Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to RBC's Conference Call for the Second Quarter 2020 Financial Results. Please be advised that this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Nadine Ahn, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Speaking today will be Dave Mackay, President and Chief Executive Officer Rod Bolger, Chief Financial Officer and Graeme Hepworth, Chief Risk Officer. Then we'll open the call for questions. Give everyone a chance to ask questions, we ask that you limit your questions and then re queue. We also have with us in the room Neil McLaughlin, Group Head, Personal and Commercial Banking Doug Dussmann, Group Head, Wealth Management, Insurance and INTS and Derek Nelner, Group Head, Capital Markets.
As noted on Slide 1, our comments may contain forward looking statements, which involve assumptions and have inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially. I would also remind listeners that the bank assesses performance on a reported and adjusted basis, considers both to be useful in assessing underlying business performance. With that, I'll turn it over to Dave.
Thank you, Nadine, and good morning. Thanks for joining us in what is unprecedented and challenging times. We do hope you and your loved ones are keeping safe and well. Before I move into my comments on the macroeconomic environment, I do want to say how proud I am of our employees for all they have been doing throughout the crisis to bring our purpose to life by supporting our clients and our communities. We moved quickly to support our clients including granting payment relief to over 490,000 clients, so they could redirect their money to where it's most needed.
Our various client relief programs represent over 70 $6,000,000,000 of loans outstanding. Graham will speak more on these programs later in the call. As the situation evolves, the regulatory, monetary and fiscal actions taken by policymakers globally has helped provide stability and support to the economy and to the financial system. As Canada's largest financial institution, we also have an important role to play in helping lessen the financial impact of the crisis on our clients while helping to restart our economies. In Canada, we have been working closely with the government in implementing various federal programs and we provide access to $4,500,000,000 in available funding over 115,000 clients through our CEVA program.
And given Kenna's relatively strong fiscal position, the country's finances are well positioned should further actions be required. In the U. S, we have provided over US3 $500,000,000 of funding to our clients through the Paycheck Protection Program. I'll now provide some highlights of our financial performance. Today, we reported earnings of $1,500,000,000 In a quarter, we recorded a provision of $2,800,000,000 which I will speak to shortly.
We carried our strong momentum from the last quarter into Q2 and North American equity markets hit all time highs in late February. However, as the COVID-nineteen pandemic spread, expanding public health crisis led to increased concerns around the global economic outlook, culminating in elevated market uncertainty in March. We supported our clients through these volatile markets as they drew down on their credit facilities in light of liquidity concerns. The severe correction in global markets and widening credit spreads in particular negatively impacted our results this quarter, including unrealized mark to market losses in a number of portfolios. This was partly offset by elevated client activity related to significant volatility across asset classes.
In contrast, macro outlook concerns, low equity valuations and elevated volatility meant companies largely sat on the sidelines when it came to mergers and acquisitions. As credit markets opened up in April following a significant intervention by central banks, we saw a significant uptick in investment grade debt issuance. Since mid March, capital markets has been a book run on over US150 $1,000,000,000 of global investment grade issuance and has led over 80% of corporate debt transactions in the Canadian market. Our source of strength and stability for clients is reflected in the significant growth of consumer and business deposits and strong volume growth in our wealth franchises in Canada and the U. S, particularly at City National.
We've also seen an acceleration of digital banking adoption, including all time high volumes in direct investing. Rod will speak more to these trends later in the call. More recently, we started to see a cautious reopening of certain economies including those in Canada. However, significant uncertainty remains on the severity and duration of the global economic downturn as a result of elevated unemployment, low oil prices and disrupted supply chains. With that background, I want to focus my comments on the strength of RBC's financial position.
Our balance sheet remains strong, giving us a solid foundation to face these risks head on. We have confidence in our prudent risk management and diversified business model. We have a proven ability to organically generate capital averaging over 17% return on equity over the last 3 fiscal years. And in the quarter of significant external stresses, we generated pre tax, pre provision earnings of $4,600,000,000 the 2nd highest in our 150 year history. We also paid $1,500,000,000 in dividends to our shareholders while growing our book value.
While the economic downturn caused by the outbreak of COVID-nineteen was unexpected, we have been preparing for the potential of a recession for the shorter term. Our focus in the last few years has been on driving market leading organic growth while building up capital buffers as opposed to acquisitions or ramping up share buybacks. Furthermore, over the last 2 years, we have made a conscious decision on the composition of our loan portfolio, including prudently managing our corporate loan book, growing our residential mortgage portfolio and maintaining both underwriting limits and strict discipline on not originating non prime unsecured retail credit. We are confident in a robust balance sheet underpinned by a strong 11.7 percent CET1 ratio, which is 2 70 basis points or $15,000,000,000 over the current regulatory minimum, even after increasing provisions and providing exceptional support to our clients. We took prudent action to bolster our alliance for credit losses to $6,000,000,000 given the economic outlook and our expectation of a prolonged recovery.
Our stress test suggests that even under a severe pandemic scenario, our capital levels remain above current regulatory minimum levels and we remain well positioned to continue paying our dividend. While our corporate clients have been drawing down on lines and accessing capital markets, our retail clients have cut discretionary spending on debit and credit cards by over 20 percent as social distancing took hold in the beginning of March. Physical distancing measures have also impacted the Canadian housing market with sales activity retrenching, although house prices are largely unchanged. Although any recovery in the housing market will be gradual at first, we believe the risk of a sharp near term price decline is low. Despite rising unemployment levels, we remain confident that our prime Canadian retail portfolios will continue to perform well with the combined power of our client relief programs and the government led initiatives providing support to our clients.
Even though the Canadian retail mutual fund industry has toughest months ever in March and markets experienced extreme corrections, RBC Asset Management continued to grow its leading market share in Q2 with a strong performance in February and a recovery in April. In other parts of the bank, activity levels have never been higher. We are benefiting from our significant investments in technology over the last number of years provide alternative ways to deliver products and services to clients. We have seen a significant growth in digital banking volumes with mobile sessions 20% from last year as we ensure our clients' day to day financial needs continue to be met. We have also seen increased e transfers and digital sales.
And direct investing recorded all time high volumes during the quarter. We are also proud to note that RBC has been ranked number 1 in overall customer satisfaction among Big 5 Retail Banks in the J. D. Power 2020 Canadian Retail Banking Satisfaction Study. After delivering very strong results in Q1 2020 and early into Q2, we entered this period of heightened uncertainty from a position of strength.
While much has changed in the past 8 weeks, it's also important to focus on what has remained the same. We remain committed to creating long term value for our clients and our shareholders. We will continue to leverage our strong balance sheet, our leading scale and distribution capabilities across our franchises to prudently and efficiently support our clients. And we believe our past investments in building unique capabilities such as Borealis AI, InsideEdge and My Advisor will significantly differentiate us in the future and enable us to deliver even more value for our clients. Several of our ventures are also well positioned to support our clients including Owner, which helps entrepreneurs manage their businesses and build their brand online and Doctor.
Bill, which helps reduce the stress and complexity of medical billing for physicians. Our entire leadership team is focused on how RBC can emerge from this differently and stronger in the future. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Rod.
Thanks, Dave, and good morning, everyone. Starting on Slide 8, we reported earnings of $1,500,000,000 and EPS of $1,000,000 with results impacted by $2,800,000,000 of provisions for credit losses, up nearly 7 times from last quarter, which Graham will touch on shortly. Pre provision, pre tax earnings were up 3% from last year to $4,600,000,000 driven by strength in capital markets, investor and treasury services and insurance, a testament to the continued strength and success of our diversified business model. Our record pre provision pretax earnings through the first half of the year allowed us to prudently absorb over $3,000,000,000 of PCL and still generate nearly $5,000,000,000 of net income. A few thoughts on expenses, which were essentially flat year over year.
Excluding FX and $30,000,000 of COVID related costs, mainly in Canadian Banking, our expenses would have been down 1%. Given the current environment, we saw a slowdown in costs related to marketing and travel, which were collectively down close to $40,000,000 from last year. And recall, variable compensation largely acts as a natural hedge to lower market sensitive revenue. As Dave noted, the crisis is changing client behavior and we have seen an accelerated shift towards digital engagement. We would expect to see opportunities for cost savings going forward, assuming client preferences continue to trend towards digital interactions.
Early last year, we spoke about managing our costs based on the earnings outlook and we remain diligent in this regard. However, as always, we will balance any project prioritization with our commitment to creating long term value for our clients and shareholders. On taxes, our lower effective tax rate largely reflected changes in our earnings mix given the elevated PCL taken in the quarter was largely in jurisdictions with higher tax rates. Before I get to the segment results, I wanted to add to Dave's earlier comments on capital. Moving to Slide 9, we reported a strong CET1 ratio of 11.7%, down 30 basis points from last quarter.
The largest driver of CET1 was related to an increase in credit RWA, which lowered our CET1 ratio by 41 basis points through both unprecedented levels of draws and credit downgrades. Turning to Slide 10, where we show our RWA composition by the probability of default. The composition of our largely Canadian retail portfolio remained consistent from last quarter, underpinned by our high quality residential mortgage portfolio. In the corporate portfolio, the majority of the credit line utilization was from our investment grade clients in Capital Markets, where the loan utilization rate increased by 9 percentage points from last quarter to 38% on April 30. This is down from the March peak of above 40%.
Drawdowns from our Canadian Banking and City National Commercial clients are more muted at this stage. The impact of credit downgrades this quarter was largely from our Capital Markets loan book. We would expect the impact of credit migration on our commercial portfolios to increase in the coming quarters. I wanted to spend some time on the downside risk to our capital ratios. Our disclosures on Slide 30 highlight the assumptions that went into our IFRS 9 calculations in late April.
We have also run more severe stress test scenarios, including Canadian equity prices falling more than 50% over the next 12 months and Canadian and U. S. GDP falling 18% to 20%. We also consider unemployment staying over 14% for a number of quarters and not returning to 2019 levels for a number of years. While we believe these scenarios are unlikely, they do represent the inherent uncertainty surrounding the healthcare and economic outcomes.
In our severe scenario, we believe our CET1 ratio will remain well above our regulatory minimum. To provide additional color, in a very conservative scenario of a 1 notch downgrade across all sectors and geographies in our well diversified wholesale portfolio. This scenario would result in the RWA density of these portfolios increasing by approximately 15 percentage points over a number of quarters, negatively impacting our CET1 ratio by approximately 115 basis points over time. Comparing this unlikely scenario to our 270 basis point buffer over the current regulatory minimum, which represents an RWA buffer of approximately $165,000,000,000 or 30% increase above current RWA levels. Furthermore, our consistently strong organic capital generation will continue to act as the primary absorber of any credit deterioration.
Also, should credit spreads normalize, we'd expect a recovery in unrealized losses carried at fair value through OCI. These impacted our CET1 ratio by 19 basis points this quarter. Moving to our business segment performance beginning on Slide 11, Personal and Commercial Banking reported earnings of $532,000,000 Canadian Banking net income was $649,000,000 with pre provision pre tax earnings of $2,400,000,000 which was relatively flat year over year. Strong volume growth was offset by lower net interest margins, down 2 basis points from last quarter due to the impact of lower interest rates. We continued our strong momentum in mortgages, up 9% over last year.
However, as Dave noted, we are seeing a material slowdown in housing activity This is reflected in much lower mortgage application volumes since April 30. We expect mortgage growth to slow to the mid single digits by year end. Both business and personal deposit growth was strong, up 14% and 8%, respectively, providing a partial offset to margin pressures. While strong growth trends in our core checking account continued into May, we would expect these trends to moderate from here. Non interest revenue was impacted by lower card services revenue as client purchase volumes declined as a result of the COVID-nineteen pandemic.
Turning to Slide 12, Wealth Management reported earnings of $424,000,000 with pre provision pretax earnings of $653,000,000 down 16% year over year. The impact of market volatility contributed to mark to market seed capital losses in RBC Global Asset Management and unfavorable interest rate derivative valuation adjustments in City National. The impact of market volatility also drove unfavorable changes to our U. S. Share based compensation plans.
Adjusting for these, our pre provision pretax earnings would have been down 2% year over year. Canadian Wealth Management benefited from higher fee based average client assets and an increase in transaction volumes driven by higher client activity. Global Asset Management AUM was up 7% from last year, mainly due to strong net sales, including in our institutional business. Canadian retail net sales recovered well in April, particularly in our money market and long term fixed income strategies. Very strong double digit buying book at City National and fee based asset growth in our U.
S. Private client group was offset by the cumulative impact of the Fed rate cuts, as well as by higher costs to support underlying business growth. We expect City National's expense growth to slow over time as its elevated technology investments and regulatory costs begin to normalize. Moving to insurance on Slide 13, net income of $180,000,000 increased 17% from a year ago, mainly due to higher favorable investment related experience and new longevity reinsurance contracts, partially offset by the impact of actuarial adjustments and lower benefits from favorable reinsurance contract renegotiations. While overall claims were largely flat from last year, we saw an increase in travel claims this quarter.
We continue to help Canadians with their travel insurance claims where trips have interrupted or canceled in light of COVID-nineteen. On to Investor and Treasury Services on Slide 14, record net income of $226,000,000 increased 50% from a year ago, primarily due to higher funding and liquidity revenue, reflecting the benefit from interest rate cuts in the current quarter, as well as higher gains on the disposition of certain securities. Our Asset Services business benefited from higher FX revenues, reflecting increased client activity as a result of heightened equity and FX market volatility. Going forward, we would not expect to see the same level of benefits. We expect next quarter to be particularly challenged given our surplus liquidity position, lower asset valuations and more normalized client activity.
Turning to Capital Markets on Slide 15. Capital Markets reported earnings of $105,000,000 Pre provision pretax earnings of $1,000,000,000 were up 16% year over year and were our 2nd highest level on record following our strong Q1 2020 performance. The segment generated positive operating leverage of 6.5% with expenses kept flat as lower variable compensation costs were offset by higher costs to support business growth. Corporate Investment Banking revenue was down 25% year over year, largely due to $229,000,000 of unrealized mark to market losses in loan underwriting in the U. S.
And Europe as high yield credit spreads widened significantly. M and A and IPO activity was muted given the market uncertainty. In contrast, we saw strong debt underwriting activity. Global Markets had a record quarter with revenue up a strong 37% from last year, largely due to higher fixed income trading revenue across all regions. Our rates trading business performed well in the volatile interest rate environment.
In addition, we saw higher earnings on our spreads in our repo business. Lower results in our equities business were driven by losses in our structured products business given severe market dislocations in normal course correlations. And with that, I will turn it over to Graham.
Thank you, Rod and good morning everyone. As Dave noted earlier, COVID-nineteen has had a significant impact on financial markets and the global economy. While significant progress has been made in slowing the virus and managing the economic fallout, the speed at which the economy recovers, the efficacy of government support, future potential waves of the virus and the availability of a treatment or vaccine, all remain highly uncertain and will continue to affect our risk profile going forward. In response to these events, we increased our allowance for credit losses by $2,400,000,000 since last quarter, as you will note on Slide 17. With this significant increase, we now have $5,900,000,000 in total allowances to absorb future loan losses.
This represents 0.84 percent of all loans outstanding and 4.2 times our net write offs over the last 12 months. Nearly 90% of this increase in our allowance this quarter is a result of higher provisions on performing loans, up $2,100,000,000 from last quarter. This was primarily driven by unfavorable changes in our macroeconomic forecast to reflect the current economic conditions, was all impacted by ratings migrations and drawdowns mainly in our capital markets loan portfolio. Additionally, 2 thirds of the increase relate to our wholesale exposure, which spans capital markets, personal and commercial banking and City National and 1 third related to our retail exposure, which is predominantly in commercial personal and commercial banking. The other 10% of the increase in allowances is due to higher PCL on impaired loans.
Turning to Slide 18. PCL on impaired loans of $613,000,000 or 37 basis points was up 16 basis points from last quarter, largely reflecting higher provisions in Capital Markets. These provisions were mainly related to the oil and gas and consumer discretionary sectors reflective of the current macroeconomic environment. In Canadian Banking, provisions were up $39,000,000 from last quarter. We had higher impairments in our collectively assessed commercial portfolio and higher impairments in our personal lending portfolio.
In City National, provisions were up $18,000,000 from last quarter largely due to higher losses on previously impaired loans in the consumer discretionary sector. Turning to Slide 19. Gross impaired loans of $3,500,000,000 was up $593,000,000 or 6 basis points from last quarter, reflecting higher impairments in capital markets in the same two sectors I noted earlier. This was partially offset by lower impairments mainly due to one real estate account that has returned to performing this quarter in our Canadian Banking Commercial portfolio and higher repayments in our Caribbean Banking Portfolio. In addition, City National had lower impairments in its consumer discretionary sector, which is partially offset by higher impairments in the consumer staples sector.
Outside of capital markets, the current macroeconomic weakness was not a significant driver of new impaired loans this quarter. Turning to Slides 20 to 23. I'd like to provide some color on some of our more vulnerable sector exposures, which includes components of our consumer discretionary, commercial real estate, oil and gas, transportation and media sectors. Consistent with our broad and diversified portfolio, these sectors account for about 7% of RBC's total loans outstanding. Let me start with the oil and gas sector.
About 90% of oil and gas provisions this quarter related to companies that have been struggling to recover from the 2015 oil downturn. Our exposure to this sector, which represents 1.3% of RBC's total loans outstanding, increased by 22% from last quarter, driven by higher draws on existing facilities as well as new liquidity facilities that we provided to existing investment grade clients. The majority of our exposure to this sector is to E and P companies, which is predominantly done through a borrowing based lending structure whereby loans are secured by the value of proven and producing reserves. About half of our oil and gas exposure is most sensitive to oil prices and many of those clients have hedged their production through the end of 2020. Our ACL coverage ratio for the oil and gas sector is now at 4% of our outstanding exposure is slightly above the cumulative amount of provisions we took in this sector from 2015 to 2017.
With the other vulnerable sectors noted, clients have been affected by business closures, physical distancing measures and other government restrictions. Retail related commercial real estate has been impacted by retail closures, creating challenges around tenants' ability to pay rent. Retailers and restaurant owners with limited to no online presence or that are independent businesses without access to broader corporate support are being negatively impacted. Hotels have seen a substantial drop in occupancy rates and recreational EMEA related companies have also seen a substantial drop in demand or have been forced to temporarily shut down. While each sector is unique, we feel that the support programs we put in place for our clients are consistent and prudent approach to our underwriting standards and the various government programs available to them will all help mitigate potential loan losses.
This is additionally supported by an allowance for loan losses of 1.1% of our total wholesale outstanding exposure. Let me now discuss our retail portfolio. Turning to Slides 2425. As I noted earlier, we had higher impairments in our personal loan portfolio and stable impairments for the remainder of our retail portfolio relative to Q1. Cards utilization rates have declined in April and other revolving lines of credit have been stable through the quarter.
4% of our clients have taken advantage of our client relief program, but the pace of client take ups has decided over the past few weeks. Our client relief programs offer the opportunity for retail clients to defer certain payments for up to 6 months. Once these client relief options run their course, we do expect to see elevated delinquencies and insolvencies given the significant impact COVID-nineteen has had on the labor market. As reflected in our allowances, we expect the weak economic outlook more acutely impact our cards and personal lending portfolios due to the unsecured nature of those products. Given our prime focus in retail, the vast majority of our collects credit profiles remain strong and we are proactively assisting clients that may be facing hardship to help them navigate through this environment.
While we are forecasting a decline in house prices, declining credit performance in our mortgage portfolio will be mitigated by the very strong credit profile of our clients as reflected in the FICO distribution as well as our strong security position as reflected in the LTV profile. Let me now discuss market risk on Slide 27. We saw sizable market movements over a few weeks in March that were equivalent to or greater than those experienced over a number of months during the 2,008 financial crisis. This volatility led to 13 days of mark to market losses. 4 of those days exceeded VAR projections in March due to markdowns of the loan underwriting portfolio, the counterparty default and significant market volatility.
In April, trading businesses were able to capitalize on the reopening of primary markets and better secondary market activity as markets recovered and volatility subsided. Average market reservoir increased from Q1 due to wider credit spreads and market volatility that impacted our loan underwriting commitments as well as fixed income and equity portfolios. Going forward, we do expect our average VAR to be at higher levels than it has been historically as the volatility experienced in March will be reflected in our VAR methodology for the foreseeable future. Having said that, VAR has now declined by approximately 25% from its April peak as a result of reduced loan underwriting exposure and improved market conditions. As I noted earlier in 2019, our leverage finance business employs an underwrite to distribute model with 2 primary risks, market risk in relation to loans and bonds we distribute and credit risk in relation to the portion of the credit facilities we retain.
For our loan underwriting activities, our primary protection against market volatility is in the form of PriceFlex that helps mitigate against spreads widening during the distribution period. Given the significant market volatility noted earlier, we saw spreads widen the quarter beyond our flex protection. These spread movements have all been reflected in the valuations Rod mentioned earlier and referenced on Slide 12. We ended Q2 with a committed loan underwriting book of $3,900,000,000 market activity in May has allowed further reductions subsequent to quarter end. Our overall approach to leverage lending, including the portion we retain, continues to adhere to our disciplined risk management approach.
The committed portfolio size is largely unchanged over the past year. It is a very well diversified portfolio with no sector representing more than 16% of the portfolio and single name concentrations kept relatively small. To conclude, our history of prudent underwriting, the prime nature of our retail portfolios and the diverse nature of our wholesale portfolios serve a strong net against the deteriorating macroeconomic conditions that have arisen as a result of the COVID-nineteen pandemic. We believe we have taken appropriate provisions to reflect these deteriorating external conditions. Based on our current view of the economic outlook, we believe that PCL and performing loans this quarter has reached the high watermark.
However, as I noted at the beginning of my remarks, there is great uncertainty with respect to the speed at which the economy recovers, the efficacy of government support, future potential waves of the virus and the availability of a treatment or vaccine, all with the impact provisions in the future. We expect impaired loans and the associated losses to be muted in the near term given the prevalence of client relief options with a more material impact beginning to show once the relief options run their course. As a result, we anticipate our PCL and impaired loans to trend higher to the latter portion of 2020 and then into the start 2021. We expect to be able to draw down on the allowance in performing loans that we built this quarter such that our total allowances won't materially change as the loans become impaired. Drawing down on our allowance and performing loans will partially offset the expected PCL on impaired loans we're anticipating.
With that operator, let's open the lines for Q and A.
Thank you. We will now take questions from the telephone lines. The first question is from Ebrahim Poonawala of Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Good morning. I guess I just wanted to follow-up on something that Rod you mentioned around expenses and operating leverage. Crises create opportunities And when you look at Royal, I mean, it's hard to argue that you won't be better off competitively than you are even coming into the crisis. Talk to us just in terms of how you're thinking about pulling back on discretionary expenses or investments versus any opportunities that are already beginning to emerge where either from a market share standpoint in retail or capital markets that you could be looking to sort of capitalize on?
Thanks, Ebrahim. I'll start and Dave might join in. In terms of investments, we've been ramping up our investment spend on technology with a client focus and then obviously also an efficiency focus, but really on a client focus and market share growth focus over the last 5 years. And so that was done in anticipation that if and when a recession hit, we could dial that back and still be in a strong position. And so that holds.
We will still continue to invest if it makes sense, but we're also taking back discretionary spending. We kind of bucket it into 2 or 3 buckets, which is what are the low hanging fruit that you can dial back in a situation like this, which I mentioned in my comments, marketing and travel. Then there's the investment spend, where we have definitely curtailed the growth. We could take it down. We could keep it at the same level depending on what makes sense from an NPV and an investment in future growth standpoint.
And then there is the other items which kind of ratchet up and down with business volume such as variable compensation. So our strategy has not been significantly changed by this. We look to drive efficiency through the cycle and that has not changed.
I'll just add an example in City National where we've been investing and expanding our network and opening new branches and new locations whether it's in Nashville or New York City. So that will continue. We see enormous growth opportunity. You've seen the results in the City National and a growth story. At the same time, we've been investing in digital capabilities there.
We're launching it. We have launched a new cash management system for City National and we're we've delayed the launch, but we'll launch this summer a new mobile banking platform. So those types of investments, we use the tailwind of rates. That organization, obviously, City National is facing tougher revenue headwinds with a decline in rates and a rapid decline in rates. We've got a lot of that work behind us, but you still want to invest where there's growth.
And I think so there's an example of where we're going to be careful, but we still want to invest. So, as Rod said, we'll look at where there's opportunity, where there's client growth, we'll continue to invest, but we have made a big chunk of our technology investments. And if needed, we can pull back depending on the revenue profile going forward knowing that we have very strong technology capabilities on a comparative basis.
Thank you.
Thank you. The following question is from Steve Theriault of 8 Capital. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much. Rod, that was great color on how your some of your most adverse stress tests would impact capital. Now you said you remain well above the regulatory minimum. Does that is it safe to say that translates into greater than 10% if we take that? You mentioned 115 basis points was the sort of what would weigh on CET1 off the 11.7% you're at this quarter?
Just want to make sure what the messaging is there.
Yes. Thanks, Steve. So our current buffer is 2 70 basis points above the regulatory minimum of 9%, including the domestic stability buffer of 100 basis points. Most of our scenario analysis would suggest that we are going to remain well above that 10% threshold that you mentioned. If we do take some of our more severe scenarios, we're still working through how those might play out, whether it's a W type recovery or others.
We are fine tuning and these scenarios consistently constantly. And as we work through those, we remain well above our risk appetite, which includes a buffer above that 9% minimum. And in a predominant number of cases, we are well above that 10%.
Okay. And then the 41 basis points of drawdowns and downgrades you mentioned, am I right to assume that the vast majority of that is the drawdowns we saw this quarter?
No, it's approximately a fifty-fifty split. So 41 basis points figure, 20 for drawdowns and 21 for downgrades. Okay.
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Sure. No problem, Dick. Thanks.
Thank you. The following question is from Meny Grauman of Cormark Securities. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. I know you mentioned you expect a moderation in mortgage growth. But if I look at what we've seen through the quarter, definitely very strong. And I'm wondering how you reconcile that strength with everything we know in terms of deferrals and lockdowns and just the depression level economic indicators that we will see in the short term. So how does that all make sense to you?
Well, thanks for the question. We started the year exceptionally strong. So we were originations for the Q1 were exceptionally strong. So that was really fueling the early growth. As soon as we really saw the impacts of COVID, obviously, you can't show a home and transactions just dried up.
So right through to really the end of April, we were at annual lows for origination. We've since seen that come up a little bit, probably about a third from sort of peak to trough in May. But right now, we're on an annual basis, we're probably looking at an outlook for originations of about 80% to 85% of last year and a lot of uncertainty obviously given we don't know what the measures are going to be and how much access that clients are going to have to go and actually look at home. So that's how we had really bridged the 2. Strong start and then just a sudden breaking as the inventory just dried up.
And then just in terms of your commentary on pricing, how would you contrast your outlook for condos versus single family in terms of the expectation for price declines?
I don't know if we've this is Graham. I'll answer it at a broad level. I don't know if I have the split between the different types of housing. But overall, in our forecasting, we built a 7% decline in house prices with kind of recovery period taking over about 2 years. Underneath the hood that would split by different geographies and different property types.
I just don't have those numbers with me, But the national level of the client we're forecasting and modeling right now is a peak to trough of 7%.
Thank you.
Thank you. The following question is from Gabriel Dechaine of National Bank Financial. Please go ahead.
First of all, thanks for all the disclosures and especially on the impact of downgrades and your commentary, Rod. On one hand, I could say that you're conservative, but on the other hand, also have about 43% of your wholesale portfolio with non investment grade credits. Like how would you address that dichotomy?
Well, so, Gabriel, this is great. I'll maybe take down the migrations a little bit. So just to think through how this is happening. So what Rod gave you was a sensitivity that reflects if we did a one notch downgrade across the whole portfolio, which would be very broad and pervasive, but just does give a good sensitivity against it. In terms of how we've approached this so far, we basically have gone through our corporate book and really taken the rating actions that we think are necessary in that space.
We are very much able to do that in such a kind of a timely manner there just because of the very public nature of those companies. We have a very visible data around them. They have got visible information in terms of markets and have a very constant dialogue with the company on that. And so we think we've taken prudent rating actions necessary there across the piece. Where there is more, I would say, so any ratings actions there, I would say, will come by company specific information or changes in macroeconomic environment that might have us change our view on these companies.
On the commercial and retail side is where there is more ratings actions to come. Given the latent information set that we get there, maybe those are more model driven and as the model capture more information on our client activity, we will and do expect to see further credit action and migrations through the latter half of this year. To give you some context though on Rod's number, so oil and gas is an example and we talked about it in our slides here, one of the most highly impacted sectors in this environment and was one of the sectors that we saw the most downgrades in. The average downgrade there for companies that were downgraded was 1.8 notches. So that just gives you some context for the kind of downgrade activity we would see on average.
And that would be true regardless of whether it's investment grade or non investment grade.
Thanks. And while I have you, Graham, people are going to ask about your PCL expectation for Q3 and Q4 and that's important. But I'd like to know, and you alluded to it, the outlook for peak gross impaired loans, like when do you expect that to take place and roughly what level, because that's ultimately going to dictate if the provisions you're taking now and next quarter are sufficient or more than sufficient?
Yes, sure Gabriel. Kind of walk you through how our thinking is on the PCL because the growth impaired loans is really just is really what we're forecasting at the end of the day when we're calculating our expected credit losses and then we're translating that back into provisions. And so we have a lot of very rich tools in our toolbox. Certainly, we've built a lot of very strong modeling capabilities for IFRS 9. We've had a lot of strong modeling capabilities for our stress testing.
And so as we head into the COVID pandemic that we're facing, that's a great starting point we have, but certainly the storyboard here is very unique and unlike anything we've ever seen. And so we really took those tools that we've kind of reset the storyboard. We really reset it to reflect the environment we think we are facing. So our base case started with the storyboard that talked about this pandemic being a situation where we can effectively be in an economic lockdown for 3 months to get the virus under control before the economy starts to reopen following that and reopen over a very extended period of time. And then we translated that into the macro variables I think that you saw in our disclosures there and then really took those all that information set and the modeling capabilities we have to try and forecast gross impaired loans ultimately and the translation into Stage 3 losses, which is ultimately then what we kind of discount back to get the expected credit losses that we established in our Stage 1 and 2 provisions.
We talked about the severity of different scenarios. When we established that base case, we are really trying to reflect the real acute severity of the economic condition we are facing. And we have already mentioned some of the variables there. In that scenario, we are talking about HPI down 7%. We're talking about unemployment going up to 15% and taking many years to recover.
We're talking about oil prices dropping down into 20s and staying in the 30s before recovering over the next 2 to 5 years into the 40s. So we think we have reflected a very severe scenario in our base case that we use to project out these losses. Now we did bring in because of the severity situation, we did bring in a lot of their tools here. We really leveraged our portfolio management teams, our product specialists and really our credit experts that know their sectors inside out And we really have them kind of think through these scenarios and assess what they thought impairments and loan losses could be. And we are really able to bring all these together to really project and get confidence in kind of the impairments that we think we will face going forward.
And so the peak level of impairments, I guess, was your original question really ties to kind of the guidance I provided on provisioning, which is to say, we do think in the near term, will there be some suppression and impairments in Stage 3 losses with that in large part due to the deferral programs and the government programs. But as those run their course, many clients will return to back to good performing position. But we will have clients facing hardship and then that's reflected in our elevated levels of unemployment that we expect in the coming quarters years. But we really expect to see that start to accumulate kind of the latter half of this year and really into early 2021 as those programs run their course.
So early 2021.
So that's the short answer. Thanks. Thanks, Gabriel. Thanks for
taking all your questions.
Thank you. The following question is from Sumit Malhotra of Scotiabank. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning. Graham, just to start with you. Towards the end of your prepared remarks, you were commenting on the increase in the allowance. Just wanted to make sure I heard you correctly.
Did you indicate that the bank is of the view that the level of the aggregate allowance should not change too much from here going forward? Or were you talking about one specific part of the reserves?
Yes, thanks. No, we are talking about reserves in aggregate, right? I mean, we have built up a very significant allowance in Stage 12, that is our expected credit losses. And assuming the world plays out consistent with the forecast we have made, then we would expect to draw down on that and that would offset the impaired loan losses that we would expect to increase over the coming months quarters here. So we do all else being equal that we do see those as largely offsetting.
Now there is a lot of uncertainty to that and so all that will change obviously as the each and every quarter as we reestablish kind of our forecast as we learn more about our client behavior relative to how we have modeled it, that will impact our reserves each every quarter. But in our baseline, that is how we would expect this to play out and that's how it is by design set up to operate.
So said differently, going forward for Royal, the provisions and charge offs essentially net off and the assumptions that you've made going forward?
That is the assumption subject to all the uncertainty that we've put out there.
Last question is for Rod Bolger. Thanks. I'll echo the statements. Really appreciate your upgraded disclosure this quarter. And specifically on capital, looking at your waterfall chart, the comment about 23 basis points of IFRS nine capital modification, Does that only reference the expected credit loss transition?
Or have you also does that number also pick up the reduction in the stress bar multiplier?
That's just for the 70% modification on the stage 1, stage 2 build that falls to 50% next year and then 25% the year after. So it does not include the stress bar.
And is the stress bar I think your methodology and policy line in the market RWA was down, I don't have it in front of me, I think it was $4,000,000,000 to 5,000,000,000 dollars You talked about the VAR scenario updating next quarter to include the volatility in Q2. Just curious as to how you were expecting that market risk line to trend from here given that change in VAR? And frankly, what has obviously indicated would be the market environment in which that stressed bar multiplier leaf would be removed?
So on the first question, you'll see in the waterfall, the 6 basis points and the $2,700,000,000 that's a net figure. So we did get about 11 basis points of benefit from the SBAR modification, and that's offset by other model and methodology increases that were about 5 basis points. We would actually expect as we roll through VAR and you get a full quarter in, the way our methodology works, we would expect market risk RWA to increase next quarter despite the 25% reduction that Graham outlined. My understanding is that OSFI may change the multiplier back once we get to normal volatility levels and market conditions, which is not anytime soon that I would anticipate.
Thanks for your time.
Thank you. The following question is from Sohrab Movahedi of BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Okay. Thank you. Graham, when the bank had hosted an Investor Day a couple of years ago, I think one of the benefits of the tech and the data infrastructure, I think that was highlighted was a better risk management, I guess, perspective. Is there any way to quantify how much of the benefit would have been reflected here? Or maybe put it differently, how much higher would your provisions have been had you not had the benefit of the investments you had made in technology and data and the like previously?
It's Graham. Maybe I'll start with that. I don't know if there's a way to quantify what our provisions would have been if we didn't have the capabilities we have today. The capabilities we have today, I think, are just inherent to how effective we are and capable we are at managing risk. And those credit models can that we build and leverage all the data and infrastructure we have can really emphasis in 2 ways through a cycle.
1 is we can use it to mitigate and not originate risk that we otherwise might have originated or we can use those models to take on revenues for risk that we're quite comfortable with. So it's not as simple as just saying how does it trim one part or the other. When I look at this quarter in particular and how valuable those capabilities and that modeling was, we were really able to take that infrastructure, the data and really the people and capabilities we have there to really get down into account level modeling to understand income disruption with our clients, to understand the impact of payment deferrals at the account level, the government programs and really help support the loan losses we established here today. I mean, likewise, on the fraud side, which is such an acute risk in this environment, We've really been able to leverage that data to ensure really strong performance on the fraud front. Cyber would be another example of that.
I mean, we just these are all just incredibly strong capabilities we have to really help manage risk effectively through the environment. To quantify that for you, I just I don't know how to put a number to that.
The only data point I would add is you've heard me talk about our retail scoring systems and bring in an expansive data set, which we continue to do. When we first implemented it 15 years ago, we got about a 30% lift. So, we've seen a material shift. And the more data, the more insight you bring to decisioning, that investment in managing data, which allowed us to really focus on core checking accounts. As I've told you before, the information value of our core checking business is not just on purchasing habits and lifestyle habits of clients.
It also comes down to risk management allowing us to manage our book appropriately. So we've seen, to Graham's point, a really significant return on the investment of technology and data and why we continue to make it a big part of our strategic type going forward.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. The following question is from Mario Mendonca of TD Securities. Please go ahead.
Good morning. I think rightfully everyone on these calls is focused on the here and now, the short term, because it's so meaningful. But now with a few of the banks under our belt, I want to just take a longer term perspective. Coming out of the financial crisis, every bank's ROE dropped pretty significantly. We had like 20% plus ROEs.
And Dave, as you said, the banks averaged a 17% ROE over the last 3 years. I'm not sure if it's possible yet, but when you look out to the end of this crisis, could we be looking at a Canadian banking sector led by Royal with ROEs that are substantially lower than 17% either because of higher capital requirements or much lower interest rates or just a much weaker Canadian consumer. Are you able to think that far out yet and look at what ROE potential Royal has when this is all said and done?
So maybe I'll start and then I'll hand it to Rod for more detailed balance sheet comments. But if you look at our strategy, Mario, it's strategy of driving a premium ROE and we've invested in businesses and in customer franchises and geographic expansion that allows us to drive a premium ROE strategy. We're not moving away from that. We still think our collection of client franchises businesses, our scale, diversification, technology investments and a comparative advantage there allows us to drive a premium ROE in the marketplace and that continues to be our medium term objective and will be how we manage this organization going forward. We're learning a lot about the business as it stands through a crisis.
We'll look at our businesses going forward. We'll look at how customers have changed and we'll continue to invest in driving a client franchise that has a premium ROE to it and we'll have to exit businesses that we don't think can drive that premium going forward. And so we're going through a world of change. It's early to call exactly which customer franchises or products may not be part of the set going forward, but we're keeping a list to see, okay, this business has been impacted significantly, will it recover, how it will recover, are there going to be
a new capital ratio applied,
how does liquidity perform. So, all of that will be taken into consideration, but we're starting from a position as you referenced of enormous strength and I don't see a significant change from the premium retail franchise we have, the premium wealth and our focus on wealth growth in the United States and Canada. Having said that, as you said, we are expecting that a medium term headwinds from a low rate environment in the U. S. That impacts our U.
S. Wealth franchise significantly as you saw the results, but that will recover. But volume growth is helping offset that and we continue to see enormous opportunities to drive good volume growth. So we will manage the business accordingly and we're very much focused as you heard at the end of my comments on emerging from this as even stronger and more focused company knowing that we can continue to lever all of the capabilities, the brand, the technology, the fortress balance sheet, the team and the people that we have to drive a premium ROE and I think that's what you should expect from us.
Yes, I'll just add on 2 structural elements Mario. Looking at the financial crisis versus now different Basel mechanisms. But if you do like for like and that's kind of pro form a to Basel 3.5 back to the pre financial crisis, we're 3 times the capital ratio we were entering then. We did pretty well through that crisis. We did do a small equity issuance.
We don't expect to do any equity issuance this time and we expect to maintain well, well above much higher regulatory buffer. So we don't think there is a structural need for more capital in the banking system. We think it's been elevated to levels it needs to be, which means that we should be able to return to pre COVID premium ROE as well. You won't see that immediately because you're going to see inflated RWA, which means that you're going to be holding denser equity, if you will. So there will be a couple of years where that's going to be suppressed.
But structurally, we don't think there's going to be a seismic shift up in the equity, which would dampen those returns.
So just to
put a final point on it, the denominator doesn't change much because unlike the financial crisis, I would hope we're not going to go through yet another update to capital requirements. But I guess what I'm hearing is maybe we've got to be
a little careful about the numerator
of the ROE calculation that earnings could be somewhat depressed for some time. Is that fair?
Well, you're going to see earnings suppressed in the short term until the economy recovers, absolutely. And then once the economy gets back, if you look at the Chart 30 that we shared, if the economy gets back to those levels in 2022, you should start to see that ROE pick up again.
Okay. Thank you. Thank
you. Thank you. The following question is from Scott Chan of Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Rod, you talked about the U. S. NIM at CMB and it was down another 20 bps quarter over quarter. And I think you talked about a bit of a decline short term, but do you have any color of when you expect that margin to stabilize from what you know right now?
Yes, we expect a couple more quarters of compression, just because it's going to take a little time for that to flow through. Now we have seen very significant deposit growth, which has continued. So that's helped displace some wholesale funding with retail and core deposit funding. But we would expect that to continue. And it's fairly consistent.
If you look at the impact, it's fairly consistent with the impacts that we had disclosed previously in terms of the earnings compression. And we're managing the business that way. Dave outlined our continued investment in that business. The core franchise is growing extremely well. And obviously, we have some margin compression to deal with and work through.
And so not unexpected, but we would expect it continued for at least 2 more quarters.
Okay. And then just quickly on Slide 7, appreciate disclosure on the client activity. Just on the Canadian Retail AUM, have you noticed a notable shift with your clients in terms of penetration into active mutual funds versus ETFs kind of pre COVID and what you're seeing right now?
Yes, Doug. I'll take that. So I wouldn't say there's been a real change because of COVID. The shift from active to passive has been much lower in Canada than the U. S.
We've built the product shelf to address whatever the rate of changes in that direction in terms of the alliance that we've arranged with BlackRock around ETFs. What we have seen in disrupted markets is a higher than normal share of gathering assets. And a lot of that ends up in cash deposits in the retail bank and slower mutual funds sales across the industry. Our share of those sales has been very strong, disproportionately strong. And so our market share of the active long term funds continues to rise.
And we'd expect, like we've seen in prior discussions, that as markets normalize, people will do what they should with their savings, which is start to invest it across asset classes and we'd expect it to slide over into mutual funds. So that business remains extremely healthy from our perspective.
Thank you.
Operator, next question please.
Thank you. The following question is from Steve Theriault of 8 Capital. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much. I just want to ask a question on cards for Neil. We've heard from some of the other banks that activity levels bounced back pretty close to pre COVID levels. Maybe that's temporary, maybe not. But can you give a bit of an update there on what you're seeing in your card book?
And in particular, for your WestJet portfolio, how much impact are you seeing there from with air travel being mostly on pause?
Yes, thanks for the question. Yes, I mean, if you look at if you break down the categories, I mean, for the quarter, travel was down about 90%. Largest Airlines, we are seeing it's just evaporated. Dining is down about 50%, gas sort of these large categories down about 50%. It's really only kind of the daily essentials.
It's food, it's things like pharmacy, they were up about 20%. So those are the I think the big category swings. Net net for the quarter, we were down about 12% or 13% in terms of spending. So that would translate there's about $5,000,000,000 of purchase volume that we had anticipated that did not materialize because of the COVID measures. In terms of splitting it between the WestJet, Steve, to your question, we are seeing if we lump sort of all of the reward products together, spending was down about 30%.
When we look at the portfolio that does not carry rewards, it was down 20% for the quarter. If you look at sort of through the quarter, I wouldn't say it is we've bounced off the bottom, but we're nowhere near kind of back to normal.
And for the WestJet card that earns WestJet dollars, is there ability to earn sort of regular RBC loyalty points?
No, no. So those they earn those dollars and we immediately pay WestJet for those and that liability is transferred over to WestJet.
And that 30% you mentioned for the loyalty type products like the WestJet sort of in line with that?
Yes. Yes.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. The following question is from Nigel D'Souza of Airtas Investment. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning. So I wanted to tackle your commentary on impaired the outlook for impaired loans and delinquencies towards the end of the year. And a lot of that will depend on how fiscal support programs play out and how the deferral loan programs wind down. So I was wondering if you could maybe give us a sense of what's already baked into your performing loan loss this year.
So in other words, of the deferred loans that you currently have, which is pretty sizable for mortgages and wholesale, for example, how much of those loans are currently classified as Stage 2 or are the majority of them still in Stage 1?
That's great. I have to I don't have that breakdown off the top of my head. I would say again going back to the commentary we had on the modeling we've done, that's exactly what we've been playing out. We go down to the account level and really trying to understand the income disruption there, overlay our views on the unemployment situation that we talked about earlier. And then in the government support, ultimately to kind of model out what we think the delinquencies and impairments will be and that's the loan losses.
The disclosure we provided on the payment deferral program, just to give you some context, as you said, certainly the biggest balance has come in the mortgage space. A couple of pieces I would maybe just give you context on that. One is, so in deferrals about 40% of our clients took a 1 month deferral on that. So that's the 1st cohort we've been able to look at a little bit. We've just gotten some early insights on that.
About 50% of those clients have returned back into a payment status. That's just one point of context. So that's a bit of the earliest data we have to start to validate the assumptions we've been making. The other piece just in terms of kind of the higher risk use there. If you take kind of that again those clients that have opted for a deferral plan programs and you look at our mortgage book, the uninsured component of it and kind of the high LTV, the over 80%, you're talking about $900,000,000 in balances right now that fit that kind of high risk category.
So those are just kind of some of the points, but again, the modeling we do is obviously much richer than just kind of capturing those points. And certainly, as we kind of see our client behavior going forward, we'll continue to reflect that into our modeling and any adjustments we need to make in our provisions. But right now, that's pretty much the grand door approach we've taken to it.
Yes. If you really want to get into the details, you can look at Page 77 of the RTS where we break out the staging by risk category, by product, which includes residential mortgages. So about 8% of our portfolio is currently in Stage 2. So that is up from year end and from the prior quarter.
Okay. That's really useful commentary. I appreciate it. Thanks.
Thank you, operator. I think we're done with the call. We'll turn it over to Dave Mackay.
Thanks, Nadine, and thanks, everyone, for your calls. I recognize how difficult the last 2 days have been for the analysts and particularly this morning with 2 banks reporting. There's really kind of three themes that I wanted or hoping that you took away from our commentary and as many of you have noted, the enhanced disclosure that we provided to give clarity on the strength power of our franchise. Number 1, our strong financial position. The diversification of our business model and scale we talk about on almost every call for the last 5 or 6 years and I think it really showed again in a time of crisis and with balance sheet strength we've been preparing as we said in our comments for a recession sometime in 2022 it caused us to approach and build our capital to not make acquisitions to not buy back shares and therefore we started this crisis which we didn't see with a very, very strong 12% CET1 ratio and you see after a crisis where we took over 2 $800,000,000 of charges, 11.7 percent CET1 ratio.
So there are diversified models, the size scale of our business, the capital base, the Fortress balance sheet really give us an opportunity to support our clients to absorb the uncertainty with resilience and to take advantage of opportunities going forward. I think we're in a very good position to do all three. I also hope from our disclosure, from the commentary, from how we've approached the uncertainty of the health and economic outcomes, the conservatism with which the management team here at RBC has approached this from the reserves we've taken from our approach and the discussion that we're taking a very conservative base case as you heard Graeme describe is quite a severe scenario and you should dig into that, but we have approached this entire crisis with a very conservative approach to protect our balance sheet, to protect our shareholders. But third is a very strong earnings power. We exited Q1 2020 with a fantastic quarter.
We carry that momentum in. You saw a very strong pre tax pre provision earnings and that talks again to the diversification, the quality of our client franchise. So, a conservatism, a strength, a diversification and an earnings capability position us well to withstand the uncertainty and turnaround and exit this a stronger bank and a bank that can take advantage of the opportunities that will present itself in the future. So thank you very much for your questions and we look forward to talking to you over the coming quarter.
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