Wells Fargo Shares Slide as Bank Sees Long Road on Costs

(Bloomberg) -- Wells Fargo & Co. shares slid the most in six months as the bank said low interest rates and asset sales will weigh on revenue this year and it’s embarking on a long process to cut costs.

The lender, which still is operating under a regulatory cap on growth, said net interest income will likely fall in 2021, while rival JPMorgan Chase & Co. predicted a rebound. Wells Fargo’s leaders said they will sell off some units to improve the company’s focus and have more than 250 separate expense initiatives that will take three to four years.

The bank’s stock slipped as much as 8.2%, the biggest intraday decline since July, as Chief Executive Officer Charlie Scharf gave investors the widest-ranging look at his strategy for a firm that has suffered years of underperformance. The lender posted a smaller drop in fourth-quarter costs than analysts expected as it took charges of more than $1 billion for restructuring and addressing old account scandals.

“We made significant progress in 2020 in identifying efficiency opportunities across our businesses and we started executing on these initiatives,” Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo said on a conference call Friday. “This is just the beginning of a multiyear process.”

Wells Fargo said expenses this year are likely to total roughly $53 billion, excluding restructuring charges and business exits, down from $54 billion excluding customer-remediation and restructuring charges in 2020. The firm cut its headcount by 6,400 in the fourth quarter.

Scharf has repeatedly lamented Wells Fargo’s high costs, pledging to eventually shave $10 billion off annual expenses. Non-interest costs fell 5.2% in the fourth quarter to $14.8 billion, roughly half the decline analysts predicted.

Scharf said Friday the company has a “clear line of sight” to a 10% return on tangible common equity, a key measure of profitability, and expects to get to 15% over the longer term. The bank had a 1.3% return in 2020.

“Our results continued to be impacted by the unprecedented operating environment and the required work to put our substantial legacy issues behind us,” Scharf said in a statement Friday. “With a more consistent broad-based recovery and as we continue to press forward with our agenda, we expect you will see that this franchise is capable of much more.”

Shares fell 6% to $32.66 at 12:17 p.m. in New York. The stock has dropped 33% in the past 12 months, compared with a 3.1% decline for the KBW Bank Index.

Quarterly results were hurt by a $321 million charge related to customer remediation and $781 million of restructuring charges. Still, net income rose to $2.99 billion, better than the $2.9 billion analysts expected, as the bank released credit-loss reserves tied to the sale of its student-loan portfolio.

Reserve Releases

Scharf joined Wells Fargo in late 2019 with a mission of moving the firm past a series of scandals that began with the 2016 revelation that employees opened millions of fake accounts. The lender remains under a Federal Reserve-imposed asset cap limiting it from expanding its balance sheet beyond $1.95 trillion, its end-of-2017 level. Friday also marks the bank’s first time reporting with restructured business lines after Scharf broke three units into five.

Wells Fargo released $763 million of loan-loss reserves for the three months through Dec. 31. Scharf said last month that credit performance has been “far better than what we would have expected,” but cautioned that much remains uncertain. The firm now has $19.7 billion set aside for soured loans, 2.2% of its total loan book.

Non-accrual loans jumped 8.8% from the third quarter due to increases in the bank’s commercial real estate, residential mortgage and lease-financing portfolios, countered by a decrease in commercial and industrial.

The firm said it would restart stock buybacks after the Fed last month gave banks the green light to resume repurchasing shares following a second round of 2020 stress tests. Wells Fargo’s board approved a repurchase increase of 500 million shares, bringing the total authorized buyback amount to 667 million.

NII Sinks

Net interest income, Wells Fargo’s largest source of revenue, sank to the lowest level in more than a decade as the impact of low rates continues to bite into the earnings. The firm earned $9.3 billion in net interest income for the quarter, compared with the $9.4 billion analysts expected. The bank said Friday that 2021 net interest income will be flat to down 4% from the annualized fourth-quarter level, which was $36.8 billion.

Also in Wells Fargo’s fourth-quarter results:

• Revenue fell 10% to $17.9 billion, missing analysts’ estimates of $18.1 billion.
• The bank’s efficiency ratio, a measure of profitability, worsened to 83% from 81% in the third quarter.

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