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JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)

Q3 2016 Earnings Call· Fri, Oct 14, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to JPMorgan Chase’s Third Quarter 2016 Earnings Call. This call is being recorded. Your line will be mute for the duration of the call. We will now go live to the presentation. Please stand by. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to JPMorgan Chase’s Chief Financial Officer, Marianne Lake. Ms. Lake, please go ahead.

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I am going to take you through the earnings presentation, which is available on our website. Please refer to the disclaimer at the back of the presentation. Starting on page one and taking a look at the quarter, we had strong performance in each of our businesses despite the continuation of reasonably challenging conditions. And bringing it altogether, this quarter’s result was clean with no significant items and with the Firm reporting net income of $6.3 billion, EPS of a $1.58, and the return on tangible common equity of 13% on $25.5 billion of revenue. Highlights of the quarter include the highest reported revenue for third quarter in the CIB with IB fees up 15% and markets revenues up 33%, with strong performance across the board, robust core loan growth for the Company of 15% on the back of sustained demand across businesses, and the continuation of strong credit performance including a net release for oil and gas. Card sales are back to double-digit growth year-on-year and we saw a strong positive market reaction to new proprietary products. And finally, we had record consumer deposit growth up 11%. Before I move on, we recently submitted our 2016 resolution filing. The Board and management believe that we submitted a credible plan and more than met the requirement for the October submission. It was a tremendous effort across the Company involving all businesses and functions, and we took many significant actions, perhaps most notably improving the Firm’s overall liquidity and prepositioning our material legal entities for both liquidity and capital. We determined this is in the best interest of the Company, albeit at some cost. And we took many other important actions which hopefully you’ve had a chance to review in our public filings. Moving back to…

Operator

Operator

[Audio Gap] from CLSA.

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

Good morning, Mike.

Mike Mayo

Management

Hi. Can you talk about the competitive environment in capital markets? I mean, you had a strong growth. Is that due to better markets, better share or both?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, I think there is three things -- three or four things to mention. The first is that I would say that the industry generally had a pretty weak third quarter last year. And so, when you think about the year-over-year comparison, we are little flattered by last year’s performance, not necessarily more so than our peers but nevertheless we are. And then, we talked about the fact that this quarter the conditions were relatively favorable broadly and compare and contrast that last year where there were pockets of activity in client flow but there were also pockets where people were really sitting on their hands and not transacting. So, I think client flow quite broadly across the environment would characterize the quarter. In terms of the competitive performance, I would say it feels like we did well. Obviously we’re the first to report, apart from Citi this morning. It feels like we did relatively well. So, we may have gained some share, certainly, hopefully the momentum in terms of the business we’ve been building in the way we are serving our clients, will serve us in that capacity, not just this quarter but through time. But obviously that can be a bit of volatility in the market share space. So, we prefer to look at it more through time and we feel pretty good about the performance.

Mike Mayo

Management

Specifically versus the European banks, so are you looking to use your balance sheet more to gain share?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, I would say, we don’t specifically target a competitive set to -- but, I will tell you that our balance sheet, we talked about it many times on this call before, that we do have the capacity to put our balance sheet and our resources to work for our clients, for our best clients and we think about using those resources in the context of overall relationship. So, if any peer is more leverage constrained and has less access, we may have competitive advantage. And certainly, we will continue to make those resources available to our clients.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Glenn Schorr from Evercore ISI.

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

Hi Glenn.

Glenn Schorr

Management

Hi. Thanks very much. I’m curious on card delinquencies picking up. I know you’ve been guiding towards that but when you see, it is the only part of credit that has anything but great trends. You mentioned on your comments newer vintages will have a higher loss rate than the portfolio average. Do you mind just drilling down a little bit more color on what exactly is driving that; is that going down credit a little bit or is that just expected season, as you thought?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, I don’t know Glenn if you recall, we had a bit of discussion about this last quarter and sort of guided to the fact that we would expect to see our loss rates go up slowly, I mean partly because obviously 250ish basis points, I think we could call that pretty low historically. But also because over the course of the last couple of years, we have been changing the mix of our originations a bit to the prime, near prime space and still completely within our credit risk appetite and at risk-adjusted margins that are better than the portfolio average. So, we’re getting paid for that. So, we are doing it within our risk appetite doing it judiciously. But as a result, as those vintages become a higher percentage of our overall population, they will have a gentle upward pressure on the charge-off rate. So, what we’re seeing in terms of the delinquency uptick and the charge-off gradual increases completely in line with how we underwrote those loans and our expectations. And so, as you look forward for us over the course for the next several quarters and we would expect those phenomena to generally continue again slowly, we’re growing our portfolio, we’re going to see the seasoning of those vintages as the mix increases and as they become more seasoned, cause us to build a reserve but for the right reason.

Glenn Schorr

Management

Fair enough. Just one follow-up if I could get a just a high level comment on has anything materially changed in terms of rate or curve sensitivity as you remix the portfolio and as you’re getting all this great loan growth? I’m just curious on current positioning.

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

No, nothing significant, Glenn. No significant changes to our sensitivity.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Betsy Graseck from Morgan Stanley.

Betsy Graseck

Management

I had a question on the Card strategy. And I know -- we all know that you’ve created the closed loop and you’re using that in part, it seems to drive really efficient pricing in the marketplace on the credit card products. What I am obviously seeing is an increase in share on card issuance; you’re taking some nice share in the merchant space as well. I just want to understand what the goal is and how far you’re willing to push this market share versus ROA, ROE.

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, I would say that all of the things that you mentioned whether it’s closed loop network, whether it’s our new proprietary products whether it’s our investments in the technology platform and the business merchant services are all at good returns that ultimately will drive the business to be profitable in the future as it has been in the past. So, we haven’t given specific guidance for ROE part of this business but nothing has changed over the medium term for what we think that the performance of the business would be.

Betsy Graseck

Management

So, is it fair to suggest that part of the market share improvement here is coming from some give-up of profitability? And the underlying question is really how much market share do you want in this business? You are already at 18% to 22% market share of the credit card space, depending on which numbers you want to use.

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

Yes. I mean, it’s a very competitive business and it’s very profitable. So, all other things being equal, we would like to continue to gain share.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ken Usdin from Jefferies.

Ken Usdin

Management

Marianne, just wondering, you mentioned that part of the increase in consumer cost this quarter was planned investments and that you’re continuing to self fund. I am just wondering as you think forward and we get past this good gear that you’ve had, will that be kind of underlying expectation for you guys, again with the understanding that the revenue environment will always take things up or down; but do you have an aspiration that you can continue to keep costs flat?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, I mean, look, we haven’t given specific cost guidance going out beyond this year at this point. But our objective will remain consistent with those that we stated previously, which is we continue to try and become more efficient across our businesses. As you know, we’re at the tail end but not finished on a couple of large expense programs in our largest businesses, so that we create capacity to be able to invest in the businesses broadly whether that’s in products and marketing and investment in innovation all of which we’re doing as much as we can as long as we do it well. And so, it’s going to come down to if we think we have investment opportunities that we can execute well that have an appropriate return, we would like to keep doing that. And in order to have the right to do it, we would like to become more and more efficient in our core business operations. So, we haven’t actually given guidance, I think I would characterize it as expenses under control, creating capacity to invest but we will decision investment based upon their merits and obviously explain them to you in the future at Investor Day if not on other venues.

Ken Usdin

Management

And if I can come back to another investment day point from earlier this year, you’d mentioned that you’d felt comfortable with an 11% CET1; you plan to get to your CET1 to 12%; you are at 12.1% now already. Just within the construct of Governor Tarullo’s recent commentary, does 11% still feel like the right time; did you sense anything from the commentary that would change your philosophy around where you’d like to live in that potential comment you made at February to potentially go above 100, if in fact this was the right mechanism?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, first of all, I would say that based upon the speech, and obviously you know that there are still some unanswered questions with respect to specific parts of the proposal, which I’ll come back to. But based upon the speech moving to a baseline minimum standard is more consistent with how we think about our capital management policy and using the capital stack add-up using our G-SIB Score and our stress drawdown, actually you would come out with a sort of capital constraint on the CCAR that’s pretty much on top of our regulatory capital minimum. So in that sense, because of the offset, because of the lack of balance sheet growth, lack of RWA growth and the curtailment of capital distributions, we’ve actually ended up in a place where we look to be approximately equally bound based on last year’s test by both of those two measures, which is a place we played in for a while. We’ve been -- as we talked about before, we’ve been bound by many constraints, somewhat equally over a period of time and striving to sort of operate within that constraint and maximize shareholder value. And I think we think we don’t know obviously how funding or liquidity shock will be incorporated. And in any case, this is not for the 2017 CCAR cycle. So, it’s a whole cycle away from now. And we will be operating in 2017 under the same basic test construct that we have previously. And so, I don’t think it’s a clear and present danger necessarily that we will be able to look at payout ratios that are above top end of our range. Meanwhile we are at the top end of our range now.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jim Mitchell from Buckingham Research.

Jim Mitchell

Management

Maybe just a quick follow-up on FICC in your commentary and maybe a broader -- maybe you can have a broader commentary around how the widening LIBOR or rising LIBOR yields helped your businesses across the board in FICC or anywhere else. Just help us understand how that’s playing through the income statement.

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

Yes. So, I’ll just -- generally speaking with respect to our rate sensitivity, as I think you know we are most sensitive to the front end of the curve but to IOER and prime. So, we do have LIBOR based assets but also liabilities. Good examples would be commercial loans on the asset side or long-term debt on the liability side but our notational mismatch is not particularly big. And so, as a consequence, impact of LIBOR curve move has been not very significant on our P&L, we wouldn’t expect it to be. I will say that the LIBOR moves were one of the features that our rate business had a perspective around and they got good client flow in and around that trade. And so, it was one of the catalysts, one of many, but one of the catalysts that we point to in terms of ability for rates to monetize flow as we had a lot of client flow around that condition. But I wouldn’t put a number on it for you.

Jim Mitchell

Management

And maybe just a follow-up on deposits; you guys have had very good trends in retail. But on the institutional side, there was quite a bit of flow, looked like as well. Any particular drivers there; was it money market reform helping the flows in institutional or something else?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

We obviously did get some good inflows, liquidity flows in terms of money market reform into our government funds but we also have been very focused in our other wholesale businesses on continuing to attract operating deposits. And so, as I look at our overall strong deposit growth, I wouldn’t say it was equally but it was pretty much equally wholesale operating and retail deposit growth. So, we feel good about both of those.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Matt O’Connor from Deutsche Bank. Matt O’Connor: In light of some of the selling issues over at Wells Fargo, I was just wondering if you’ve thought about reevaluating how you approach the consumer, how you compensate staff; and this was obviously not a JPMorgan specific question, but just for the overall industry I think it’s something that folks are wondering about. There is clearly some stuff that’s black and white that you shouldn’t do but I think we also worry that there might be some gray areas that are somewhat less known. So, just how are you thinking about the way you conduct business and compensate staff in light of what’s going on?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, I might just give for context, remind you or maybe you recall that for a number of years now for a fairly long time,, we’ve been standing up at Investor Day and other venue saying that customer experience is the central tenant for how we think about engaging with all of our clients but certainly our retail clients in the branches. And we’ve been very, very focused on investing in customer experience broadly defined and have made great progress I think in doing that. And also we had talked about the fact that what we are looking for very, very clearly is deep customer relationship engaged customers who want to be primary bank, we want to gather a deeper share of wallet, so balances not necessarily products. And so again, remember saying cross-sell is an outcome, it’s not an objective. And that’s certainly the philosophy with which we have designed our compensation and performance structures for the branches. And we review them regularly, at least annually to make sure that they continue to be aligned with our objectives and again objectives about the engaged relationship with customers, good customer experience in the right product, all the right reasons the right way. And so, as we think about those objectives and how we’ve designed our plan and as we look inward not just and obviously because of the news now but also regularly in our BAU capacity, we feel like our plans are designed to incent those behaviors.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Erika Najarian from Bank of America.

Erika Najarian

Management

Just a question on back to CIB, you had a slide during Investor Day that showed a walk to $19 billion of expenses by 2017. If some of the factors that you mentioned that drove revenues into CIB higher repeat for 2017; is that $19 billion number still achievable or I guess a better way to ask it, will any incremental revenue uplift from here fall to the bottom-line?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, obviously, first of all, I would say we are on -- I’ll tell you, we are on track with respect to the commitments that Daniel made to you to deliver over time the $2.8 billion of expense saves. While we are not finished yet, we are substantially through that program. So, it’s moved from being a plan through execution to being in the later stages of execution. So, we feel very good about that which means that all other things equal that $19 billion is still a reasonable level of expense target. However, obviously we pay for performance. And so, clearly, if we have significant outperformance next year relative to our expectations at the time of setting those plans, there would be some variable costs associated with it. But for every dollar of outperformance, the variable cost may not always be the same. Obviously, it also depends upon the mix and the payout ratios and all those sorts of things. But a large, large portion of it would be -- it would be obviously as you know incredibly accretive because we will be leveraging all of our scale. So, the only variable cost would really be comped largely.

Erika Najarian

Management

And just as a follow-up to that -- a follow-up to Ken’s question actually. He mentioned the stress capital buffer. Outside of the static balance sheet and capital distribution offset, is there an element to this in terms of just getting better at the test that you could do to reduce that stress capital buffer without actually taking risk down significantly?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, first of all, based upon last year’s results for us, we are at the flow for the stress floor for the stress capital buffer, not to suggest by the way that we wouldn’t continue to want to properly understand and better understand how we can through time make sure that we are performing the best we can on the stress within our risk appetite. So, we are at that floor right now. So, within those home strengths, what we’re trying to be, within our risk appetite manage risk properly, but also add shareholder value. We have to carry that capital anyway. So, we would want to use it, but use well.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Paul Miller from FBR.

Tim Hayes

Management

Hi. This is Tim Hayes for Paul Miller. Can you give any color on your outlook for margin throughout 2017? To me, fed commentary suggests that rates could remain low and potentially hover around these levels over the next 12 months. So, how can we think about your NIM in that type of scenario? And then, what would a December rate hike do for your outlook?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

Okay. So, for your purposes, I’m going to talk about NII; we don’t really manage to NIM, but you can obviously back into it. So, if we ended up in a situation right now where rates are flat throughout all of 2017 which for what it’s worth I don’t think is pretty much anyone’s central expectations right now. But if we were rate flat, you’ve seen us grow our core loans and our loan balances pretty strongly, pretty consistently across businesses. And while we may not be able to replicate $0.15 core loan growth forever, certainly we can continue to grow our loans. So on that stuff, mix shift away from securities over time, we should be able to deliver $1.5 billion of incremental NII next year rate flat. You know that if rates are -- if we’re fortunate enough for the right reasons that we see a hike this year, at the end of this year and get the full benefit of that next year it will be higher than that. And you’ve seen our earnings and risk disclosures; they’ve been pretty close to $3 billion number on a 100 basis-point move for a while most of which is front end.

Tim Hayes

Management

Okay, thank you. And then switching gears, your CRE and C&I lending was pretty strong this quarter. And regulators have obviously grown a little bit more cautious on those segments. So, just kind of if you could give any color for your outlook on lending to those segments going forward?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

Yes. So, we’re aware obviously of the riskier types of CRE lending, the types of lending that attract scrutiny and for reasonable reasons considering how they performed in past cycles. We are also mindful of where we are in the cycle and take that into consideration in our underwriting. So, we have and continue to avoid and what I would characterize as the riskier segments and those segments that performed poorly in previous cycles. So, we really stick to our knitting if that’s an American expression, in terms of continuing to do what we’re good at within our risk appetite. And so, if you think about our commercial real estate growth, commercial term lending is about three quarters of our portfolio. And you know that we’re very focused on smaller loan size, Class B, Class C properties with low vacancy rate. So, rent stabilized, supply constraint markets, underwrite to LTVs, good debt service coverage, we look at forward rates and current rents. And so, we really have expertise in a specific niche and we compete on speed and certainty of execution, not on credit and structure. So, we feel pretty good about our exposures and even in the more traditional real estate banking space and we have avoided riskier segments with limited construction lending exposure, home builders, minimal exposure; we’re pretty disciplined about it.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Eric Wasserstrom from Guggenheim.

Eric Wasserstrom

Management

Marianne, at a conference just before the end of the quarter, another bank talked about improving underwriting conditions in the auto lending space, particularly sort of in the mid to lower FICO range. Are you seeing anything similar?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, we are a primarily prime lender in auto. We are the number one prime lender. We actually have the lowest share in sub-prime among the national banks. So, it’s less than 5% of our origination. So, I wouldn’t speak specifically to underwriting in the lower FICO sectors, not where we play at this point.

Eric Wasserstrom

Management

Sure. I think the reference was to below 700, which includes the bottom end of the prime segment, which has been an area of intense competitive focus; I am just wondering if you’ve seen anything in that segment.

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, not that I would comment on except for we have recently decided to pull back on 84 months plus term loans on all FICO bands just as where we are in the cycle as we see the risks of that type of lending. So, we continue to calibrate our underwriting but I wouldn’t comment on seeing anything specifically.

Eric Wasserstrom

Management

And is that influencing your reserve expectations for consumer at all?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

Auto?

Eric Wasserstrom

Management

Yes.

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

We’ve built $25 million of reserve this quarter for auto and we expect to continue. We think that auto opportunity is still strong and we have a great franchise, we have great manufacturing partnerships that are growing strongly too. So, as we grow that portfolio, I would expect us to continue to grow reserves modestly in 2017. However, we are expecting charge-offs to stay under control.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Steve Chubak from Nomura.

Steve Chubak

Management

Marianne, I appreciated your remarks on the latest guidance from Tarullo relating to G-SIB capital. One of the questions we’ve been getting from a lot of folks is because this SEB is calculated based on stress losses year-to-year and historically CCAR results have been pretty volatile, I am wondering how you are thinking about the appropriate management cushion or buffer above the minimum. Historically, it had been about 50 bps just for AOCI volatility and maybe operational risk losses. But, do you now have to also handicap CCAR volatility when thinking about that cushion?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, you’re right and obviously even specifically for JPMorgan, if you look our stress results that [indiscernible] by the fed over the course of last three years has been reasonable volatility. And clearly it’s not the case that we will expect it to be complete. And I would not expect to see the same levels of volatility going forward as we’ve seen historically as the test has as you know over time occasionally included new not insignificant features. And while that may continue to be the case, I would think that there’d be a bit more stability. But, we haven’t actually gone through and finalized our thinking about what the buffers would look like.

Steve Chubak

Management

And one more question just thinking about capital management priorities. Given that the new proposal, as you noted, allows for curtailment of the buyback or termination of the buyback and then curtailment of the dividend halfway through the test, do these changes as well as the softening of the 30% dividend cap alter your thinking about how you prioritize buybacks versus dividends?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

Before I talk about the prioritization of capital distributions, I would just start by saying our capital management policies prior to this year’s CCAR and these year’s resolutions had us making those actions regardless of whether they were allowed to be reflected in a test. And obviously as part of the resolution planning, we have revised our policies to include more granular triggers. So, our policies do with some specificity run pretty granularly through time through a stress speak to the sorts of actions that we would be leaning into and taking even if they don’t get reflected in the test. With respect to the prioritization, look, the soft cap on dividend has been lifted. Dividends are ultimately at still a cost of the baseline minimum standard. So, there will be possibly some natural constraint there. It hasn’t changed at this point anyway, the Board’s determination or management’s determination about the order of priority we would like to continue to have the capacity to grow our dividends. And I think even though there may be some natural constraints, I think it would be above 30.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Gerard Cassidy from RBC.

Gerard Cassidy

Management

I just had a question. You pointed out that about three quarters of your credit card acquisitions organic growth coming through mobile channels or digital channels I should say. Can that be moved over to other consumer products or is it just unique to credit cards that you are going to be able to generate that much growth through the digital channel?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, we are very focused across spectrum of our businesses on developing better digital capabilities to allow seamless engagement with customers and acquisition through digital channels. There are complexities associated with documentation and standards for know your customer and anti money laundering that we’re continuing to work through but ultimately it should be achievable and we’re working on it. So, we one of the things that we’ve previously mentioned is that majority of our consumer accounts are opened in branches. One of the reasons among others why branches have been important to us as well as advice centers and we will continue to work on trying to see how far and how fast we can move people to be able to have a better digital experience opening accounts with us.

Gerard Cassidy

Management

And then as a follow-up, obviously third quarter results in investment banking were very strong, fourth quarter seasonally is weaker than third quarter as you pointed out. Are there any other reasons why you think the fourth quarter numbers may be weaker than the third quarter other than the traditional seasonality?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

I would just -- I’d start by pointing out that about all of the businesses -- all of our businesses, not just the ones that I talked about at the high level, not just macro spread equity, but even if you go a level below that quite granular, all of our businesses did really quite well this quarter. So, not to overuse the phrase, firing on all cylinders but it really was pretty consistent. And normally you might see pockets of more strength or less strength. So, I think it would be hard to imagine replicating this kind of strength through time consistently. But the fourth quarter is seasonally low; we have no reason to expect that it would not be.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Betsy Graseck from Morgan Stanley.

Betsy Graseck

Management

Hey, I just wanted to follow up on FRTB and Basel IV and how you’re thinking about the implications for JPM at this stage?

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

So, there isn’t a whole lot of really -- it’s clearly news but as we think about all of the FRTB; we talked about before modest and manageable; nothing about that has changed for us, but obviously there are the advanced and standardized credit operational proposals out there. The most important thing that we yet to really -- and there are pluses and minuses in it and it’s different for us and others maybe but the one thing that we haven’t really heard about yet that is how it will all be calibrated. And calibration will be very important. So, we are expecting to hear over the course of the next short while, and maybe that will be delayed from just given some of the discussions and we’ll update you when we hear a bit more about how it will going to come together. But right now, it’s still little unclear.

Operator

Operator

There are no other questions at this time.

Marianne Lake

Chief Financial Officer

Many thanks, everybody.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.