Bank of America Corporation

Good day, everyone, and welcome to today's Bank of America earnings announcement. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions during the question-and-answer session. You may register to ask a question at any time by pressing the star and 1 on your touchtone phone. You can remove yourself by pressing the pound key. Please note, today's call is being recorded. It's my pleasure now to turn the conference over to Lee McIntyre. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thanks for joining the call to review our second quarter results. I trust everybody's had a chance to review our earnings release documents. They're available on the investor relations section of the bankofamerica.com website. I'm going to first turn the call over to our CEO, Brian Moynihan, for some opening comments and then ask Paul D'Onofrio, our CFO, to cover some other elements of the quarter. Before I turn the call over to Brian, just let me remind you that we may make forward-looking statements during the call. And for further information on those forward-looking comments, please refer to either our earnings release documents, our website, or our SEC filings. So with that, let me turn it over to you, Brian. Thanks.

Thank you, Lee, and thank all of you for joining us for our results.

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As I stepped back and thought about talking to you this quarter, I thought back to our discussion of last quarter's results. In mid-April, as we were talking, we sat in the depths of the COVID-19 crisis. We're seeing a rise in virus cases. We completed a massive move in our company and companies around the world to work from home. We were closing branches at for safety and other facilities. We had a million customers that had already approached us by mid-April asking for assistance in terms of paying their loans. We'd seen a massive amount of commercial line draws in mid-March to mid-April and loan requests out of panic and the need to create instant liquidity. And we saw a flood of deposits looking for a safe haven at the same time. Yet at that time, the core economic projections were still catching up to the worsening predictions of the future. and the reality of the health officials' projections of the virus path and the reality of shutdown and stay-at-home orders. And now we're a quarter later. In some areas, the cases are still rising. In some areas, they're rising less. Economic predictions have been revised, and the forward path has deteriorated from last quarter. Baseline projections now extend the length of the recessionary environment into 2022, deep into 2022. We provide substantial additional reserves for expected future credit losses this quarter, to reflect that it has impacted earnings. On the other hand, there's been some encouraging signs. Consumer spending activity has vastly improved since April. Spending by Bank of America customers during 2019 was a total of $3 trillion, so it's a sizable sample of U.S. activity. For the month of April, that spending was down 26 percent compared to April of 2019. However, for the month of June, that spending was relatively flat to 2019. And so far, through the first couple weeks of July, we're seeing that total spending actually be above what it was last year. Customers and businesses have adapted to a new environment. Some have reopened, and yes, some have also been reclosed or limited again. We expect this start-stop to be the base case as we look ahead. At present, core operating assumptions for making our credit projections and our reserving are that unemployment stays elevated and ends this year at around 10%. It remains at 9% in the first half of 2021 and 7.5% at the end of 21. In that provision setting scenario mix, it takes some time until late 2022 or early 2023 for the aggregate GDP level to get to the same size it was heading into 2020. So it'll be a bit of work to get back to that level.

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The central banks around the world led by actions of the Fed provide unprecedented liquidity in the financial system. The U.S. government has also provided direct payments through unemployment supplements, EIP, the PPP program, and many other things to help American citizens weather the storm. Due to all that, a number of things are in fact different from our last quarter conversation. Panic borrowing has dissipated as the markets have provided a financing source for many companies to extend their maturities. Most companies have stabilized their operations. Draw rates and middle market lines of credit are back to levels that they were mid-last year. In the smaller business segment, they are actually down, as companies do not need the liquidity. While many companies may not like where they are in terms of revenue growth, they have stabilized. Consumers have benefited from direct stimulus and deferrals on loan payments from banks, such that delinquencies are far lower than would be predicted in an 11% unemployment scenario. Consumers have more money in their accounts. For those that received the PPP, the small business that received it at Bank of America, we estimate that the money has been spent out of the PPP proceeds at only 35% level so far. So 65% is left to be distributed from those companies to their employees and other vendors. Coronavirus assistance requests have fallen. The consumer, what we call CAP program, the weekly requests the last three weeks are down 98% from where they were in mid-April. The question we all get asked then, is when will the storm end? That is and has always been a healthcare question, not an economic one. So our job continues to be prepared for whatever the economic scenario ahead brings. And how do you get prepared? Well, it's too late to start in the second quarter of 2020. We did that through our out of 19 decade long effort to drive responsible growth in our company. Portfolios are in great shape heading into this year. And in the second quarter, we reviewed our commercial loan portfolios at a customer level across our businesses. Our risk ratings are up to date. We're moving credits quickly to criticize our MPL designations. We've also gone through every credit to assess the need that they'll have to borrow in the near term for liquidity and business prospects. On our consumer books, we also benefit from the decade-long improvement in our underwriting standards. We remain consistent. Since the virus of rising unemployment-related matters, we paired our consumer risk appetite. A key difference in our company now versus the last crisis is the unsecured card portfolio. It's basically half of what it was going into the Great Recession and with better asset quality. Another example of difference is our commercial real estate, especially the far less exposure, especially in the construction area. We saw recent stress tests prove this out again as we had the lowest losses among the large firms for the seventh out of the past eight stress tests the Fed has run. We've also improved our fortress balance sheet even from year end to today. All this amidst this crisis. We have built liquidity. Our liquidity at the end of the quarter was up $800 billion on average. It is significantly up from year end. We've doubled our credit reserves to $21 billion from where they stood at year end. We've built our capital levels, resulting in a common equity tier one ratio at the end of the quarter of 11.4% versus 11.2% at year end. And we're 190 basis points above our regulatory minimum. And as we disclosed to you after the stress test, we have room even within the stress capital buffer as we're floored at the 2.5% level despite the 2% actual calculation. We earned $7.5 billion year-to-date even as we built those reserves, and we returned $10 billion of capital to you in the first half. By the way, charge-offs to the quarter were stable, and the ratio remained low at 45 basis points this quarter, and our NPL has only increased modestly in this environment despite us scouring the portfolio for rating changes. Quarterly expenses of 13.4 billion remained in a tight four-year long range of 13 to 13.5 billion, with little exception, even as we continued our investments over the period and incurred higher COVID operating expenses. During the crisis, we also haven't lost our way on our strategic programs. During the first half, we have driven our promise as a digital leader across all our businesses. Our capabilities have enabled smooth transitions for our companies and our institutional investors and our people who we work with as customers whether they're working from home or sheltering place to transact their financial business whatever way they want to where this goes we will see our raw data has provided some signs of cautious optimism we emphasize cautious here we aren't in the reactivist state here we are being diligent and we're making sure we keep our company strong in any regard we are ready for whatever happens because the last decade of hard work on responsible growth most importantly We're ready because we have 212,000 talented teammates who work with me every day to come and do a great job for the customers, communities, and our shareholders. So let's drop into quarter two results. We're going to do slide two and slide three together, and I'd ask you to refer to that combination. The commentary on three talks about the charts on slide two. This quarter, we showed the balance in our company. Our more credit sensitive businesses saw low earnings due to provisions, and lower rates impacted our fast-growing deposit tents of businesses. Our position as a top capital markets platform for issuers and institutional investors allows us to produce solid overall results. Markets served as an anchor to Windward for the company. In the second quarter, we produced $3.5 billion of net income. This concluded building our loan reserve by $4 billion. due to a total provision expense of 5.1 billion. Earnings were 37 cents per share. Earnings are down 3.8 billion from the second quarter of last year, driven primarily by our reserve bill. As I did last quarter, I think it's useful to draw your attention to the pre-tax, pre-provision income number. We believe that number helps assess the earnings power of the company to support credit costs in the downturn. We produced 8.9 billion of pre-tax, pre-provision income which was down 9% from quarter 2019. Given the changes in interest rates and the growth of deposits and the impact it has on our company, the forgiveness and fees we've made to help accommodate our consumer customers in time of stress, and the overall lower economic activity record drops in this quarter, it shows pretty remarkable resilience. In fact, it's just below the average of pre-tax, pre-provision income for the level of the past four quarters. The 3% year-over-year decline in revenue was driven by lower NII. NII fell to $11 billion this quarter, bearing the brunt of the significant first quarter rate cuts for the entire quarter. Mitigating the revenue decline from NII was strong global markets results. Sales and trading revenues, excluding DVA, of $4.4 billion were up 35% year-over-year. Investment banking fees of $2.2 billion were a record and grew 57% year-on-year. In aggregate, we saw $1.9 billion improvement in sales and trading investment banking year-over-year. Most importantly, And we think about profit in this company. Our global markets team produced $1.9 billion in after-tax profit as a separate segment. Our non-interest expense was $13.4 billion, as I said earlier. It included roughly $400 million in net impact of expenses and savings related to COVID-19. Our return on attainable common equity was 8%. Let's go to slide four. Here we note the continuation and expansion of programs to support our teammates and clients initiated last quarter. In quarter one, we established broad measures to promote the health and safety of our teammates and help limit their exposure to COVID. In quarter two, we continued and expanded those efforts and have remained mostly in the work-from-home posture with less than 15% of our employees in offices, financial centers, and call centers around the world. We continue to provide ongoing access to comprehensive benefits and resources, such as enhanced backup childcare and adult care, services among many other supplements and incentives for frontline associates. And all those costs are in the numbers you're seeing this quarter. And we honor our commitments to hire the 2,800 students for summer jobs and permanent jobs coming out of college. Taking care of employees is the right thing to do and enables each of them to play the important role they must as providers of critical services for the U.S. economy and the worldwide economy. In addition to keeping our financial centers open to serve clients continuously through the crisis, We continue to offer assistance in our commercial consumer and small business clients affected by COVID. These actions include payment deferrals, refund of certain consumer fees, pausing certain foreclosure sales and repossessions of cars, evictions, and other matters. One noteworthy path was the PPP, the Paycheck Protection Program. We originated the largest number of loans in that program at 334,000 plus small business clients receiving a loan providing funding of $25 billion. We also supported the communities we live in. After announcement in quarter one to donate $100 million to fight the immediate effects of the pandemic, we announced a new initiative in quarter two. We recognize there are communities and certain people that have been disproportionately impacted by this healthcare crisis and the elevated racial tensions that existed for years in this country. We announced a $1 billion four-year commitment to advance issues of racial equality, economic opportunity, and healthcare initiatives. Our market presence and other leaders throughout the country are busy working to play their vital role in helping us plan how we deploy those critical funds, these critical actions. I'm proud of how my teammates serve their customers and clients during this COVID crisis, but I'm even prouder how they're playing a part more generally to help. On page five, we discussed the deferrals. The assistance program, the customer assistance program, as we call it, CAP, for our clients has provided easy access to request loan deferrals and ease their immediate financial burdens. The request built quickly, peaking in the first week of April at 415,000 requests in a single work. They started dropping from that point and have continued to drop. By mid-May, the request fell. In the last three weeks, we've been consistently 98% below that peak. In total, we processed 1.8 million consumer deferrals, with about 1.7 of those remaining as we enter July. This represents $30 billion of consumer balance with payments on deferral. The largest number of processed deferrals, as you can see, are credit card holders. Another area to concentrate a request is the practice solution group in small business. Let me provide a little deeper insight into these categories. You can see it on the lower right-hand part of the slide. On credit card, 85% of deferrals were initiated in late March or early April and has died down since then. 95% that initiated were current on the payments when the deferral was requested. More than 60% of the active card deferrals have made at least one payment since going on deferral. One-third have made every payment every month. As we look forward, if there are no other major changes to consumer spending habits or major macro deterioration, we'd expect card deferrals to decline significantly in quarter three given the expiration. in these payment observations.

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Importantly, our credit reserving that you see in our P&L today reflects the individual credit characteristics of all these deferred borrowers and the higher risk they propose. Small businesses where we saw the highest percentage of accounts requesting assistance. As you may recall, last quarter we talked about this. These requests came from our business practice solutions group. These are mostly dentists and doctors who were shut down during the crisis but now are open. As they reopen, our internal survey shows that 80% of these borrowers, as of a few weeks ago, were all back to work with steady revenue. In our contacts with accounts, 90% indicated no elevated level of continued distress and informed us they'll need not to continue their referral. And while not in this charter, deferrals for commercial accounts amounted roughly 2% of our loans, but only 1% of those are unsecured. And through conversations with these borrowers, we do not expect many of these to request a second deferral. Now moving on to slide six for consumer spending. After a significant slowdown in consumer spending in April, we began to see signs of improvement beginning in May. And while sterilely, we have seen momentum in early July. The chart on slide six shows a seven-day moving average of payments and compares that to the same week last year. There are three lines representing credit, debit, and total spending. Again, credit is about 12%. Debit is about the same amount. And total spending is obviously the $3 trillion I talked about before. Overall, in the first couple months of the year, in a healthier U.S. economy, payments were running at a high single-digit percentage pace ahead of the same period in 2019. That changed the pandemic spread and the economy shut down. We saw a severe decline across all payment types, particularly in discretionary spending on categories like travel, leisure, and entertainment, which drives credit card spending to lower levels than other forms of payment, including debit card. This was followed by large increases in payments for necessities around groceries and staples like health supplies. But you can see those payments were made largely with debit cards or cash. As states began to reopen over the past couple of months, we saw an improvement in spending levels as customers became more active, buying fuel and spending on home projects and eating out. Much of that improvement has been paid through debit usage as customers saw stimulus payments and other assistance in their checking accounts. On a monthly basis, comparing spending to the prior year's month, April 20 was down 26% from April 19. May was down 13% from May 19. And as I said earlier, June returned to basically flat. We had seen some spending leveling off on a weekly basis as COVID cases rose recently in hot spots around the country, causing municipalities and states to pause further on further phases of reopening or impose more restrictions. But even with that, July is actually running ahead of last year and is much higher during the shutdown periods of early April and May. It appears consumers are demonstrating they're quickly adapting to the environment by changing shopping habits and moving back and forth between physical and online as needed and are doing the same with delivery and takeout restaurants as restrictions change. We continue to monitor this behavior every day and accept and expect that there'll be starts and stops as you see the ebbs and flows of cases and people's and government's reactions to them. And also until we learn to operate in this new normal. Let us go to lending activity on page seven, slide seven. Here we see that the borrowing credit shows modest growth beyond the commercial activity involving loans and pay downs. We've seen some modest recovery in some consumer loan applications which all dropped in April. As you can see, during the quarter, total loans declined $52 billion from the end of quarter one, but there's several dynamics worth mentioning, including the sale of $9 billion of mortgage loans. Within commercial, excluding PPP activity, loans grew $5 billion year-to-date as clients paid down $62 billion of the $67 billion loan growth in quarter one. While this isn't good for the balance sheet and loan growth, it is a good sign, as many borrowers in quarter one accessed emergency or panic borrowing to get liquidity, but have since paid those funds back. Or they've accessed the capital markets and turned out the financing, many of which we were able to assist in helping them do. As I said earlier, revolver usage has returned to levels in our middle market business about where it was last year, and it's lower than those levels in our business banking business. Consumer lending shows solid residential mortgage growth, but a decline in credit card during the spending levels I described earlier. The point is there are a lot of COVID-related activity, but underneath that, we'll stop. There were some underlying demands for loans in the first half of the year. Mortgage apps continue to be solid despite conservative price and credit at Bank of America. We've also seen auto loan apps fight their way back to the levels they were pre-crisis as dealers have opened and people have bought cars. And last, I would note that we continue to supply capital to these customers. Our total commitments have been consistent to our commercial customers. They've remained above a trillion dollars throughout all these periods. And year to date, we've approved nearly $160 billion in new expanded commercial commitments for our customers to help them weather the storm. On deposits, we talked about those in slide eight. We've seen impressive client activity, and that activity has continued during the quarter across every single line of business. Since the end of 2019, total deposits have risen $284 billion to more than $1.7 trillion. It's also worth noting that the disciplined pricing with rates paid moved from 44 basis points paid to the customer to nine basis points as short rates declined. Consumer deposits grew $123 billion, or 17%. Sixty-nine percent of that growth has been checking, further cementing our position as a leading core transactional bank for American consumers. Global banking deposits have risen $118 billion, or 31%. Our wealth management deposits are up $29 billion, or 11%. Customers continue to value our company as a core partner. Importantly, and on slide nine we'll talk about this, it's the last thing I'll mention before I turn it over to Paul to go more in-depth in numbers, is our clients' digital uses.

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Our customers value the years of continuous investment and innovation as they found an ever-increasing need for our digital capabilities in a covered environment. Providing this proves once again that we are a digital bank and a physical bank. In consumer, there are many examples, and I'll touch on a few. Digital logins were 2.3 billion logins in the quarter, and have increased 20% in the past 12 months. The average logins per user is also up 14%, demonstrating engagement in quantity of users and depth of use by those users. More customers discovered these. Convenience and safety of opening accounts digitally, as the number of units sold digitally increased 20% since last year, representing 47% of sales. We added over a million new mobile check deposit users, surprising 22% of those being baby boomers or seniors who have been traditionally hard-earned engaged digitally. This engagement effort to keeping our physical centers and call centers running have our customer satisfaction running at all times high at Bank of America. On a commercial side, we've seen an equally impressive growth in our users and usage as commercial users have the need for similar conveniences while in a work-from-home mode. And wealth management, in addition to convenient online banking capability and increased engagement, we utilize WebEx and other methods to have secure video conference applications engaged with our clients, which result in household growth in our wealth management business, even during the crisis. Digital logins across Merrill clients were up more than 100% year-over-year, and 39% of checks deposited were digitally versus less than 25% last year. If you look on slide 10, this looks at the more active consumer segment. I think a lot of you focus on single-purpose payment providers. I want to draw your attention to the top right chart for Zelle to illuminate how much money is moving through our customers through that system. We now have 11 million customers actively using Zelle every month, adding 3 million in just the past 12 months alone. And you can see in the chart we nearly doubled the volume of transactions every year for the past four years to now more than 117 million transactions in the quarter. And that volume has resolved near doubling the dollars used to $32 billion in transfers during this quarter. That's impressive gains given the fact that total payment volumes have dropped. And Zelle has freed our industry's clients and benefits our shareholders through lower costs. Above all, it's better for our customers. And with that, let me turn it over to Paul.

Thank you, Brian. I'm going to start on slide 11 with the balance sheet. Our balance sheet ended the quarter at $2.7 trillion in total assets. increasing $122 billion since the end of Q1, driven by a surge in deposits. During Q2, deposits grew by $135 billion, while loans declined by $52 billion as commercial borrowers repaid much of their lines. Excess liquidity continued to be invested predominantly in cash and cash equivalents. Shareholders' equity increased modestly as earnings exceeded distributions to shareholders. With respect to regulatory ratios, for the past two years, our CET1 ratio under the standardized approach has been binding, but this quarter, the ratio under the advanced approach is lower and therefore binding. Our CET1 ratio under the standardized approach improved 80 basis points link quarter to 11.6% primarily driven by an $86 billion decline in RWA. This RWA decline was mainly driven by commercial loan paydowns as well as lower credit card balances. In addition, we early adopted the standardized approach for counterparty credit risk, aka SACR, for derivatives. Our CET1 ratio under the advanced approach improved to 11.4 percent as RWA under advanced declined modestly. Also this quarter, we received our preliminary stress capital buffer, or SCB, from the Federal Reserve pursuant to our CCAR results. Our stress depletion was approximately 150 basis points. And including the dividend add-on, our SEB was a little under 2%. However, as you know, SEBs are floored at 2.5%. So our minimum standardized and advanced CET1 requirement is 9.5% and remained unchanged. The capital cushion above our 9.5% CET1 minimum was $28 billion at quarter end. The CET1 ratio under the advanced approach became our binding ratio primarily due to the impact on RWA of the migration of corporate credit risk ratings under the advanced approach. Our TLAC ratios increased and remained comfortably above our minimum requirements. Turning to slide 12 in net interest income, on a GAAP non-FT basis, NII and Q2 was $10.8 billion, $11 billion on an FTE basis. Net Interest Income declined $1.3 billion for both Q1 2020 as well as Q2 2019. As we noted on our Q1 call and experience this quarter, NII fell to roughly $11 billion this quarter as variable rate assets repriced lower following a more than 100 basis point decline in average one month LIBOR from Q1. Other notable NII headwinds in the quarter include roughly $300 million of higher premium amortization on our asset-backed securities given a lower rate environment and a decline in higher-yielding credit card balances. These negative impacts were partially offset by deposit growth coupled with lower deposit pricing. The addition of PPP loans in the quarter was marginally, it also marginally aided NAI, as did lower global markets funding costs. Given the sharp decline in NAI, coupled with the increase in the balance sheet driven by deposit growth.

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Net interest yields declined notably quarter over quarter by 46 basis points. Looking at the bottom right chart, the largest driver of that decline was lower interest rates quarter over quarter. Another large impact was the increase in deposits, which is modestly helping NII, but diluting net interest yield, given that most of the excess funding in Q2 was invested in cash or cash equivalents, earning only 10 or 15 basis points. We continue to assess uncertainty with respect to the duration of these deposits. Two other elements diluted net interest yield. They are the higher level of premium amortization and the lower balances of high-yielding credit cards. In terms of forward NAI guidance, we believe the largest impact from the interest rate declines occurred in Q2 as expected. As we enter Q3, we face a headwind from the paydowns of commercial loans, which could reduce NAI by a couple of hundred million dollars. And as a reminder, NAI will be impacted by the long end of the curve as our securities portfolio continues to reprice lower. Beyond Q3, NAI stability, absent material changes from the economic conditions, will be dependent on asset growth and or redeployment of deposits into higher yielding securities rather than cash. Beyond NII, as Brian mentioned, the balance and diversity of our revenue streams combined with strong expense management has supported pre-tax, pre-provision income despite the unprecedented decline in interest rates. I would also just remind you that short-term rates were near zero in 2014 and 2015 before rates rose. In those years, we produced solid profits. Plus today, we have $150 billion in higher loan balances and $500 billion in higher deposit balances, which will benefit NII versus those periods. Turning to slide 13 and expenses. At $13.4 billion this quarter, expenses were modestly lower than Q120. For three years now, Despite investments in areas such as technology, sales professionals, marketing, philanthropy, new or renovated financial centers, expanded benefits, and increased minimum wage, we have managed expenses well and have operated in a tight range of $13 to $13.5 billion in expense each quarter outside of the impairment charge taken in Q319. This quarter was no exception. Even with the added cost related to COVID-19. In Q2, we estimate that COVID-related spending versus COVID-related savings netted to an increase in expense totaling $400 million. We will be working hard to reduce this cost as we move through this crisis, while at the same time ensuring that our customers and employees are safe. The higher cost of COVID was mostly offset by the absence of elevated payroll tax when comparing total non-interest expense to Q1. With respect to expenses beyond Q2, please note that on July 1st, we began accounting for merchant services provided directly to our customers versus through a joint venture. Accordingly, beginning in Q3, we will record revenue and expense for these operations separately as opposed to netting them under the equity method of accounting. As a result, we expect the expense for this business to add roughly $200 million per quarter to our expense run rate. Additional revenue for merchant services in the near term should be roughly $100 million a quarter, improving as the economy recovers and operations become even more fully integrated, driving increased value for clients. We are excited to integrate merchant services into our lines of business. Merchant services is an important product for many of our clients, from small businesses to large multinationals, who rely on accepting credit and debit cards for significant portions of their revenue. As such, it is core to transactional banking and working capital management. Because our LOBs enjoy leading market share across both consumers and businesses, We can innovate, connect, and provide services that add value across the spectrum of payment users, including offering innovations in expedited settlement, enhanced authorization, lease cost routing, liquidity management, credit, FX data analytics, and many other products. Our new proprietary platform is flexible, resilient, and enables us to grow and facilitate the evolution of the payment ecosystem as the marketplace evolves. Turning to asset quality on slide 14, our underwriting standards have been responsible and strong for many years now, and we expect this fact to benefit us as we advance through this health crisis. One independent indicator of the relative quality of our balance sheet is the Federal Reserve's annual CCAR stress test. Our net charge-off ratio under this year's stress test was once again the lowest of our peers and has been the lowest in seven of the last eight years. Total net charge-offs this quarter were 1.1 billion or 45 basis points of average loans. Net charge-offs rose 24 million from Q1 with an uptick in commercial losses mostly offset by lower consumer losses. Provision expense was 5.1 billion. Our reserve bill of $4 billion reflects a weaker economic outlook since the end of Q1, which impacted expected future losses. While we saw increases in commercial reservable criticize exposures impacted by the virus, overall credit thus far has been better than expected as NPLs only rose modestly.

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Versus our expectations, as the economy reopened, we saw lower deferral requests, better payment trends from the stress borrowers, a slower pace of commercial downgrades towards the end of the quarter. and faster payments of line draws than we anticipated. On slide 15, we break out our credit quality metrics for both our consumer and commercial portfolios. On the consumer front, COVID effects on asset quality remain benign. This is driven by deferrals extended to consumer borrowers, coupled with government stimulus for individuals and small businesses. Consumer net charge-offs declined 138 million, which is partially attributable to a deferral, which should provide a better chance of recovery with stimulus and other assistance. In commercial, we saw 162 million increase in net charge-offs with concentrations in commercial real estate and energy. Our commercial loan book, excluding small business, ended the quarter at 88% investment-grade, or collateralized. One could see COVID's impact more clearly in Reservable Criticized Exposures, which increased $9 billion from Q1. This increase was driven, not surprisingly, by exposures to cruise lines, restaurants, real estate, and retailing. Turning to slide 16, this table provides a full picture of our allowance bill since year-end 2019. As you can see, our allowance, including reserves for unfunded commitments, was $10 billion at year end and has doubled to more than $21 billion, while our overall loan balances are relatively flat. Note that we ended Q2 with an allowance to loans and leases of 2%. I would also note the coverage ratio for credit card increased to 11%. Total commercial loans increased to 1.6%. and CRE rose to 11.5% excuse me, 3.5%. These ratios reflect our loan mix with consumer concentrated in secured loans with consistent high underwriting standards which for the past 10 years has focused on high FICO borrowers with whom we have strong relationships. It also reflects the investment grade nature of our commercial portfolio with strong payment and debt servicing characteristics. Our increase in reserves from Q1 reflect an outlook based upon the most recent economic consensus estimates. In addition, we continue to include downside scenarios. Awaiting of these new scenarios produced a recessionary outlook with a deeper decline and gap to return to positive GDP. It is worth noting that if one looks at the Fed's stress credit losses in the latest CCAR and just assumes that we have pushed all those losses into reserves today, our CET1 ratio would still be above 10.25% versus our minimum of 9.5%. There remain many unknowns including how government fiscal and monetary actions will impact the outcome and how our own deferral programs will impact losses. But perhaps the biggest uncertainty is how long economic activity and conditions will be significantly impacted by the virus. Okay, turning to the business segments and starting with consumer banking on slide 17. Despite the enormous financial challenges of various COVID-related impacts, including dramatically lower rates, fee reductions, higher provision, and increased expense, the business remained profitable in the quarter. And as Brian discussed, this health crisis has proven the value of our high-tech and high-tech strategy. The significant investments and innovation in our digital capabilities have been a valuable resource for our customers, complementing investments in our financial centers and differentiating us from peers. Provision expense reflected higher expected future losses from the worsened economic conditions. And note that net charge-offs in the period actually declined. So much of the financial burden of expected future losses were incurred in the first half of this year. And because of deferrals, significant charge-offs in this segment are not likely until the end of this year or later. Revenue in this business absorbed the brunt of the company's NAI decline as the segment has the bulk of our deposits. And this segment also bore the brunt of the fee waivers negatively impacting revenue. Card fees were down as a result of lower spending activity as well as fee waivers. Service charges were down as well due to fee waivers and fewer overdraft and related fees as a result of increased balances in customers' accounts. With respect to expenses, as you know, banking is considered an essential service, and across the country, we have managed to keep 60% of our financial centers open. The team worked through enormous challenges in the first half of the year to assure ongoing service, which has been a daily balance, between the service our customers need and the safety of our employees as well as customers. Our costs reflect this balancing act. We've added roles to service calls and manage digital interactions, not only for existing products and services, but also for small business applications to the paycheck protection program. Many of these additional personnel worked from home. We also continued to invest in the franchise. We added salespeople in addition to the associates to handle customer calls that I just mentioned. We renovated and added financial centers, and we increased minimum wages. The expense from these investments continued to be mitigated, at least in part, by process improvements, digitalization, and technology improvements. Client momentum continued as we saw average deposits rise 104 billion or 15% from Q2 2019. Even more impressive was the fact that 70% of this growth was in checking accounts as clients received stimulus, delayed their tax payments, and slowly are ramping up spending. Average loans increased 8% driven by mortgage demand in this low rate environment. Mortgage growth was mitigated by a decline in credit card and other consumer balances. We continue to add consumer investment accounts and see strong flows into our Merrill Edge platform. In Q2, we added 9% more customer investment accounts this year than last year, with more than 30% of those added digitally. AUM rose 17% driven by flows and market valuation. Let's skip slide 18 and move to wealth management as I think we've covered most of the trends already. So, referring to wealth management and to wealth, to global wealth and investment management on slide 19 and 20. Here again, you saw lower rates as COVID-related credit costs impact an otherwise solid quarter with good AOM flows as well as strong deposit and loan growth. Merrill Lynch and the private bank both continue to grow clients as we remained a provider of choice for affluent clients. Despite our Salesforce working from home in Q2, we added nearly 6,000 net new households and Merrill Lynch and nearly 500 net new relationships in the private bank. Total client balances rose to 2.9 trillion from Q1, driven by the rebound in equity markets. Compared to a year ago, they are up 1% driven by strong growth in deposits, AUM flows, and loans. Net income of $624 million was down 42%, driven by a 10% decline in revenue, as well as higher provision expense. The revenue decline was driven equally by lower NII, as well as fees. Non-interest income decreased 7%, driven by lower transactional revenues and lower asset management fees driven by market valuations, partially offset by the benefit of AUM flows. Expenses were stable year over year as investments made in the past 12 months in sales professional and technology were offset by lower revenue-related incentives and net savings associated with COVID. Provision expense increased from reserves built for future COVID-related net charge-offs while current net charge-offs remained low. Moving to global banking on slides 21 and 22. As noted earlier, global banking saw strong average loan growth from Q1 line draws, record deposit levels, and record investment banking fees. But those benefits were not enough to offset the impact of low rates and higher provision expense as a result of COVID. The business earned $726 million, falling $1.2 billion from Q2 2019, but this included adding $1.5 billion to the allowance for credit losses this quarter. On a pre-tax, pre-provision basis, results improved 4% year over year, driven by record investment banking results. In Q2, we were able to improve notably both our investment banking revenue and market share for the second straight quarter. Investment banking fees of 2.2 billion were up 57% year over year. This record result included records in both investment grade as well as equity capital markets. While average loans are up 14% from Q219, I would note that repayment of Q1 draws built significantly as the quarter progressed, which will be an headwind to NII in Q3. I would also note that new loan origination spreads increased quarter over quarter and year over year. At the same time, we continue to see strong growth in deposits, which were up 131 billion or 36 percent even as the rate paid decline following the decline in LIBOR rates. Rates paid are now back to a level seen at the end of 2015 just before rates began to rise. Growth in investment banking fees, loans, and deposits reflect not only what we believe to be a flight to quality, but also the addition of hundreds of bankers over the past few years increasing and improving our client coverage. Turning to digital on slide 23, as we have already covered most of the important points around loan and deposit activity on 22, as in consumer and GOM, our digital capabilities are more important and useful than ever in this health crisis, enabling clients to work from home and seamlessly manage their treasury needs. And it's no surprise that in this environment, we would continue to see increased use of these capabilities. Switching to global markets on slide 24. Our teams formed well in an unusual environment, producing the best quarter of revenue since the first quarter of 2012. We saw the fixed income market mostly strengthened through the quarter and prices recovered from Q1 with particular strength in credit products. As I usually do, I will talk about results excluding DVA. This quarter, net DVA was a loss of $261 million. Global markets produced $2.1 billion of earnings in Q2, nearly doubling the prior year's period, and increased 42% from solid Q1 results. Year over year, revenue was up 34% from higher sales and trading results and improved investment banking P's. partially offset by the absence of a gain on an equity investment which occurred in Q219. Expenses were well controlled and flat compared to Q219. Within sales and trading, excuse me, within revenue, sales and trading improved 35% year over year driven by a 50% improvement in FIC and a 7% improvement in equities compared to Q1 Sales and trading revenue also improved as growth in FIC linked quarter overcame a decline in equities from a record in Q1. Trading comparisons to Q2 19 for FIC reflected better trading performance across all products, both macro and credit. FIC results benefited from improved client flows, credit spread tightening, lower funding costs, and asset prices, which rallied through the quarter. Equity revenue was driven by stronger performance in cash and client financing, partially offset by a weaker performance in derivatives. On slide 25, note the half year comparisons, which show sales and trading up 28% year over year, but otherwise pretty stable over the past several years at around 7 billion. Finally, on slide 26, we show all other which reported a profit of 216 million. Revenue benefited from a gain of $704 million from the sale of $9 billion in mortgage loans, which drove the improvement in revenue from Q1. Our effective tax rate this quarter was 7%, reflecting the 11% tax rate expected for the rest of 2020 due to the greater impact of tax credits related to tax advantage investments on lower pre-tax income, as well as the related adjustment to the year-to-date tax rate. Okay, with that, let's open it up for questions.

And at this time, if you would like to ask a question, press the star and one on your touchtone telephone. Star and one on your touchtone phone. We'll go first to Glenn Shore with Evercore. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi, thanks very much. Two quick clarifications. On your net interest income comments of down a couple hundred million, I'm assuming that is off the current base. And then do we stabilize from there? I heard your comments about depending on how we assess the duration of and stickiness of the deposits. So maybe you could talk about how do you assess the duration? It sounds good, but I don't know how you, if clients can help you assess that. But how do you assess the duration and stickiness of the deposit? And what would you redeploy into if you thought that they were somewhat sticky?

Yes. So just to be clear, we're talking about a couple of hundred million off of, you know, from Q2 to Q3. I won't repeat all the kind of drivers of that. You know, beyond Q3, the growth of NI is going to be dependent upon sort of asset growth and redeployment of deposits. into higher yielding securities. We've added $284 billion in deposits since year end. All of that has gone into cash, earning 10 basis points. So, you know, as we assess the future of this pandemic, as we kind of assess how much of that is going to stick around, and we get a little bit more confident on those two elements, That can be deployed into securities or a portion of it, let's say, can be deployed into securities. And, you know, there's a big difference even in these rates between what you can earn on a mortgage-backed security or a treasury bond and 10 basis points. So there's some opportunity there, but I think you have to be thoughtful about it. And it's one of those things I think you know when you see it.

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Got it. Maybe a similar question on expenses. The $400 million in COVID... related expense. I'm assuming that's a combination of PPP and work from home related things. Does that roll off starting now? Does that stick around? I want to get to the core number that we're adding the 200 of merchant servicing expenses on top of. Thanks.

Yeah, sure. So as we said, we're sort of estimating that if you take all the increases from COVID related spending and all the decreases, you're at a net $400 million. If you think about all those increases, it's not just PPP. There's supplemental pay. There's child care. There's masks. There's food. There's more financial guards at our financial centers. You've got all the PPP-related expenses. You've got all the tech expenses, moving people, virtually all our employees moving to work from home. You've got some offsets in terms of travel and other employee expenses in terms of meetings. That all kind of nets down this quarter to $400 million. We're going to work on that. I don't think you can say it's all going to go away in Q3, but we're going to work on those expenses as we move forward. But of course, we're going to make sure anything we do, we're not jeopardizing the safety of our customers and employees. So we think there's some, you know, opportunity there.

Okay, last one. The Wealth Management Reserve bill, I wonder if you could talk about the profile of those loans. you know, how much of that is to things like a building for a wealthy individual that there's a corporation just curious on what in wealth management would require that build.

And most of it's mortgages.

And there's some commercial lending in there, but it's all very high quality and, you know, personal wealthy people's loans and some are, you know, they were 30 percent of our mortgage originations this quarter uh beta the 20th and so you know the significant mortgage book and that picks up some and just the estimates whether it happens or not it's a separate question but we feel good about that portfolio but it's just uh the same factors applied to the rest of the portfolios applied in that business okay appreciate it when we look at things like real estate we look at things like real estate exposure we consider real estate exposure in that business of people who have buildings and things we're talking about there's Going back, Glenn, to the many years, there's no hidden sort of real estate exposure in a wealth management business. It's handled as real estate.

Understood. Thanks, Brian. Next question is from Mike Mayo with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Hey, Brian. You mentioned July activity is above last year. Is that right? Yes. I just a little bit more color on the green shoots. Um, seems like, you know, the trends are all in your favor, but I'm just wondering if that's backwards looking, uh, and many of your markets like Florida or Texas or California, I mean, that's where you're big, you're seeing an increase in COVID cases. And, you know, I guess that leads to death and that leads to shutdown. So from an on the ground perspective, You know, do you expect these green shoots to continue? What advice do you give, you know, the governors in those states? How does it all shake out?

You know, the first advice we give to everybody is try to be safe. The faster you can get the environment to tip over, as you've seen in some of the hotspots we talked about last, you know, last April. You can see the activity pick up, but just to be very precise, the data through the 14th of July, so that's about as recent as you might be able to get, is up over last year. If you look in the first two weeks of July, it fell a little bit in Texas and places like that, but it's still 25% higher as an aggregate than where they were in the shutdown phase. It'll plateau a little bit, Mike, I think, and you'll see that ebb and flow. But there are other activities that just overwhelm, you know, what you see in terms of the bars closing and stuff, just the general activities, the improvement in people's homes, spending on their homes. And you saw some of the data today that supports that in the retail sales numbers. So, yes, it's flattened a little bit because, you know, flattening a credit card, you'll see that more dramatically because the credit card spending goes on in restaurants and and travel and stuff, but just in the last couple of weeks, it fell mid-single-digit percentages, I think, in Texas and Florida, but it's still 25% compared to the weeks before the reopening. It's 25% up, so we'll see it play out. It's hard to be any more down-to-date than July 14th.

And then a separate question, I guess you've added more to your reserve, what, $8 billion added to your reserves the last two quarters, another $4 billion this quarter. Pretty remarkable. And your net charge-off ratio is flat quarter to quarter. Talk about a disconnect. However, maybe it's not a disconnect. So I guess this is a tough question. But what would your charge-offs be? What would your NPAs be? if you didn't have the forbearance in place like if it if it ended tomorrow and you had to recognize the fourth set of the problems just in a sense of order or order of magnitude would it be you know five percent higher ten percent higher fifty percent higher what uh just to give you a simple answer if you in a little bit mike will always depend on timing because you think about credit cards and there's a roll rate to them as you well know but just for the second quarter i think the number

would have been, you know, another 40 million higher if you took all this stuff and assume, you know, the payment behavior took place, but there was no deferral and says 40 million on what six, 700 million bucks. So it's, it's, it's something small, interesting enough for the non-deferred customers, the delinquency quarter to quarter actually went down 15 or 20 basis points or the non-deferred customer, excuse me, the non-deferred customers. So 90% of people in cars that didn't defer, their delinquency went down quarter to quarter. And so as you think about that, you know, it's a mixed bag. The other thing that's inherent in your question is all of us getting used to CECL versus, you know, the old methods of providing, which is, you know, you provide for a lifetime and then the losses are going to come later down the road by definition or else you haven't had a CECL provision. So, you know, you'll see the actual losses come in later in later quarters. But you're right. Right now, we are seeing nothing that is consistent with an 11% unemployment rate in the actual consumer payment behavior. And that has to do with the stimulus and things that it's helping at the margins quite substantially. So it's hard to predict because there's a lot of factors in it, but that's kind of the data points I give you to give you a sense of it.

And just last follow-up, I mean, clearly the stock market based on your stock price, you know, doesn't believe you. They think your customers are a lot weaker. Are we just not seeing it yet? I mean, you know, two or three quarters from now, are we going to say, ah, it was a lot worse than we expected? Or do you think this is going to play out and that, like, actually the borrowers are in better shape than people realize?

I think, you know, part of this will play out in terms of how – the path forward on phase four stimulus and everything occurs. But even on the commercial side, if you look, our, uh, uh, the MPLs went up, you know, uh, 350 million or something on a commercial MPLs to the quarter and 40 basis points. So even on the commercial side, and we went through, we asked our team to go through every commercial bar and our business banking and our middle market segment, which is, you know, tens of thousands of borrowers and assess everyone and re-rate them, make sure they're all up to date, make sure you just really go work on it when they were at home and not able to do as much. And they've gone through that book and what you see criticized moved up and that's expected. The actual non-performers aren't. And so those commercial customers are adapting and you're seeing it. So I think we basically have looked at the assessment, the provision setting, methodology is, as we said, 10% unemployment year-end, 9% first half of next year, gets down to 7.5%, so it's not a rosy picture in a lot of ways. And the proof is, you know, we give all this data to the Fed, as Paul said, and they do a stress test, and under those scenarios, you know, our losses run, I don't know, 4%, 4.7%, you know, and And we're sitting with 2% reserves today. And we're not in that scenario in terms of actual payment behavior by customers or delinquencies or in cash. And that has to do with it. The stimulus is different in this crisis than it's ever been. It was given directly to consumers to sustain their ability to carry their day-to-day expenses. All right. Thank you.

It's obviously, Mike, it's obviously hard to see data yet, right? But there are some clues out there. And you can start looking at those clues across the industry. And, you know, you mentioned one of them. Let's just look at losses. You can look at NPL growth. You can look at reserve crit growth. And then, as Brian just said, I mean, it's not like this is one time where our loss ratios and the Fed stress tests have been the lowest among peers. They've done eight exams. Every one of those exams is kind of different. They did this thing and that one and stressed this thing more and that other one and changed something else in the next one. Seven out of eight of them, no matter what they changed, no matter what they did, we had the lowest loss rate. So there is some evidence out there if you look carefully at it.

All right.

Thanks again.

Next question is from Jim Mitchell with Seaport Global. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning. Maybe Brian, just to follow up on your corporate credit comment. If you look at your MPLs, you absolutely had the least amount of increase quarter over quarter versus your peers and appreciate your comments that you did really a real micro as opposed to macro look at every individual loan. So when we think about that, do you think it's your performance is more to do with the fact that you took a micro look rather than some peers maybe doing a macro look? Or is it really just your higher exposure to investment grade, your industry mix? And how do you think about the massive amount of capital raising in the second quarter and the liquidity that provides to corporate borrowers and how you factor that in? Just that's it. Thanks.

I'm not sure where it is in that sequence, but it's the latter part of it, which is that, you know, basically it's the quality of the portfolio. So our commercial real estate exposure, as Paul said earlier, is much higher it's not going into last crisis. We had $14 billion or something of, you know, construction related for housing construct. We have like 400 million or something like that, you know, very little. So the kinds of exposure to get, you know, get pulled on pretty quickly. And remember, we took a lot of charge us in the first quarter for, for gas company exposure, a couple hundred million Paul. And, you know, those, you know, so we've been taking care of the portfolio. So it's not a macro micro, it's actually just the quality of what we, have done in client selection across the last decade gets us there. And that's why you see differences in the rates and the stress tests and other things. But that's responsible growth, and we built this company. So there will be an adamantine in all times and a fortress, and that's how we built it. And we'll see where this all goes. But remember that our SCB is under the floor. There's a lot of objective third-party evidence. that shows, and that has a lot to do with our mix of businesses and how we build them.

Yeah, absolutely. And then maybe on deposit growth, it continues to be, I think, surprisingly strong. appreciate the comments of not sure how it holds up and you're holding it in cash for now. But when you think about, is there any kind of trends throughout the quarter, you know, as the stimulus money got paid, do you see deposit growth slowing or are you seeing it turn negative lately? How do we think about the ability for those, at least near term, what are you seeing in terms of deposits over the last month?

Well, and I'll let Paul talk a little bit. about this in the commercial side especially because he used to run that business for us a long time ago before we got him to be CFO. But the reality is the place we're uncertain is in the large cash inflows from corporate customers that you're not sure when they're going to start using the money and redeploy the money. And you want them to, frankly. We should want them to redeploy that money into the economy as opposed to – having drawn or raised money in the markets and have it sitting on a balance sheet. So that's the real volatility question is when do those companies move some money out for higher yield because some of the money markets are settling in with a little more yield to them and things like that, and stability allows them to think about putting it off a bank balance sheet. So that's the volatility question in terms of deposits is around that. But we look at consumer just to give you a sense. The You link quarter growth and consumer checking was 50 billion. We had 180,000 net new checking accounts. You're up almost 900,000. Those are numbers that are normal quarters sort of net production. I think we might have been 250 or something like that in a quarter like this. And so what's happened is we still are building up that core consumer base, and the average amount in accounts are up 12%, 20%. Some of that's been spent down. We think all the EIP-type stimulus is largely out of people's accounts. It's been gone through the system. Obviously, the unemployment supplements for the limited number of customers we have, you know, that's a small, you know, in any group that's, you know, 10% of the population, so it's smaller than the whole. But, you know, you're seeing that stimulus was, that $1,200 type stimulus came in one out of people's accounts pretty much. On the small business, you're seeing the PPP, 65% to be spent, which is also good because that's future stimulus to be deployed. And so if you think about all those pieces, I would focus more on this Paul's comments about understanding whether this deposit is going to stick is more of a commercial question and a large corporate question than it is a wealth management consumer question. Because what's going on behind this is we've ground out another, even with 40% of our branches shut down due to the environment, we have ground out digital sales and digital growth and even non-digital growth to the tune of 108,000 new core checking accounts with average balance moving up in 92% core. And that's stick-to-your-ribs money, and we'll deploy that over time. But you had to make sure that, like all of you, we're worried about where we go next, and that's why we're trying to keep the liquidity position that might run out of here for the client's purposes or whatever. So, Paul, I think all the volatility comments are really around the institutional side of it.

Yeah, I'm not sure that anything, Brian, maybe just a macro point of obviously, if the money supply grows, more our deposit balance is going to go up. And, you know, when you look at in addition, when you look at the Treasury's bank account at the Fed, it's got an enormous balance way higher than usual. And, you know, my guess is some of that's going to end up in the private sector as well. So there was some perhaps some macro forces that would suggest that the positive balances are going to grow at banks and we're going to get our fair share. There are a couple little just tiny things about the third quarter that's worth reminding people. You know, tax payments were delayed and they're going to get paid in the third quarter. Plus, we're all hoping, as Brian says, that spending continues to increase. And so some of that excess money that's sitting in people's accounts may get spent both on the corporate and consumer side. And then in GWIM, you've just got, you know, a lot of deposits came out of the market and went into deposit accounts. And if markets continue to feel good to people, you expect to see some of that come out of deposits and go back into the market.

All right. Well, that's all really helpful. Thanks.

Our next question is from Betsy Grosick with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. A couple of follow-ups there. One on the points that you were making about the deposits. It's interesting that you had all those drawdowns and paybacks, but the deposits didn't leave yet. That's basically what you're referring to, right?

Yeah, Betsy, that's the interesting point. You'd expect if they paid them back, you'd have seen it. But other cash came into those companies and it came on the books. And I think we grabbed more than our fair share. Nothing to do with the consumer side, but an institutional side. It's been interesting because our predictions would have been that we'd have seen the deposits decline already and they haven't.

So my two questions, one's on just the forbearance and the waivers. Can you give us an update as to how you're dealing with those? Do they roll off automatically? Are you going person by person? You know, how should I be modeling this fee waiver fading? Is it, you know, going to come back? Do you kick it back in? And I mean, do you stop a few waivers in 3Q or is it going to be more of a phase in through 2021? Just help us understand how you're dealing with that.

I think leave aside mortgage has different aspects because of statutes and stuff. The rest of the lending side stuff begins, especially like the small business, as I said earlier, really runs off as we speak. And then some of the other products run through. Yeah, we're always going to help consumers in distress. So if somebody calls up and says, you know, I'm unemployed and I can't work and stuff, we're going to work with them and we're going to work on both on the fee side and on the collection side, for lack of a better term. But our view from the start was we want to have that dialogue with the consumer to help figure out where they stand. And so that activity starts to pick up. The waivers, by definition, were 90 days and things they roll off. But what you'll get away from is people who did it out of panic, which When you see somebody's paid every, every month, obviously they didn't need the waiver. You know, those people roll off and disappear and you'll get down to the people that you need to actually help that are unemployed and struggling and we'll help, you know, we'll work with them like we always do in our collection efforts. So that's the sort of credit side of the thing. And in the big numbers, when we move, you know, the numbers of requests, I said, have dropped 98%. So it's really nothing. If you look at our percentages relative to Industry and mortgage were lower across the board, 200 basis points, 150 basis points in terms of requests and stuff, so we feel good about that. When you get to the fees, you know, this is really going to come down to this. We went into this thinking about it as a bit of a natural disaster type approach, Betsy, so that's going to come down to where the consumer lives, the market, the condition, what's going on in that market, and whether they're able to work and things like that. So we'll see that play out. If there's another round of stimulus payments, we waive the fees so people wouldn't have the fees we held off on the fees that they had that could have been negative in their account to make sure they got the whole $1,200 in the case of the last payment. We will do that again because that's the right thing to do to make sure they get the benefits of those payments. But, you know, those things will sort of ease through the third quarter depending on really a specific question, and then as you get towards next year, they'll normalize.

And then as we, you know, go through this pandemic, obviously we've got flashpoints building again in, Certain locations, like you were asked earlier on the call, you've got a big footprint of branches in these locations. So, you know, I would think that your programs are open, obviously, for folks who are coming back, you know, into that second wave. You just want to confirm that. And then how are you thinking about the branch footprint just generally? I mean, you mentioned earlier about opportunities to improve efficiencies, to claw back the $400 million, you know, net COVID cost increase that you experienced this quarter. but a little bit longer term, you know, given the increase in digital, the fast ramp that we've seen in the most recent couple of months, does that make you think, hey, we can pull back on our branches, you know, even more than we had been thinking before? Give us an update there, thanks.

Yeah, I think the time to figure that out will be a little bit later, Betsy, not because we don't work at all times. Even year over year, I think we're down, you know, 30 or 40 branches or something like that in terms of branch count. You know, this last year, second quarter, this year, we're always working this dynamic. They might be bigger and replace two or three small ones. They might be places that we just had too many, whatever. But we'll always be working that. So 6100 to 4300 branches continue to work. And we're doing that by following customer behavior. So if this some of this behavior changes stick to the ribs, you'll see us keep fine tuning our system. By the way, the cost of deposits, in other words, all the operating costs and consumer over deposits actually went down the over year, again, by about seven basis points or something like that. So we continue to manage that overall operating costs down. And it's not just the branches, it's all of the call centers and all the things around it. So let us play that out. I don't think, and then by the way, remember we're deploying and we open branches in the middle of this thing. places in Ohio and stuff we didn't have. And so that, that replaces some of the account, but a much different execution than something that may have been left over from years ago. So it'll play out. I don't think they'll get, they'll go one way or the other way dramatically, but what will happen is some of the account will leave, will be consolidated markets as we've always been doing in, in deploy to markets where you don't have reach. I think on a given day, we're still getting a half million visits to the branches. So it is an important part of what we do. And the teammates in those branches have done incredible work being open every day during this crisis, despite what was going on in the environment around them. So it will always be an incredibly important part, which makes us different. We are a big digital company. It would have been a physical company, and that combination produced superior customer reach and results.

Thanks.

We'll go next to Matt O'Connor with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Can you just talk about the small business PPP in terms of the timing of when you think it'll be repaid or forgiven and remind us of the accounting there? And is that including your net interest income outlook?

When I start with the accounting, so the if you look at this quarter, there's about a little under $100 million. It'll be a little more than that next quarter in NII for PPP. That's a function of, you know, 1% interest rate plus 100,091, you've got to amortize the fees into, you know, NII over the life of the loans. In terms of the overall program, you know, we did about 335,000 loans in a few weeks. That was quite expensive in terms of, you know, all that we had to do to do that well. And so I would not expect much, if any, profitability out of PPP.

Okay. And does that include the fees that you get if it's accelerated from a forbearance? I think there was some articles out there that you're going to donate any profits, but obviously There's just a focus on the revenue, and to your point, there is a cost as well.

Yeah. Once there's forbearance, to the extent that we were amortizing those, you know, fees into NII, once a loan is forgiven, then you have to accelerate the remaining fees that haven't been amortized. So it could be a spike in a quarter or two if we start seeing a lot of forbearance. But again, you know, as you know, we've, we've, we said, we're going to donate profits, but I wouldn't expect a lot of profits out of this program. You know, 335,000 loans in a quarter is probably, I don't know. I think somebody consumer told me it was like 10 years of loans and small business. This was a massive effort that involved people outside of the company in the company, um, to get, to do it well.

Okay, and then just separately on the criticized commercial loans, you know, it's helpful that you do disclose this. I'm not sure everybody does, so I appreciate that. But how would you think about the loss content on that? Obviously, it's a much bigger bucket than, say, non-performers and our loans that you're watching. But how should we kind of think about the risk of loans that are kind of criticized versus, you know, say, non-performing or how much might flow into non-performing?

You know, I think that depends on the loan. They're largely secured. They're collateralized. You know, what sort of recovery. But remember, the rating is driven as a loss, you know, a probability of loss given default, and then the collateral structure. So that's all built into the reserving methodology that results in a reserve build. So it's not something that you have to think of separately than NPLs. It's just, you know, there are different stages in the process of getting through the system. So it's really, you have to say if it's, you know, we, we, for example, we have a lot of retailers have gone through bankruptcy over the last several years. We haven't lost anything because of the nested of securing yourself and things like that. And that's, but that's a business we've had for decades that has done a great job there. Um, whereas, you know, if it's an unsecured line and somebody you have a fallen, somebody falls quickly, that can be more problematic, but it's just rest assured. It's all built into. The methodology produces a loss content which produces the reserves in the scenarios we use.

Okay, thank you. Next question is from Ken Houston with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning. A couple questions on the on the JV dissolution. So I was wondering, Paul, relative to your 100 million fees, first of all, where is it located? Where are we going to see it? And second of all, can you help us give perspective of what it was maybe at its peak? And you mentioned it could get better as the economy improves. What's the best metric we can watch of your disclosures to track that progress?

You know, it's a portion of that revenue is going to be in consumer portion, but it's going to be in global banking. We'd have to think about how to help you, you know, see it because it never, certainly on a net basis, it never was a big number in terms of net profits coming out of that JV. We expect it, you know, now that we can integrate it, do it our way, really leverage our customer relationships, put, you know, our full sales force more directly behind it and innovate. We think this is incredibly important to our customers and we can grow it. But right now it's, you know, we gave you, I think we gave you some perspective. It's about, you know, I would expect the revenues there to be about $100 million in the near term, but we would expect them to grow as we ramp up, as some of our investments start to, you know, bear fruit. And again, I don't know how to answer your question on how you can see it. I'll have to think about that, whether it's something appropriate for the supplement or not.

Okay. And just in terms of the, you know, fees, other categories, wealth management, the asset management part was down. Was that because of the averaging effect? And should that improve given the period and market levels that we saw?

Yeah. You have to remember the AUM fees are on a one-month lag. So you're picking up there, you know, what happened at the end of the first quarter.

Yep. And lastly, just any comments about the investment banking pipeline given the relative strength that we saw in the second quarter? Thanks, Paul.

Yeah, sure. You know, investment banking had a great, great quarter. And we know we picked up significant market share. We've been picking up significant market share for many quarters now. I think all of you have sort of recognized that. It was a record. I think our market share is above 8% at this point. And our market share in middle market investment banking is also rising, given our emphasis there and the bankers we had. I think we're up to over 9% there. A lot of activity as we help clients, you know, raise capital to address their needs. You know, you can't really expect – we don't know the answer, but we're already sort of seeing a little bit of a slowdown in activity in the first couple of weeks of this quarter, so I don't think you can expect that – the third quarter is going to be as robust as the second quarter has been but but i will want to emphasize we feel really good about the progress we have made with um with our clients in terms of market share both for large companies around the world and the middle market companies thank you we'll go next to saul martinez please go ahead your lines open

Hi, good morning, guys. I wanted to start off on NII, just a bit of a clarification. You said NII would be down a couple hundred million quarter on quarter on commercial pay downs. You also said long end rates would also weigh on NII. Just give us a sense of what the order of magnitude could be in terms of additional NII pressure. to the third quarter from long end rates. I would assume that the redeployment of cash into securities is something that helps, but only over a longer period of time. And I know, Paul, in the past we talked about reinvestment risk and kind of sized up the impact of long end rates on securities cash flow. So if you can help us understand the potential impacts on third quarter and how to think about it beyond that.

I will say in terms of our $200 million kind of perspective being down quarter over quarter, 2Q to 3Q, we're kind of putting all that stuff in there, right? You've got loans being potentially down. You've got average LIBOR coming down. You've got the securities portfolio. It's kind of all in there. Securities portfolio, you know, about 20, 25 billion matures every quarter and, you know, reinvestment yields right now are significantly below where the portfolio is. So that's just going to slowly dilute over time. We can offset some of that if we decide to take these deposits that are now sitting in cash and put them into securities, we can get a sort of a natural offset. But we have to sort of just see how that all plays out.

Okay. I don't think I'm being misunderstood. So the $200 million, a couple hundred million is all in, not simply from the impact of commercial paydowns, but from a number of things, I guess. I guess I wanted to go back and follow up on Matt's question on PPP and get a little bit better sense for what the order of magnitude of the impact would be. Because, I mean, you have $25 billion of PPP loans, you know, I think it's fair to assume that a pretty sizable proportion of those will be forgiven. And, you know, given the fee rates on those, I mean, we're not talking about, you know, small numbers even relative to the size of your NII. I mean, you get to easily over a billion dollars. So I guess my first question is why shouldn't we see a pretty significant spike in NII and 4Q and 1Q as those loans start to get forgiven and the income is recognized? And I guess relatedly, on the expenses, I guess I'm trying to understand what you mean by you're not going to make a lot of money on that. Is it just that it's sort of in the expense space already and you've had to ratchet up expenses, or is it that as revenues are recognized from an accounting standpoint, you'll donate, you know, those accounting, that accounting revenue away as one of your competitors is doing. I guess I'm trying to understand, you know, the order of magnitude, timing, and geography of the impact. So they don't seem to be small

We announced in April, I think it was, that we'd give away the net profits from this activity. There's a lot of costs, internal costs, obviously allocation of 10,000 people we had working on the origination form of this at the high point. The forgiveness, we've got 3,000 people lined up to work on forgiveness that are already working on it, and we open for business in a couple weeks. And we also had to hire third parties to come and do some work and and supplement us. And we, you know, so there's a lot of elements. So where it shows up in revenue and expense, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll deal with it, but just, you know, I, well, the revenue you're saying is, you know, not insignificant. The issue is there's a lot of costs against it. You know, some are in the P and L and some are going to be next quarter's P and L because on the forgiveness side, we have these teammates working on it. So we'll, we'll reconcile it all for you. But the basic commitment was to give away the net profits. That was something we committed in April. This is not new news. Okay.

But am I thinking about... You're not going to see... Go ahead. To your point on the revenue, you're not going to see it in the revenue until the loans start to get forgiven.

Yeah. Which we would assume is what?

You'll see some of it. Yeah. We don't know when it's going to be. Yeah.

And by the way, in phase four, they're talking about extending and doing more loans. And there's a bunch of proposals. So, A little bit is hard to predict because if they say you can do loan A and then do another loan or extend it, you know, that's even in the last quarter, we've been from eight weeks to 12 weeks to 24 weeks and things like that. So, you know, there's no mystery here. We just don't know until we get through it what exactly is going to happen because the rules change so much.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Fair enough. I appreciate it.

Next question is from Vivek Junejo with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hey, Brian. Hey, Paul. A question that I wanted to just clarify. The consumer loans that have been deferred, I'm presuming in sort of late June, early July, you've started to see some of those start to get through their deferral period since deferrals were 90 days, and So what are you seeing in the ones where deferrals are done? What percentage are re-upping and asking for a deferral to continue versus how many are going off? And of those going off, what are you seeing?

Your point, Vivek, is that it's now the time for that. The time period that most of it occurred is now in a time period where it rolls off. And so we'll know better, but you separate the card, we've already seen, you know, a couple hundred thousand roll off and a bunch of them are rolling off as we speak. So that is, you know, 85% of them are card. And so separate that from the standpoint of all the other aspects. So they said earlier about small business, which is the next biggest, which is the biggest percentage category. Yeah, those are docs and dentists and they've all told us they're paying us and their payments are now coming up in July and early August. In terms of home loans, we're seeing the numbers on deferral drop every week because the new requests are less than people continue to pay. And so it's going to come down to cards, and we're in that period of time. But there are substantial reserves set up based on the credit characteristics of those individual cardholders and what our expected outcome for them are. And as we said earlier, a substantial number have been paying us every month. Some haven't been paying us at all. Some have been paying us part-loan. And that will all play out this quarter. When they charge off, then we'll be down as that plays out over the roll rate type of thing. But it's all in the reserves today. In other words, there is a decent chunk of reserves in the car business that is specifically built by these deferred loans. What I said earlier, if you didn't hear it, was that for the second quarter, for the people who had deferred, The actual increase in charge of us would have been about, I don't know, $30, $40 million on a basis, $600 and some million, whatever it is. So it wasn't a substantial difference yet. And so those have been people that only good enough that they would have rolled and charged off during the quarter. So let us see it play out. It's in the reserves. It will be covered by the reserves.

Okay.

Thanks. Our next question is from Brian Klein-Hansel with KBW. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks. Just two quick questions. I mean, first on the expenses, just how are we to be thinking about the expense trajectory as we look out to the third quarter, fourth quarter? I get the extra $200 million from merchant services, but then how much of these COVID-type expenses are expected to roll off into the third quarter? And then we get the typical seasonality as well in the back end of the year?

Yes, so all those factors I think Paul laid out earlier, but what we were reminding people is last year when we unwound the joint venture and told you about it this time last year, we said when we took it from a joint venture interest through the P&L on the balance sheet interest, it was going to increase our expenses. That $200 million, this is the quarter where it happens, and so we just want to make sure people are factoring that in. Absent that, you know that we manage expenses tightly in this company, and we'll manage them down, and we'll have some pluses and minuses, and we'll work it down. But we didn't want people to forget that we told you that last year. All the rest of it will be the same sort of manager practice we had. You'll have some PPP expenses. You'll come down a little bit. As people moved around and opened up a little bit, you have a little more business activity expenses. We'll see it play out. And then you have the seasonality, as you mentioned. And that will all be standard fare. But the key difference is we want to make sure people didn't forget what we told you last year.

And then a separate one, just simple, is the tax rate guide that you gave in the second half, does that roll forward into 2021? Thanks.

I don't think we have a good answer for 2021 yet. At least I don't have an answer. We can get back to you on that if you need it. But for the rest of the year, it will be around 11%.

And we'll take our final question today from Charles Peabody with Portales. Please go ahead.

Yeah, I wanted to get some more color on your consumer and community bank and particularly the profitability of the various product lines like cars, mortgages, autos, branching. And I ask that because on a relative basis, your consumer and community bank has done much better than the other big three, Wells, J.P. Morgan, and Citi. And I know a big part of it is probably cards, where the other businesses are losing money, the other companies are losing money in cards. So can you talk a little bit about the profitability of your different product lines and the relative value that they produce for you guys versus other major banks?

I'm not sure I frankly agree with your premise that, You know, the profitability of our consumer bank is driven by the deposit business. And so given that you're in the middle of a twist right now with rates falling and the floors of zero rates in the consumer business, you know, the card, it fell this quarter. But that would be expected as you go through this twist. So it's been running, you know, the deposit segment has been running $2 billion a quarter. type of numbers. And that, you know, that's in a consumer lending segment would have been running, you know, even back in 19, about a billion dollars a quarter. So it's a business which is, and that's all lending, not just the card lending. So it's a business which is driven by the deposit business. And when the rates fell as quickly and we move rates down in a quarter, you know, it's going to take a little while to catch back up. And, but that's, but I'm not sure I agree with the premise. And, you know, that it's driven by the card business. The card business is, you know, a portion of that third of the general operating process.

I think you're right, Brian. I think the way to think about it is we started at a position of profitability before rates came down that was stronger than many of our competitors given the strength of our deposit franchise and given how careful we have been you know, with respect to credit, unsecured consumer credit. You're now seeing, you know, us getting hurt on the, you know, because that deposit franchise isn't, those deposits aren't as valuable in a low rate environment, but you're not seeing us have the same sort of potential losses in unsecured consumer because we just don't have as much as others.

Be that as it may, the lending portion lost money this quarter. and the deposit business didn't make money this quarter. So I'm not sure I get the starting point, but just to give you a sense. So there wasn't a lot of money overall, but it was made by the deposit business.

I guess the starting point was that the card businesses tend to be an outsized product for the other big banks, and they clearly are losing money. And so is that the big differentiation? Is your card business losing money this quarter as well, but less so than the other big businesses, other big companies?

Yes. The lending business lost money. I don't have a separate card P&L. But the lending business and consumer lost money. The deposit business made money and brought it to profit and offset, you know, three-quarters of a billion dollars of losses on the lending side because of the provisions versus three-quarters of a billion dollars of profit after tax. But remember, what drives a profitability consumer business is the position we have across all the products, we don't think of a lending business. And as we think of a customer business, that is number one position and deposits 92% for checking account checking account growth of, you know, of a million accounts year over year, the average about those accounts growing year over year, even taking out the COVID impact, they still were growing at, you know, double digits typically in a year. That the operating costs coming down you every year in terms of as a percentage deposits These are all good measures that give you a great tanker to win work. It gets tougher when rates are very low That's we played that, you know, I've been CEO for this my 11th year and then through 9 to 11 I think that the feds fund rate has basically been zero a quarter and so that that's we're doing the car business is a nice business we keep it to size that we think is consistent with our our at a maintain commitment, responsible growth. And therefore, you know, that it's never going to drive the P&L one way or the other way. And the risk adjusted margin is 8% in that business today during an actual charge loss. Remember, what's causing the losses, you're putting up reserves for the rest of the life of the portfolio in one quarter, given an economic scenario that's deteriorated. So it's a good, it's a wonderful business for us. It's our biggest business in terms of profit. and you know it but we don't run it as a car business as a home loan business we got out of that many a decade ago saying it is a consumer business and we drive on a unified basis all right thank you it appears we have no further questions i'll return the floor to brian for closing remarks well thank you and uh thank you for uh spending time with us this morning uh it's another quarter where we've driven responsible growth we continue to uh manages company tightly given the environment we're in, and we continue to drive the core activities forward. And this quarter, we're especially pleased with the work our team did in global markets and the investment banking area that gaining share and providing the earnings power to have a sort of twice our dividend, build our capital, build our liquidity, and have the worst economic quarter since the Great Depression. So thank you. We'll talk to you next time.

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