them every single year across business lines. In our case, what I wanted to highlight here is our relationship managers are responsible in Global Banking for more than just the company that they cover. They're responsible for the person or the family who owns them and the management team and the employees of those companies. Now they've got people who helped them, obviously. But on the right-hand side, we helped to refer wealthy individuals at these companies, it might be the owner, it might be the CFO, it might be the CEO, to Merrill Lynch and the private bank. And on the left-hand side, we help refer to the consumer bank the employees of the companies we cover to make sure that we can talk to them about basic banking solutions and 401(k) and HSA. This is something that we've gotten better and better at over the course of the past 5 to 10 years. And it's one of the reasons we've invested in our sales force in Global Banking is so that we can get to these opportunities to introduce our colleagues in GWIM and in the consumer bank to make sure now that in local markets, we're teaming together and thinking about the company's holistic needs. So I just wanted to profile that before we finish. And then I'll wrap up with then what I think about as being -- on our final slide, what makes us attractive as an investment thesis. First, I think we've got a track record for solid and recurring profitability. And you've seen we've got strong and attractive returns. And we're increasingly back to where we've been. We have a philosophy and a mentality that we're going to keep expenses tight. We're trying to always keep that below GDP and drive operating leverage by getting sort of top line revenue growth above GDP by taking a little bit of market share every year. We feel like our capabilities give us a competitive advantage. We have a series of world-class capabilities. And in total, added together, it makes us quite a compelling partner for our clients because they know they can go to us, and we can deliver a lot of different things. We're planning on growing loans and deposits responsibly as we have for the last 10 years. And we believe we can do that using the exact same commitment to our existing risk framework. And then importantly, for the future of this franchise, we have invested in the past. We're going to be the beneficiaries in the next year or 2 from those investments. But we're planning on continuing those investments in things like GTS and digital and Investment Banking coverage and in adding local salespeople in Business Banking and GCB around the country and in driving our international subsidiary business around the world. And when we do that, we think we can keep adding to our existing client base and begin to drive still more addition of net new clients by bringing them in from other banks. Finally, we think we can do that not just for the company and its needs but also for the employees and the families who own those companies in many cases, so that we're doing more than just delivering Global Banking products, but all the things our companies can do. And when we do those things, we think we're in a good position to drive future growth. So I'll stop there, Jason, and I'll see what questions you have and what questions the group has.

Alastair, appreciate the comments in Global Banking. And as a reminder, for those in the audience, upper right-hand corner, click ask a question if you have a question. I really do have some follow-up questions on what you said. But I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up last Friday's announcement, probably the longest press release I've ever seen in terms of announcing changes internally. But one of them obviously jumped out was you becoming CFO in the fourth quarter. And we're obviously not going to ask you detailed interest margin questions yet. But maybe at a high level, why do you think Brian picked you for this job? And what skills do you think you possess that will make you successful?

Well, it's probably a good question for him. I think I'm probably slightly biased. But let me say a couple of different things. First of all, Paul is one of my role models, has been for many years. And I've had the good fortune to work with him and for him. And I think in some ways, I hope you find that I'm a little bit like him. Now here's what I mean by that. I've been -- kind of like Paul, I've been a banker for 32 years, which gives me obviously some experience over that time. I've worked on our management team now for a year or so. I was on the Operating Committee before that for several years. So I've been around Brian and the Board in a number of different situations. I'm quite comfortable then with this concept of responsible growth, and I've been driving it in the commercial bank for the course of the past 9 years. That culture is important for us to get right for us and our shareholders. It's not responsible or growth. It's responsible and growth. And I feel like I understand that. Obviously, Brian feels like I understand that. But that's an important question for everybody that you see on this leadership team. And then, look, I feel like I've successfully run one line of business for the course of the past several years. Prior to that, I ran the Global Capital Markets business. I did an okay job there, I suppose. And along the way, I've had to deal with various projects that the firm has asked me to do outside of just typical sort of banking stuff, and that might be MRA resolutions or whatever it may be. So hopefully, I've demonstrated that I've been effective with our regulators and on behalf of our shareholders, obviously, understand the company's strategy. And I'm looking forward to doing the best I can to fill Paul's shoes.

I appreciate that. So a little bit under 10 minutes left. I guess Slide 7 caught my attention. That's the one where you had kind of daily commercial loan balances. And you kind of saw that nice trajectory or the improvement we kind of saw in 2Q kind of carry into 3Q. And I guess some of the commentary so far in this conference around loan growth had been mixed. That graph is probably on the more positive data points we've seen. Just maybe extrapolate in terms of what's underlining that, kind of what areas are kind of driving the growth, and then which areas are kind of restraining further improvement.

Yes. So I think what you'll see in Global Banking is the main driver has been the commercial bank. It's been middle market companies across the United States. And look, obviously, we went through a period of some significant disruption to just general business and some supply chain challenges as well. Now we obviously haven't gotten through all of the supply chain challenges. Those still exist. But I think what you're seeing now is after all the PPP loans have sort of been paid off or they've been drawn and have been used and forgiven and so on and so forth, corporate America is beginning to use and demand growth capital again. So that's one thing. Second thing is, last year, we chose to focus primarily on our customer base. And we made a deliberate choice with everything going on to slow our prospecting. This year, we have really returned to BAU over the back 6 months of last year, so that our calling activity this year is up towards where we would expect in 2019, for example. And with it, we are adding more new clients than in prior years. And we're back on that sort of long-term organic growth. So I would say to Paul and Brian prior to today's presentation, we're kind of back on that long-term organic growth profile. So I think we've got 2 things going on. So Corporate America beginning to get back to borrowing more money. And we're beginning to get back to -- I'd say we're fully back to our kind of organic growth within the commercial bank, for example. And that's where we've seen most of the growth. So what you're going to want to look for, I think, going forward is just, number one, it's one thing when we do it for a couple of months at the end of 2Q. It's another thing if we get another 3 months in Q3, and now we're beginning to feel like we're beginning to see much more of a trend. I think we're beginning to see that. Now in addition to that, at some point in the future, we feel like there's a reasonable chance we're going to get revolver utilization goes exactly back to where it was in the past. We have no idea when that will take place. But it's highly probable it will go back there because most often, we kind of know what revolver balances have looked like through the course of time. And so we're anticipating at some point, we'll get a pop from that. But it's just very difficult to tell when that will be. And it may be determined by the health care crisis first and economics second and supply chain third. But Corporate America, it feels like it's beginning to get back towards its normal stride.

Got it. That's helpful. And then you used the word responsible growth many times throughout the presentation in several different contexts. One question we get from investors, is there such thing as too responsible of growth? And are, I guess, the risk parameters put in place kind of restraining what otherwise could be accretive business to Bank of America? And kind of how do you just balance that? And then are there situations where you can't deliver to your clients what they need because you're "too responsible?"

Well, listen, there's obviously some science to that, and there's some art to that. We're pretty comfortable with our strategy. I think our shareholders have been very comfortable with our strategy. And it's allowed us to turn capital and drive returns in a way that has been quite attractive to long-term shareholders. The -- I'll occasionally get that question from investors asking, in the commercial bank, could you grow faster if you change your risk appetite? Possibly. But remember, we have -- we don't get to choose whether or not we -- should we have a looser risk appetite right now because we have a point of view that the economy might be okay for the next year or 2. That's not the way it works. Most of our corporate relationships are decades long. We do a good job for a company. We should stay their bank for 20 years. Some of our clients, we have a relationship for 150 years, some more. So there isn't a context of you get into a relationship for a year or 2 and then you get out. No. We pick our clients based on people that we think are terrific companies with sensible leverage ratios that we can bank through a cycle, in many cases, through decades. And it's, I suppose, possible that we could grow ever so slightly faster here or there if we changed our risk appetite. But none of us have any interest or appetite for that. And in many cases, I think the better answer would be that we deserve a higher multiple because we've shown now that going through a pandemic, our balance sheet held up extremely well. And I think that's one of the reasons we trade at quite an attractive multiple. So look, we're going to keep doing what we do. It's worked well for the Board, for Brian, for all of us on the management team. And I think we can continue to compound those same high-quality results over a long period of time with high-quality clients.

And you talked about investing in areas like GTS and digital and IP coverage and local salespeople, international. And it's interesting, you listen to some of the other money center banks or the brokers, you listen to some of the super regionals, even some of the nonbank financials, and they're all trying to increase their presence in some or all those segments. Maybe just at a high level, just talk about the competitive landscape and how that's playing out, where you have a lot of different organizations kind of chasing the same kind of business opportunities.

Yes. So look, obviously, competition remains fierce. And we've seen a couple of our regional competitors acquire others. They'll talk about acquiring scale and acquiring greater digital capabilities. We're in a fortunate place where our franchise is pretty well developed, obviously. That's one of the things, I think, for our shareholders. If you look at what we deliver, whether it's loans, deposits, geographic footprint, whether it is investment banking capabilities or global markets capabilities, we're fully built out at this point. We're not spending any time on integration. We're spending time operating the business. We're spending our time on operational excellence. We're trying to improve our processes. We're trying to improve our procedures. And there are some things -- there are some competitive elements that feel very universal right now. Like everybody is working on a digital strategy. We're in a fortunate place where we can deploy at scale digital solutions in a totally different way than most others. And even a simple example of Erica that I used earlier, we obviously deploy that across tens of millions of people in their day-to-day life on our mobile platform. But it's allowed us to deploy it across thousands of relationship managers and treasury salespeople here in the part of the Global Banking business. So yes, it's a tough competitive environment. And yes, I still believe we have a terrific platform to continue to take market share over time in the things that we choose to.

That is, I think, a great place to leave it given we're out of time. Alastair, thank you for joining us today in Global Banking. Next year, we'd love to have you back as CFO and further the discussion.

All right. Well, thank you for having me. Nice seeing you, Jason.

You, too. Be well.

Cheers.