Earnings Labs

Citigroup Inc. (C)

Q1 2013 Earnings Call· Mon, Apr 15, 2013

$128.53

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Transcript

Michael Corbat

Management

Thank you very much. Its great to be here. I thank all of you for coming and joining us today. In my first five months as CEO I spent a lot of time reviewing our businesses, from the pleasure process to our CCAR submission, the meetings with our clients, our investors, our regulators and then my travel, seeing first hand both the opportunity and the challenges in our company. But today what I’d like to do is share with you my perspectives on our business and importantly my priority as we move forward. To begin with, as I said in the past, I believe Citi strategy is the right one and its well aligned against the global trends. We want to be a leading provider of financial services to the world’s largest multi-national corporation and investors and to provide best-in-class financial consumer banking to high quality customers in the world’s largest city. Out target client base is one which values our global network and the scale and scope of our franchise is designed to serve their needs. As you know, may firms speak about themselves in terms of products, but for us it’s the markets in our network which allow us to service our clients in a differentiated way. And in fact, our global network is becoming more unique and more valuable every day. If a financial institution doesn’t already have a significant global presence, its ability to recreate our footprint inorganically through significant M&A or organically through building, is extremely limited in today’s challenging regulatory and economic environment. But we recognize that our network only has real value if we can deliver on behalf of our clients and our shareholders and deliver a return on equity that exceeds our cost of capital. In certain products and geographies, I believe…

Unidentified Participant

Management

Okay, so try to keep it on the -- at your table you should have a remote control for the audio response system; Mike has his, John has his. So the first question is, what do you believe is the most misunderstood part of the Citi story. Is it one, the long-term growth prospect and leverage for the global economy? Two, is there an ability to reduce cost and increase the long-term possibility of the franchise? Three, is there hidden value in the DCA? Four, is the unrecognized value and other Citi owned assets such as Bandamax. Five, is to see people are over estimating the thoughts of unwinding Citi Holding or six, nothing to stop if we exercise the current level. So for those on the phone, the most frequent response is the second one, which is the ability to reduce cost and increase profitability, 28%. Typed in second will be the long-term growth prospects and also the hidden value in the DCA, that’s around 20%. Mike, any thoughts on some of these responses?

Mike Corbat

Management

What did you pick?

Unidentified Participant

Management

Same as you.

Mike Corbat

Operator

So, I’m sure we are going to touch on many of these with Q&A, but we put a round two efficiency ratios and I think that what I’m mindful of is that we’ve had a discipline around expense reductions, but as we laid out the countries in the bucketing that we shouldn’t be, regards describe the peanut butter around simply reducing cost. But we need to be targeted and we showed some areas where we think we’ve got clear places to be focused on and that we’ve got to go after those areas as opposed to lets do a 5% or 10% or whatever the reduction is, cost affirm and so I think our move towards efficiency ratio starts to put more transparency and all the metrics start to put more transparency around number two. I think from number one perspective, I think it is under appreciated. I mentioned that today, I don’t think the market yet really realizes the uniqueness and again, we’ve got to prove the value of our model. The things strategically we used to worry about, not that long ago, around people coming and having the ability to challenge us around the recreation of our foot print; I think today, I don’t think there is a lot of regulatory or political desire through M&A to see big banks get bigger and I think organically today, in particular in this rate environment, but also the regulatory environment, the time to invest and get to scale is a long protracted period and so again, I think the value of our footprint and the uniqueness of our footprint, we’ve got to prove it. But I think this is yet to be really strong. And clearly we mentioned DTA. We are right there, but I think we need to show. We had DTA going in the wrong direction last year, with a net of what we were able to accomplish away from it. We’ve got to show it’s as changeable. We got to turn that and we’ve got to show the market our ability to start utilizing DTA.

Unidentified Participant

Management

No, I’m just encouraged by the fact that three top answers are the three things that we addressed in the presentation. Next question. So what do you as in an effective way for management to unlock long-term shareholder value? Is it to continue the strategy of focusing on the instructional clients and retail clients in the top cities globally? Is it number two, exiting on a new round of efficient initiatives? Number three, is it just more aggressively pursue growth, where there is loan growth or just market share gains in our existing market. Four would be what I call transformational actions, seeing assets, pulling stuff out, breaking up the bank or five, is there significant increase in the pay-per-capital in terms of shareholders.

Mike Corbat

Operator

So you guys, you get to go first. Given the choices that you point out there, I’m actually surprised that number five didn’t get over 50% quite frankly. So I’m actually amazed that the three of the other four generated something around 20%. But obviously, increasing of the capital return to shareholder is something that we are very, very focused on in a rational manner. I think Mike and some of the comments that he’s made in the past has talked about our this year’s three-core process and I think that that reflects our thoughts there. The other three are fairly well balance between one, two – the one continuing the strategy, two executing the new round of efficiency initiative and four, new transformational actions fairly balanced among those. You talked a little bit about from a efficiency perspective how we are going to focus things and where we are going to be positive. I talked in my talk about the continued strategy and focusing on the institutional relationship. From the new transformational action perspective, again I go back to a few things. Often when I travel, gee, can you sell a stake in this or can you sell a stake in that and you’d be selling other things, if you think about how your going to get certain activity grow. Again, I think we’ve got to prove it, but I think the model has only become more valuable; again, we have to prove that. In terms of some of these actions, in terms of selling minority stakes and ways to monetize or to show value, but probably not many people in this room probably even recognize that we have it in our bank component. We have 25% minority stake that stokers have traded stock. I can tell you not just in Poland, but having managed other ventures where we have monitory shareholders, life becomes very cumbersome, it becomes very difficult and when we talk about the actions of optimization, whether its investment or whether its re-channeling those resources, having to deal with minority investors changes the way that you think and come to work in most businesses. And I think that our business model is quite cumbersome, and again I think we’ve got the ability to extract real value from these franchises and again, I’m not prepared to sell them cheaply and I think from an operational perspective, its not the right way to going in.

Unidentified Participant

Management

So when you say prove it, how do you define that? Because if you are a big global bank, with the excess capital we have to hold, JP Morgan has to hold, you need to be the best-in-class individual business and you need the adjacencies that you talked about. So when you say prove it, is it proving it by just showing any other corporate goal or I thought maybe deliver a little bit more on (inaudible) or use to fund in a different way.

Michael Corbat

Management

No, I think its delivering on the adjacencies and being able to do something that others maybe can’t or otherwise have a hard time doing. And I think that, again grew the way we’ve done this country bucketing, of making sure that we are getting the most out of those franchises. But if you go back and you look at the underlined bucketing of where some of these things are, we are getting good things out of them and we in fact seem to focused on some areas away from these markets, to be able to make sure we are getting the efficiencies elsewhere in the system.

Unidentified Participant

Management

Well, we got a question on this. So this is dealing with risk management. So what do you perceive as Citi’s greatest risk management challenge? So the first is with the geographic risk, operating in a 100 different countries, just the complexity involved in that. Two, is just market risk that we are talking here about one time trading losses or do you just have an exposure. Three is this overall credit risk that most banks have. Four is regulatory risk, the fact of an uneven playing field in terms of Dodd-Frank, in terms of S&P business, whether it’s a disadvantage. Five is litigation risk, and six is operational risk. Okay, so the number one risk for Citi is actually regulatory risk at 31%, and then the second was geographic risk. I guess my question for you is, when other people are concerned about global macro risk, Citi is always the one that kind of takes as the people having more risk in other firms. Can you just talk about your thoughts on why this might be a misperception and how you view the role of this?

Michael Corbat

Management

We touched on a number of different risks that are here, which is the market; we got regulatory, we got credit, we got a whole series of risks. So the way we think of it, which was again those three lenses I mentioned earlier; combination of clients, combination of products and combination of geography. And in there you can look at concentration limits, you can look at exposure. Again we know, as part of making sure around ROA targets, that we are mindful that not all assets are created equally and we got to have a risk adjustment to what those ROAs, there is a risk focus of what those will look like. And so as an example, I’d give a good example of my time when I was running our European business, we radically changed the way that we come to work in Europe. We used to come to work from a central treasury; we used to think of the currency; the euro as being completely tangible and today we come to work much different; Spanish euros, German euros, Greek euros, French euros, all different and the balance sheet in those countries run in a different way rather than being run centrally. A mix in country deposits, running a balanced asset liability mix and it think when you go into our disclosures and look at our gifts reporting as an example, you see a gift exposure, but in there what you actually don’t see is what’s underline does, its differentiated between the types of assets. This is a long domicile under Spanish law. They are a Spanish company, given a loan to an international company. It is an international log loan and those things even they show up as Spanish exposure, they are very different. The way we fund and support those and so I think our real focus is on those kinds of things when we introduce them and obviously from a reputational perspective, what we’ve seen, if its not just the dollar fund that is cumulative, but around the franchise trying to stay out of the headline if it cuts directly.

Unidentified Participant

Management

I know you have (inaudible) but you do deal with risks in your roll. I mean is this how you would kind of sort out the rest of the…

Michael Corbat

Management

Actually the amazing thing I think is that if you take a look at the answers with number four being the most frequently there, I don’t think you’d get a different answer for any of your institutions. I think you’d end up with the same – you ask the same question, the same presentation at our peer institutions and I’ll do the same thing, as far as regulatory risk and an uneven global playing field. I think we are all facing that issue and we will continue to face this for several years, and so regulatory environment sort of sorts out.

Unidentified Participant

Management

So if you strip that one out, then you look at your answers two through the next line with geographic risks, 25% and then it goes all the way down to 14% and 15% for operational risks and market risks. Any views on that?

John Gerspach

Analyst

That’s the way people look at it. I think Mike gave the answer as far as the way we approach the risk. I think that the complexity of global businesses is somewhat – I won’t say that being global doesn’t add some degree or difficult for the way you operator, but I don’t necessarily think it makes you more complex. I do believe that the way that we run our businesses right now, we’ve actually simplified most of our businesses greatly; simplified them in a couple of different manners. One is we’ve got as Mike laid out before, a very clear strategy for every business. We’ve identified for each person, whether they work on a product, or in a geography, the way we expect them to come to work everyday. So they know what they need to focus on, how they need to run their business, the customers that we want them to approach or the product. And then by centralizing the way that we run everything from risks to finance to compliance, we standardized the systems, we standardize the support structures, the platforms for these business that they are operating in. So I think we’ve taken, we’ve eventually introduced a great deal of complexity into the world.

Unidentified Participant

Management

Okay. Are there any questions in the audience?

Unidentified Participant

Management

I’ll do the first one. Just to pick up on your point, you said that being global doesn’t mean you’re more complex. But do you think your regulator treats you as more complex or being global and how do you think you can educated them to change these views.

Michael Corbat

Management

Well, I think that, I think you’ll get a back up on a couple of things. Traditionally there were probably a handful of regulators that were very actively involved in some of the regulation of the global bank. Today as I travel I see a level of interest from regulators around the world, regardless of dominance, at a heightened level from here it was and I think that’s a reality that as an industry we have to be awake. That being said, a lot of the regulations that they are introducing are extremely well intentioned, but I think the challenge doesn’t necessary lie in the regulation itself. It lies in the harmonization of regulations and so we support things that make banks safer places, we don’t believe in taxpayer bailout and all those things going forward. The challenge comes when you have multiple regulators trying to address those things from different areas and we’ve got a few of those and so I think its incumbent upon the regulators and us and us an industry working with them, educate them in terms of where some of these pensions, some of these frictions, some of these competitive objectives maybe, we as a company spend a lot of time on that, a lot of the industry association, trade associations and member associations are focused around those and I think we see an open ear. Last summer I had the ability to present at what’s called the Collage of Supervisors, where a number of the largest regulators from around the world come together, and I think they themselves are very focused around their working relationships, understanding differences, the harmonization of regulation and really what’s best for the system. But right now the pace of regulation introduction is so brisk that right now probably the regulation is out there, a bit ahead of the harmonization and its ability to be implemented, I think in a way that works across the system. I think we are going to have to continue to work with those banks.

Unidentified Participant

Management

The granted fees with the financial goals that you laid out Mike are for 2015, but just looking at the balance sheet as it stands today, the ROTCE goal would imply net income of $15.5 million whereas the ROA goal would imply net income of something higher than that $18.6 billion or so based on where the balance sheet was at year end. How do you suggest we think about that discrepancy and come 2015, if there is a discrepancy between the ROTCE target and the ROA target. Would you encourage us to hope for the higher or the two?

John Gerspach

Analyst

Larry, you should always aspire for higher, but I actually…

Unidentified Participant

Management

Thank you John.

John Gerspach

Analyst

I think if you actually had a couple of seconds to think about net income and its impact on capital; as we generate net income over the next two years, and to the extent that we will not pay a 100% of that capital out and I don’t think I’m telling any trade secrets, but the fact that we are likely not going to be paying a 100% of our earnings out in ’13, ’14 and ’15, the denominator for that ROTCE calculation will also grow. So I think you will see that your map actually works, that both kind of gets you to the same asset.

Unidentified Participant

Management

In the vent that you generate taxable income in the Untied States, will you be able to use the DTA, therefore pay less in the way of tax, therefore and in the process capture, recapture some of the detail into the capital and will that combination of things conspire to make the TCE grow even faster.

John Gerspach

Analyst

Well, the DCA is “already in the TCE”. The DTA is not a deduct in order to calculate your intangible comments. DTA is deducted to calculate regulatory capital. So in effect you have to think in terms of the DTA almost as being as chain reaction. We generate U.S. taxable income, and that causes us to utilize more of the DTA. By utilizing more of the DTA, we in effect generate higher amounts of regulatory capital, which hopefully then enable us to payout higher dividend, which therefore reduced TCE.

Unidentified Participant

Management

I think that’s helpful.

Unidentified Participant

Management

Can you just expand a bit on the use of the DTA. I’m not quite sure where the path is to usually have the DTA in America. And a lot of what you talked about seems to be renationalizing the overseas business and I consider reduction in Citi Holdings. Could you just talk about how you are going, the way that these profits are going to come from in the US to use up the GTA?

Michael Corbat

Management

Our goal clearly is to drive efficiencies, drive revenues globally, that it’s part of the U.S. transaction services or market banking and our consumer businesses. Recently as an example, inorganically we saw us they agreed to bring on a best buy portfolio, roughly $7 billion of receivables, we’ll have it probably sometime in the third quarter. That has the ability to drive incremental U.S. earnings, but obviously continued around those other businesses, continue to driving growth and that’s before any net impact of hopefully at some point in the future we start to get rates coming back up again, which has the ability to significantly enhance globally, but has the ability to enhance our European capabilities as well.

John Gerspach

Analyst

And also as we continue to drive for greater efficiencies, in each of our businesses, that is not just efficiency target for businesses outside the U.S. We expect to generate additional efficiency in our US businesses as well. That will also then sever to driver higher amounts of U.S. earnings, which will enable us to utilize more of the DTA overtime.

Michael Corbat

Management

A part of it very importantly as we talked about, I talked about before is that we’ve got to get some of this noise back and you got to get the judge from holding down. We got to stop some of these one offs that have caused us for right, for 2012 to be seen going in the wrong direction.

Unidentified Participant

Management

Can I have a mic down here?

Michael Corbat

Management

Right behind you.

Unidentified Participant

Management

Thank you very much. How much do the efficiency ratio target, as well as the ROTCE target really require interest rate environment, sort of meaningfully different from the one that we are looking at today. Thank you.

Michael Corbat

Management

So what we forecasted there is somewhere between flattish to marginally up revenues and I think if you look at it and kind of assume global growth rate and think of revenues in that range, we are not looking for a hockey stick style revenue growth rate to be able to drive businesses.

Unidentified Participant

Management

I think the way you characterized it was low single digit growth rate, and so it’s not anticipating a drastic change in today’s interest rate environment.

Michael Corbat

Management

And as I said, if you do see a pickup in rates, then we should expect to hopefully see it outperform as well.

Unidentified Participant

Management

Great, thank you very much.

Michael Corbat

Management

Is there a question in the back?

Unidentified Participant

Management

So Mike, can you maybe just clarify on your 2015 10% ROTCE; what’s implied in terms of the size of Citi Holdings at that point and then also give us some color in terms of what you think the nature rate of attrition is in that portfolio. Because the 10% looks like a pretty conservative estimate if that business actually run a little faster. So just wondering what you guys have baked into your estimates.

Michael Corbat

Management

So, in our plan is what’s been built into the Citi Holdings numbers is effectively a runoff. The challenge around Citi Holdings is – and we think we tried to give you enough information, so that you can get pretty darn close to where that portfolio is from an organic perspective. Its very difficult or impossible to budget and forecast what the environment is going to be around asset or business sales. But in this target we haven’t built in any sizable reduction through asset sales or business sales in Citi Holdings.

Unidentified Participant

Management

Well, so again does that imply that Citi Holdings have in the next two years, some natural accretion to again arrive at that number you must have an estimate of what you think the size of that business is two or three years from now. And I guess my follow up question would also be for you to maybe talk about just the loss rates within that business. Because the loss rates seemed to have peaked around 10% of asset decline on a quarter-over-quarter basis and that looks like the loss rates have actually slowed. So it looks like that is actually getting better and again I was just wondering, your view on that.

Michael Corbat

Management

Well, I’ll talk the first part and you take the second. Again, we haven’t come out publicly and shown what the amortization rates for the portfolio and largely being mortgages. If it was just straight fully assets, it would be fairy easy to predict, but again based on prepayment rates, refinanced rates, we haven’t come public with that number. Again we try to provide enough insight in this and if you can run your own calculation around that, but again we haven’t put a public benchmark number out there.

John Gerspach

Analyst

Then regarding as far as the second half of the question, as far as the loss rate in the portfolio, I’ll give you two answers on that. One is, we have continued to stay and will continue to say, that in the largest asset category that we have yet, into the holdings, the local consumer lending, we continue to believe that the combination of the pre-provision net revenues, plus the existing reserves that we have, are more than adequate to cover any losses that we have in that portfolio. And when you think in terms of – I think we characterized it this way. As far as driving to that 10% ROTCE, the assumption there is that we drive holdings losses closer to breakeven by 2015, and that’s going to require basically addressing three things that we talked about in past. Beyond going rep and warranty issue that we’ve got or some others as far as Fannie and Freddie; the litigation that continues to surround some of the items and holdings, participatory private label securitization; and then the credit losses, which continue to come down and at some point in time we should be able to begin to utilize those loan loss reserves that we have to offset those losses. And the combination of those three items should help us drive Citi Holdings closer to breakeven in that 2015 timeframe.

Unidentified Participant

Management

Okay. We are out of time, so please join me in thanking Mike and John.