Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning, and welcome to day-2 of the 15th Annual Morgan Stanley U.S. Financials Conference. We're starting bright and early today with Fifth Third Bancorp. I'm Manan Gosalia, the mid-cap banks analyst. Quick disclosure before we start. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. The taking of photographs and use of recording devices is not allowed. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. And with that, we're delighted to have with us today, Bryan Preston, CFO of Fifth Third. Bryan, thanks so much for joining us.

Well, thanks for having me. Good morning, and thanks everyone for attending.

Perfect. So Bryan, maybe just add to big picture. One of Fifth Third's biggest strategic initiatives that you've been focused on over the past several years has been growing your presence in the Southeast. I think you mentioned that earnings at the bank grew the Southeast households by about 7% in the first quarter. You have $31 billion of deposits. And recently, Tim noted that you will be accelerating your branch build-out over the next few years. So can you talk about the levers you see to deepen customer relationships in the Southeast and how you think Fifth Third is differentiating themselves?

Yes, absolutely. Great question. We're very, very pleased with the performance that we're seeing out of the Southeast de novo build-out. We've built about 100 branches over the last 3, 4 years. Those branches continue to ramp up nicely in terms of performance. Just from a big picture perspective, it takes about 3 years for a branch to become positive from an earnings perspective, and we see them fully mature at about 7 years. The weighted average age of those branches right now are about 2.5 years. So we're actually hitting a nice ramp in terms of the revenue contribution and profitability contribution. Where we find ourselves winning right now in the Southeast, it really comes down to, first and foremost, product. We are very focused on delivering a feature-rich product to our customers. That's what Momentum Banking has been for us. It's a product that we continue to believe is differentiated and one that we continually look to evolve over time. We couple that then with really strong analytically grounded customer acquisition tactics. That has been very powerful for us in terms of our marketing campaigns, in terms of how that delivers the traffic into the branches. At the same time, then we use that same framework to support how our sales force supports our customers. Every day a banker comes in and utilizes our internally developed MyDay system, that gives them the top 15 customers that they should reach out to and talk to about what are the most important conversations with those customers. That can be based off of what we think might be a nice option for them from a deposit perspective, but it can also be as simple as calling them to talk about, hey, we've seen you call the call center a couple of times, and we just want to make sure that everything is okay. And then the last leg of that has really been the locations. We have spent a lot of time investing and making sure that we have the best locations that are going to drive the right outcomes for us. We have the freshest branch network amongst the peer group. About 10% of our branches have been built in the last 5 years. Almost 30% of our branches in the Southeast were built in the last 5 years. And we think that's going to give us a nice growth trend from here. And with another 200 branches coming in the Southeast, there's a lot of opportunity for continued growth.

And then can you also dig into the opportunity you see in Texas. That's a market you've been in since 2012. But at earnings, it sounded like you were going to lean in further there. So what's the opportunity there?

Yes. We feel very excited about Texas. We have 175 people in Texas today. We've been in that market since 2012. We have people in both Dallas and in Houston. It started with our energy vertical out of our corporate bank and has grown into middle market banking. Really excited about the performance we're seeing out of those markets. In general, we just view Texas as a really vibrant market with a lot of middle market banking opportunities. And it's a market where we just continue to see opportunities for our products across Commercial Lending, Capital Markets and our Treasury Management & Commercial Payment services just are doing very well in those markets. The one thing that you've not seen from us in that market, and it's something that's not on the agenda right now is retail. Texas is definitely a very different animal from the Southeast markets that we've been investing in. We've been really focused on midsized cities, 400,000, 500,000 to 4 million people, and that strategy has worked really well. And when you think about a Dallas or a Houston strategy, these are huge cities. Houston is 100 miles by 100 miles in terms of size. That's a different level of investment that's necessary. We're never going to say never on a market like that, but we're going to talk about that very early before we would ever make a decision to enter a market like that because that's a 50- to 100-branch commitment to attack one of those cities. So retail is certainly not something that's on the near-term horizon there, but we continue to feel very good about middle market banking in that market.

Got it. That's very helpful. Maybe to dig in on the guidance in the slide deck you put out yesterday. Is there anything you want to flag there? I know you mentioned for 2Q fees are slightly lower, expenses are lower, NCOs are up, but there's -- maybe it comes with the reserve release. So anything you want to unpack there?

Yes, absolutely. I'll walk the page. For those that aren't aware, we did put an 8-K out last night with an updated guidance page for the second quarter. NII coming in right in line with our expectations is stable to up 1%. Deposit performance continues to come in right in line with what we expected, continuing that trend of decelerating deposit cost change, as well as decelerating mix shifts. So continue to feel very good about the NII story. We continue to feel good about NII from a full year perspective as well. There will be no change at this point to our guidance for the full year down 2 to 4. Just the year is playing out very nicely from an NII perspective. Fees did come in or are expected to come in a little bit soft this quarter. We had originally thought up 2 to 4. We're now saying stable. The big change, that has primarily contributed to our Capital Markets fees. Our business tends to be a little bit overweight hedging businesses as well as some loan capital markets and institutional trading. Those are areas where we've just seen a continuation of the soft trends that we saw in the first quarter. The hedging businesses, those had historically been, say, a $40 million to $50 million quarterly business for us. We're seeing anywhere between $10 million and $20 million decrease in those businesses. And it's really across the board. And it actually somewhat is combined with loan demand. We're seeing -- as customers are a little bit cautious about investing, it certainly appears to be a one-way trade right now from a rates perspective where there's just an expectation that rates are going to come down. The propensity to hedge from an interest rates perspective is down about 30% from what we would typically see. And combined with just a little bit lighter loan demand, we're just seeing less activity in the interest rates book. FX and commodities have also been a little bit light just given what we've seen from a volatility perspective. But those are businesses that we know that are going to come back. Overall, the other business -- the other few businesses are performing really well. We're going to see another quarter of double-digit growth in Commercial Payments and another quarter of double-digit growth in Wealth & Asset Management. from a year-over-year perspective. So we feel very good about those businesses. And like everyone knows, the Mortgage business continues to be slow. But again, that's nothing that's a surprise versus what we expected. The big change was really about that Capital Markets business. From a full year perspective, we're not expecting that we're going to make up that second quarter miss in the second half of the year. So the full year guide will come down a little bit. But we are able to offset most of the fee headwinds with expenses. One of the nice things about Capital Markets businesses is they tend to come with a fair amount of comp associated with them. So that will come out as well as just other expense saves that we've been able to find. So in general, feel good about delivering PPNR. From a credit perspective, we've talked a lot about episodic and lumpy. And that's really what you're going to see from us this quarter. There are 2 credits that are attributable to the increase in the charge-off guide. These are credits that we had about $50 million of specific reserve established on at the end of the first quarter. And so that's why you see us talking about that reserve release. These are credits that have been on our radar for some time. The real question was whether or not they were going to -- which quarter they were going to hit in, and they just both happened to hit in the second quarter. No change to our full year guide from a charge-off perspective. We still view 35 to 45 basis points from a full year perspective to be the right spot. And this was really more of a timing item for us. And given that those were $50 million specific reserve, that's reserve that doesn't have to be replenished and that's why we're talking about that $50 million release. The release does not -- the $50 million does not contemplate any changes in economic scenarios that we utilize from Moody's. I'm still waiting for the final scenarios to come out this month. But overall, feeling good about broad credit trends. NPAs, it should be a good quarter from an NPA perspective. We're seeing NPAs come down. We're expecting to see stability from a credit perspective. So no real surprises other than just the timing of the charge-offs this quarter.

And any more details on those charge-offs? Are they on the C&I side or CRE side in any specific industries?

They're on the C&I side. No specific industries, just customers that had challenges with business models ultimately coming out of COVID continue to see no real broad-based trends in our credit results, just 2 episodic items.

Got it. Very helpful. I want to dig in on the deposit and loan side. But just before that, there have been a few headlines recently around CMBS losses. And specifically, there was one large property in New York. I know CMBS makes up about 60% of Fifth Third's securities book. So can you just talk about the quality of that CMBS book and any protections that you have in place there?

Yes, absolutely. The majority of our CMBS is agency CMBS, which is guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie and has the same credit risk associated with agency RMBS securities. We do have a portfolio of about $5 billion of non-agency CMBS. It's all AAA, still has around 40% hard credit enhancement, about 60% weighted average loan-to-value. The recent headlines that we've seen in the CMBS space has been around SASB, so that's single asset, single borrower structures, and that's where the loss really came from recently. We only have about $160 million of bonds that are part of SASB structures, and it's limited to the 3 actual bonds. One is a very, very new property here in New York that is fully leased. The second is a property where it is 100% leased through 2036, and that lease is guaranteed by AA-rated company. And the third SASB bond relates to a bond that supports data centers in 8 different MSAs. Continue to feel very, very comfortable with those bonds as well as the broader non-agency CMBS portfolio. It takes a fairly significant shock for us to even see our first dollar of loss. If we were to stress property values by 50% in that portfolio, we'd still have 20% heart enhancement. And you'd have to take office properties up closer to 90% losses for us to have the first dollar loss. So just not a portfolio we have a lot of concern about. It's performed really well, continues to perform really well from a spread perspective. So it's just not one where we're seeing a lot of risk right now.

Got it. All right. Perfect. So let's turn over to deposits. At earnings, you mentioned the biggest risk to the NII outlook is reacceleration in deposit competition. I think based on Tim's comments earlier and what you just said right now, it seems that deposit competition has eased a little bit so far in the second quarter. So can you dig a little bit more into the trends that you're seeing? And also talk about how you see deposit competition playing out through this year?

Yes, absolutely. So broadly speaking, deposits have been fairly well behaved. Where we've really seen the most significant decelerations are in our Commercial and our Wealth & Asset Management businesses. And that makes sense because those are the highest beta businesses, and all of that repricing really has happened thus far. And that's -- when you see us talk about -- and we have a slide in our earnings material where we talk about 64%, 65% of our deposit base that we view, and that's more of a market rate product. And that's where those balances really reside. So that repricing is really behind us. In both of those portfolios, we've actually been able to get a little pricing back as there continues to be just more stability overall in the funding markets. Continuing to see a little bit of drift in the consumer portfolio. Again, not surprising because you're still talking about rates across the industry that are well below where they would have been historically with Fed funds at 5.5%. But that's a very granular and manageable trend and not something that -- it's very predictable and it's not something that has really generated any surprises for us. And beyond that, part of our strategy of building deposits last year, we actually created a nice pool of promo balances and CDs that gives us some ability to do some tactical items to manage deposit costs. And that's something that you saw us do in the first quarter. I refer to it as basically recycling interest expense. And that's a strategy that we've used in the past and one that you can expect to continue to see from us, and it provides some opportunity to help manage those deposit costs. From a markets perspective, I wouldn't say that we're seeing any big trends across any individual markets at this point. It really just tends to be a little bit of a hit or miss in terms of if someone is just rate on in one market, but they're just -- there really doesn't tend to be any significant themes there. From a Southeast perspective, little bit more concentration with some of the larger banks in the Southeast. We find that creates a little bit more opportunity for us because there's just more lower cost deposits in those markets. And so rate has been a tool for us for customer acquisition. We would expect that to continue. But at the end of the day, we feel very good about the trends we're seeing.

So maybe a couple of follow-ups. One is on the Commercial and Wealth side, you said you've got some pricing back. Does that mean that you're able to drop deposit rates lower? Because one of your peers yesterday was commenting that there might be a little bit more room to drop deposit rates even if the Fed stays higher for longer. Is that part of the pricing you're getting?

Yes. Yes. We have seen opportunity to pull back on deposit rates and not lose balances in those sectors.

Got it. Okay. And then on the footprint and the geographical differences. I would say that the guides in deposits through this conference have been little bit mixed. Some have seen more precious, some have not. So is there anything you're seeing either by type of banks, like -- maybe the large cap banks are reacting differently, even the regionals, I know you compete with both. Or is there any small differences in geography or customer type or anything else?

Yes. I would tell you the main difference really is between the larger banks, the midsize banks and then small banks/credit unions. So the large banks, in general, we've seen -- maintain a significant amount of discipline, in particular, in the consumer books. We've just not seen a lot of rate competition from them in the markets where they have large share. Where we have seen some larger banks get a little bit more aggressive has been in some of the Wealth businesses from time to time, as well as occasionally in the Commercial portfolio. So we will see from time to time some more aggressive offers when they're thinking about how do we basically buy a relationship. Midsize banks, really, it's tended to be a little bit more company specific. We are seeing -- folks that continue to have to do a little bit of work from a funding perspective are tending to be a little bit more aggressive and those that are focused on just outright growth are tending to be a little bit more aggressive, but it really is an institution by institution and mark-by-market basis. Probably the more interesting one recently has been we've seen a bit of a pullback from a smaller bank perspective and a credit union perspective. They were a spot where last year, they were fairly competitive, especially in the CD offers, and that's a spot where we've seen them come off a bit. But overall, broadly speaking, we continue to feel a decrease in competition relative to where we were late last year, and the trends have been really stable for the past 5, 6 months. We've been seeing about a basis point a month has been the trend that we've seen for 5, 6 months. The DDA migration has also decelerated. The last 3 months of DDA migration have been the lowest that we've seen since the hiking cycle began. So again, everything is playing out in line with our expectations, and we feel good about the full year from here.

Anything you worry about in the back half? I know this whole dynamic between QT and RPP, how do you expect that to play out here?

RRP is one that we've been paying a lot of attention to and QT, obviously. We think they're at their floor right now from an RRP perspective. We're not expecting them to go to 0. We do think that the Fed likes to have a little bit of cushion in the RRP to help them manage through liquidity, potentially liquidity blips in the market. And that's one where it's very clear when you look at the Fed balance sheet data, when you look at reserves, that the RRP really has absorbed a lot of the reduction in market liquidity. So that is something that we're cautious about. That if, for some reason, we see some type of reacceleration of funding pressures out of bank deposits or challenges from a reserves perspective where some folks might start getting short on reserves, that could create the reacceleration. But more than anything, this year, we continue to be positive just because it feels like it's a year where people are more focused on maintaining profitability more so than trying to drive outsized growth. And so because of that, we think that people are going to continue to be a little bit more disciplined from a deposit perspective. The industry got their balance sheets fairly clean by the end of last year, and this is about being able to show that they can turn NII. We just think that's a really important measure that everybody is really focused on. That's going to be something that helps keep some discipline around deposit pricing.

So while we're on NII, you reiterated the guide on NII to decline 2% to 4% in 2024. And you've also mentioned that you can hit that guide even if we get no rate cuts, which is basically where the forward curve is now with just one cut in December. What actions have you taken to make your NII more resilient to different rate scenarios?

We've been really focused on making sure that the components of our balance sheet that are more tied to the front end of the curve, we've taken some actions to get a little bit more sensitivity on that front end so that if cuts will occur, that we can be effectively neutral. We're naturally a little bit asset sensitive in our businesses. And so late last year, we tore up $4 billion of swaps. We continue to hold a lot of cash and we continue to reinvest some of our proceeds into floating rate securities. And so all of those things together have put us in a spot where we're relatively neutral at this point to the front end of the curve. And then from here, it's really been about being able to maintain the benefit of the fixed rate asset repricing. We continue to feel really good about what we're seeing in fixed rate asset origination, $4 billion to $5 billion a year from a repricing perspective, continuing to see that 200 basis points of lift. And so if we can neutralize any risk associated with the front-end moving and continue to benefit from that fixed rate asset repricing, it sets us up nicely to be on a really good trajectory and a good exit trajectory into 2025.

Great. And then the other leg of the stool for NII is loan growth. And I know with the Fed H8 data, we can see loan growth is coming in weak. I think consistently, this conference, we've had loan growth is weaker. And I think Tim also highlighted recently that loan growth has been tepid so far. Can you talk about what exactly you're seeing so far this quarter? What are you hearing from clients? And what needs to happen for demand to improve here?

Yes. We're seeing good -- we're continuing to see good activity in the middle market. It's not robust, but it's growth. We're seeing decent production trends, pipelines look good for the second quarter, continue to feel good about what we're seeing there. Corporate banking has been an area that's been soft. And that makes sense because the Capital Markets, the bond market, in particular, has been a little bit more robust. And so those are your natural borrowers that might be tapping the bond markets. From a consumer perspective, continue to see strength in auto. That's just been a really good business that we think we're going to continue to see growth in and continue to feel good about the solar originations that we're doing through dividend. And most of the other captions are relatively stable, but good performance overall. One of the things that we are starting to see is we're starting to see some irrational competition in some markets. Certainly, there's been some very aggressive middle-market loan pricing and some very aggressive mortgage pricing that we would say doesn't really look economical. And so those are spots where -- if we see things that don't generate good returns for our shareholders, those are spots where we're not going to stretch. And we're in a spot right now from a capital perspective that for us, the trade-off is -- gives us a little bit more capital to utilize for share repurchases. And it doesn't make sense at this point in the cycle to be stretching for loan growth, especially loan growth that isn't necessarily priced for the risk. So we're trying to make sure we maintain discipline there.

And why do you think you're seeing that competition in specific loan types? I know some of your peers are moving away from CRE into C&I. Is that part of the reason why spreads are compressing there?

I would say that's probably part of it. People just looking for what are the right opportunities and people want to get back on to that trajectory of growth. And for a lot of people, they're not positioned to be able to grow NII without loan growth. And that's something that we're just not going to have to do from this point to stretch -- to grow NII that way.

Okay. And then for some of this loan demand to come back, I mean, does it really depend on the path of interest rates from here? Is there any other dynamic that can spur loan demand?

I think there's a big psychological effect from interest rates. I think just because the market is so focused right now on that one-way trade I talked about earlier where the expectation is that rates are going to come down, that people are willing to hold their breath. Now there is a limit on how long that people can do that, and we would expect to see some capitulation at some point where people have just put off investment decisions for a long time. Because what you're seeing is you're seeing the economy continue to perform better than people who are expecting. That's why the Fed is not able to cut. And at some point, that is going to force an investment decision even if rates stay higher. But for now, people are still hopeful that either later this year, early next year, they're going to have an opportunity to reprice and lock in long-term financing at lower rates than they're seeing today.

Got it. And anything about your Midwest footprint in terms of the benefits of onshoring in government spending? Anything you're starting to see materialize already? And how much runway is there from here over the next few years?

We're very early in the stages of the investment in the government program. I mean, Columbus, Ohio with the Intel plan is certainly the highlight for our market, but we're seeing good investment across markets. Indianapolis continues to be a really strong market for us in the Midwest as well. We're seeing investments in Cincinnati. Big picture, just a lot of opportunity in the Midwest. Detroit, we're starting to see signs of growth as well. So the Michigan markets have done well. So we feel very good about what we're seeing, and we think there's a really long runway here. These investments, the infrastructure investments that we're talking about from a manufacturing perspective, these aren't things that are done in 1 or 2 years. These are going to drive a decade-long expansion of growth and investment in these markets, and we feel very well positioned to take advantage of that.

Right. So I'm going to dig into regulation and then come to the audience in case there's any questions in the room. Bryan, with the events of last spring, there's clearly a lot of new regulations that have come down the pike for banks of your size. I want to start with long-term debt. You issued about $1 billion of long-term debt in January. How supportive is the environment today for you to continue to do that? And how much do you think you need to do here?

Very, very supportive. The market has been very receptive to our debt. Our deals have gone very well. We actually continue to get a lot of reverse inquiry demand on our debt. So if we wanted to issue another $1 billion right now, we would be able to do it at a very good execution. Just from a liquidity perspective and where we are from the expected long-term debt rule perspective, we don't really have a lot to do this year. We don't really have a need to do anything. And so we have an ability to be patient. We have an ability to access the market when we think it will be a good entry point. So in general, it's just that the long-term debt is not going to be a big significant item for us from an LTV rule perspective.

And then what about LCR? I think you've already said you had 135% LCR from a G-SIB rule perspective. I know the rules will get tough. Any thoughts on what will happen with the rules here? And I think importantly, why hold so much more liquidity over and above where the toughest rules and regulations are on LTR today?

Part of it is an expectation that the rules are going to get a little bit tougher. And in particular, there's going to be a focus on higher runoffs on uninsured deposits. So that is an area where we just want to make sure that we are incredibly well positioned because we do worry about when those rules come out, could that be a catalyst for that scramble for liquidity or an increase in deposit competition. We just want to make sure that we stay very well positioned on that front. This is the rule that everybody has been talking about now for 6 to 9 months that we still heard nothing on. So we're expecting something, and we want to stay well positioned for it. And especially when you layer that on with some of the mechanics that we talked about earlier with RRP and QT, that's part of why we're staying with a lot of liquidity. It just gives us a lot of flexibility. It gives us a lot of flexibility for obviously managing the liquidity risk of the environment, but it also gives us rate risk flexibility. And that's why you see us talk about a lot of confidence in our NII guide for the year.

And your deposit pricing strategy as well?

Absolutely, yes.

All right, perfect. On capital, you're at 7.8% CET1, including the impact of AOCI. Where do you think about managing that in the medium term? And how should we think about buybacks as we get into the second half of this year?

Yes. So there's still obviously a big question on what the final capital rule is going to look like. Everybody is expecting relief from the proposal. For us, that would mean RWA would actually go down. Because the current proposal, our RWA is effectively neutral. The AOCI opt-out is the one that we expect to go away for certain. And for us, that means -- we've historically tried to target around a 9% CET1 ratio. The capital volatility associated with the AOCI opt-out going away probably adds 50 to 75 basis points to our target. So long term, I think we'll probably operate in 9.5% to 9.75% type of target in a normalized environment. The 10.5% that we're at or that we've talked about targeting, we hit 10.5% actually in April, a little bit earlier than we expected. So we feel really good about the capital progression. We feel very good about the AOCI burn down. And that actually gives us confidence. And Tim mentioned this a couple of weeks ago to start share repurchases earlier. So we're likely to execute share repurchase during this quarter, and we'll be well positioned to continue share repurchases in the second half of the year. Still thinking somewhere between $100 million to $200 million a quarter. And so it's just well positioned to actually now start returning some capital to shareholders beyond maintaining and supporting our strong dividend.

So it's not just starting share repurchases earlier, you think you can do a little bit more this year than...

I think we'll end up doing a little bit more this year than we originally expected.

All right, perfect. And if loan growth doesn't come back as much as people were expecting, does that give you a little bit more flexibility on the buyback side as well?

Yes, absolutely. With that 10% capital target, right, it frees $100 million of capital for every $1 billion of loan, so.

All right, perfect. Are there any questions in the room? All right. Maybe I'll just wrap up with a quick one on the expense side. You've been guiding to about 1% expense growth in 2024. I know that will change now with the new guide. But how are you balancing investments on tech and growing your sales force while keeping your expense growth fairly low?

Yes. The branches is probably a good place to start, where the branch investment was really funded by rationalization of our legacy branch network, in particular in the Midwest. And one of the things where -- when we think about technology, what it has driven in branches, it changed how branches are used. And so there are less transactional activities occurring in branches and more advice that's occurring in branches. And so what that means is you can actually thin out the branch network a little bit. We used to focus on about a 5-minute drive time when we thought about branch density. And that looks more like a 10-minute drive time works for supporting the network. And so that's one area where we have found opportunity, where basically being able to add digital capabilities to decrease the transactional volume in branches allows us to carry a little bit lighter branch load, that savings then was reinvested into new builds in the Southeast. Then more broadly, it's just the discipline around process automation. We're spending a lot of time focused on the end-to-end process evaluation and automation. The call center is one that you hear us talk about a lot. We've seen about a 20% reduction in calls through our call center. And that's because we've been able to take things that the call center had typically handled via the phone calls and have been able to transition those into the digital channels as well. It's improved customer experience. It's improved our ability to -- one of the most important customer experience items is the ability to resolve the problem on the first call, first call resolution. And that's been able -- we've been able to improve significantly as part of that digital transition as well. So continue to feel good about that we have a lot of progress that we can continue to make in that space. And doing those things are how we continue to fund investment in the business long term.

Right. With that, we're out of time. Bryan, we've covered a lot of time -- we've covered a lot of stuff over the last 30 minutes. Crystal clear, as always. Thanks so much for your time.

Thank you.