Moving right along, very pleased to have Bank of America with us, returning again this year. From the company of Bernard Mensah, who is President of International for Bank of America. He's based in London and responsible for Bank of America's strategy and business activities internationally. Some of you may remember, but prior to his current position, which he took in 2020, he actually led FICC business. We did a dinner with him-
Moving right along.
... at this conference in May of 2018.
Very pleased to have Bank-
Actually learned a lot, said why Bank of America is gonna commit to the business and grow it, and if you kind of look at their revenues, it's been a nice source for the company. And with that, what we're gonna do is he'll take us through, you know, a few slides to kind of level set us, and then we'll kind of jump into some fireside chat and Q&A.
Thanks. So I sit here, and then I can see my slides.
There you go.
Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for taking the time to join, and I think we have some people on the webcast as well, so appreciate it. We have just three slides here, which I'm going to run through, and I think if there's three points that I want to make today on the slides and through our discussion, is that we have an incredible global business that is truly global, and it's at scale. The global business that we're a part of is growing, but it is complex, and we're very well set up to take advantage of it, and that our international business is a growth engine for the firm. So it's really those three things that I'm going to touch on in a bunch of different ways.
So we have this platform, it's big and it's complex, and you have to be thoughtful about how you grow it, but it's absolutely a growth engine for our global franchise. The first slide that comes up talks to that, the first point that I was making, that we have this international business that's at scale. It's all the historic amalgamations of where we are now with Bank of America. So it's full services across all the major countries that we want to be in. As you can see, we're in the 36 main countries we want to be in. We don't really have a desire for one more or other. We could be a little bit deeper in one or two countries, and we'll come to that in terms of how we're growing.
We have 17,000 colleagues that cover these countries. We have another 25,000-30,000 or so that sit in India, that run some of our platform. And in some of these countries, we've been there for 75, 80, 90 years. We've been in Italy for more than 100 years. We've been in India for 60 years. We've been in Japan for 73 years. We've been in Brazil for 73 years. Some real longevity around that. You can see that it is at scale. It's, it has around about $13 billion in revenues. It's been growing very well over the last four or five years, as has pre-tax and a good return on allocated capital as well, which is something that I look at.
Loans have been growing a lot more slowly, but actually, deposits have been growing quite a lot as well. So it's a business that is really at scale. And of course, when you measure, you know, revenues that are booked internationally or not, you can always sort of, you know, fine-tune it this way or that, but this really gets this gives you a sense of the international franchise that we have. And you can see on the right of the slide, just the quality, and what we've tried to do here is just to show the depth and the breadth and the quality that we have. We have, you know, we have a global research platform. We cover, I think, 3,500 companies, something like that, of which about 2,000 are international. We cover 50 countries. We're about 50 currencies.
We cover about 30, 35 commodities. So we are one of top two, top three, you know, global research platforms. And the exciting thing for me about this platform is that we have a full service markets business, fixed income and equities. That's one business that we do globally. We have our full service banking business, our corporate and our investment banking business. We're number three, international investment bank, corporate investment banking, internationally and in the U.S. And then the line that is a very exciting payments business, and we are top two, top three in international transaction banking services. And that's, you know, from trade finance to the card business, to treasury management, to liquidity management, and our ability to do that at scale and at the pace that we have is...
As I said, there's very, very few institutions that are able to do that. And that is driven by an incredible home base of the best and largest economy, the U.S. economy. That gives us this incredible sort of base from which to grow out, because we have that. It's a dollar-based bank, and we have an incredible suite of U.S. clients, but then we also have the ability to project and be global with the rest of the global franchise. So I'll come to that, but that's really the main point. We're set. It's not looking to grow in terms of country or product base. It's really deepening and enriching this platform that is set and in place.
The second slide I wanted to touch on was really the nature of the business, really client-led. One way to think about it is, and to give you a sense of the scale and the opportunities, is if you look on the top left, as I was just touching on before, and particularly if you take the GCIB business, you have this incredible platform of U.S. large corporates that are operating globally. We know all of them and all of the household names. And we obviously have all of the U.S. large institutions that operate globally as well, right? The U.S. sits at the nexus of a huge amount of capital, of excess savings flows.
The rest of the world generally has excess savings, mainly in Asia and Northern Europe, and then exports it to the U.S., which is able to capture a lot of the excess savings around the world, and we sit in, in the middle of those flows. But we also have a lot of internationally headquartered clients that want to do business in the U.S., and frankly, want to do business around the world as well. Now, if we have a client that is local and in-country, a large German corporate that just does business in Germany, it's tough for us to compete with that client because they'll have German banks covering them. But as soon as they're putting a foot internationally, which, you know, large majority of the biggest companies are, we're well placed to service them with that.
But another core aspect of our franchise that we're excited about is our commercial banking business. There are only three U.S. banks that have a substantial U.S. commercial banking, and we define it as $50 million-$2 billion in revenues. So in that middle space, just below the large corporates, there's just three of us that have it at scale, and the only two of us that operate globally. Absolutely. And so we can work with that incredible client base and travel with that client base. And that's when we look at that client base, it's very under-penetrated in terms of how we service them globally. So that's been an area where we're absolutely looking to grow, and you can see we've given you some of the numbers there.
If you take my international subsidiaries of U.S. commercial clients, some of those clients won't have any international business. A bunch of them will have three, four, five subsidiaries. And if you think that Wendy Stewart, that runs that business, has gone north of 10,000, 15,000, somewhere U.S. commercial clients, we're the number one U.S. commercial bank, then you see the opportunities to grow in that in terms of servicing their, you know, their subsidiary business. Now, one thing I wanted to touch on, which I didn't, we didn't put a slide up on, is the fact that it is complex internationally. It is getting more complex. If you were a CEO 20 years ago, you thought about maybe London, New York, Hong Kong, when you thought about your international bases.
Now, you've got to think, is it because of Brexit? Is it Paris? Is it London? Is it Frankfurt? In Asia, how do you think about Hong Kong, Singapore? And the world is getting, you know, MENA is coming up, and there's Dubai, et cetera. So it is getting more complex. The geopolitics is affecting the business to some extent. There are new rules and regulations that are coming, and there's a whole raft of regulations around data. There's a whole raft of regulations around climate, so we have to be thoughtful about that. But in a sense, that plays to our strengths as well, because you need to have the scale to be able to manage in that space.
You need to have the scale of compliance and local management and a local understanding, country by country, in order for this business really to be truly sustainable, so that in our mantra of responsible growth, you're growing, but you're growing responsibly. You have a strategy by country, and you're able to tap on the opportunities insofar as they're happening. So insofar as there's global GDP growth, there's growth opportunities for us, even if supply chains are moving around, actually, that presents opportunities.
You know, and, and one of the, you know, growth areas we've looked at recently, for example, is in Mexico, where in the last year, it has become the U.S.'s largest trading customer, and as that happens, we're absolutely best, best placed to, to manage through that and, and to, and, and to capture that. So this gives you a sense of, of, of, of really the client-driven strategy that's just driving this, this growth strategy that we, that, that, that we think that... and the growth opportunity that we think, internationally is. And the final slide that we put up here is really, as I was saying, that the, if, if it's the third takeaway, it's the fact that it is this incredible, engine for growth. This slide is really saying that we're connecting the dots.
We're working really hard to think through, country by country, product by product, what products to go after, how to connect this incredible franchise, how to leverage a middle-market client or a commercial banking client in the U.S. internationally, how to leverage a Korean or a Japanese client that's looking to take advantage of the IRA into the U.S., how to leverage our incredible, payments platform, or our card platform, to allow, international companies that are operating globally to take advantage of that. So we're, we're investing in the platform all the time. We have to do it at scale. When Brian talks about the fact that we invest $11 billion-$12 billion in technology, spend $3.5 billion-$4 billion in new initiatives, we absolutely benefit from that.
Because when we're investing in that global payments platform, we're investing in our CashPro platform, and when we're inventing things like, you know, the virtual accounts, the treasury virtual accounts in the payment space, a lot of those things are actually driven by global corporate interests that we can use to gain market share and frankly work with our clients and help them grow. So it is a strategy that is an organic growth strategy that is based on driving the core client franchise we have, expanding that, investing in that continuously, and just applying our global metrics to allow us to for that to be really a tremendous engine for growth.
So, I was saying to Lee, it's a little bit of an untold story within the global Bank of America sort of firmament, so it was exciting to come and talk a little bit about it.
Thank you. It's actually interesting, on the first slide, I think you showed $13 billion in revenues. So if they take, you know, 10%-15% of Bank of America's total, but the percent perspective, if $13 billion as a standalone company, would be the 12th largest bank in the United States.
Yes.
It's a fairly substantial franchise.
With $4 billion in pre-tax, absolutely.
and quite profitable. Just maybe, you touched on this, but maybe just elaborate about how you kind of leverage, you know, Bank of America's U.S. franchise globally.
Yeah. So, I touched on, and we do that in a number of ways. We... Again, we're blessed or fortunate to have that cohort of some of the biggest, most, you know, entrepreneurial and enterprising businesses. So our ability to travel with them because we have this global platform is, I think, second to none. We leverage that with the international platform that I look after.
So a lot of my job is to make sure that we have the international platform in place, that they can leverage if they want to do business in France or in Germany or the U.K., and that we are able to invest our resources in the right way across our international platform, so that we can offer those services to the biggest companies. So we do that. But the other way as well, and we do that. I talked quite a little bit about the commercial bank and how we're excited about that sort of middle market space and traveling with them.
Another anecdote I was mentioning is, I was in Mexico, you know, a month ago, and when we looked at the number of clients already on board that we do business with in the U.S., and we and that do business in Mexico, we were covering something like 25%-30% of clients that are already clients of ours in the U.S. We like, we know them. Our market presidents in the U.S. send them Christmas cards, and bank them, and do all of that. And so it's an easy call to say, "Hey, how about the Mexico business?" Now, they may say no, but at least it's, it's an easy call before you go and and look after other, other people's business.
Then the other way I would say as well is that, going back in, at least in this life cycle of our sort of economic growth, the U.S. economy is dynamic, and it's very important globally. So we leverage that 'cause everybody... There is a lot of interest outside the U.S. for investments in the U.S., and that's not just the Inflation Reduction Act, it's just the dynamism of it. It's the largest market, it's, it's the stability of the economy, it's the technology-driven investments. So we are in demand with respect to our clients looking to navigate into the U.S. in terms of how these investments might take place.
And then finally, I would say, in the global market space, which is a global flow of capital space, it's, again, it's, it's so important for the large, wealth managers. So, you know, Europe has a huge amount of savings that it exports to the, to the U.S., to a lot, to a lot of money managers, some of which comes back to the, to Europe, actually. And obviously, Asia, Japan, and all these countries have huge amount of capital flows that get exported. And we and others being at the forefront in the middle of those flows, and our ability to handle those flows is important. It's covered, you know, it's backed up with things like our research platform, et cetera. So those are the ways that we leverage all of that.
I mean, I guess it sounds like, right, you've had more of the growth of, kind of U.S. clients growing organically and then growing internationally-
Yeah
... and taking advantage of you. Maybe just talk a bit more about opportunities of kind of organic opportunities with companies that are kind of based outside the US.
Yeah.
You know, maybe talk to what you're doing there, what you do there.
Yeah. So we've expanded that enormously. Some of it was from a little bit of a low base, but if you take our GCIB, the number of clients we cover in what we call GCIB, which are the larger corporates, that has gone up by about 50% or 60% since 2019. And for the GCB clients that I was talking about, the $50 million-$2 billion, that's gone up by about 20% in the last four or five years. So we've been investing a lot in covering more clients. There's such a leverage to the platform because we have the install capacity to do that. So that has been a journey that we've been on, and that's what's driven the revenue growth, that's what's driven the profitability growth.
And our mix of our full service capability to offer them everything in the capital market space, in the corporate lending space. You know, we talked about the size of the loan book that we have. Our ability to operate in the leasing space and the card space means that we, you know, we've been able to grow that.
I was in Switzerland last week, and there were two things that—many things struck me, but one of the things that struck me was, when I was talking to one of my colleagues in the global payment services business, actually, she was most excited about a couple of mandates that she'd won in the card space, as opposed to our transaction services space, which is something sometimes we don't talk too much about. And secondly, in Switzerland, where we have been a little bit opportunistic, actually, since the departure of one of the large Swiss banks, we were actually quite street tactical in that. We went and very quickly hired... We haven't—it's not our nature to make a big song and dance about it.
We've hired five bankers from this institution who are already on the platform, and I had dinner with five CEOs of large Swiss companies, and I saw a bunch of them the next day. And it was interesting, the gap that has been left in the Swiss corporate commercial C&I space by that activity, and again, we're very well placed to cover that, particularly with those companies that are, you know, international, specifically domestic.
I guess one of the things that we've observed, you know, in the U.S., that, you know, Bank of America is good at kind of leveraging local markets and connecting clients really across the businesses.
Mm.
You know, how do you think about connecting clients across the businesses internationally?
Yeah. So one of the, one of our sort of, I think one of the most powerful tools that we've built over the last two or three years is, we've built a country executive team that we think is second to none, and it's actually mirrored a little bit on our market president's effort that I have—I'm sure you've spoken about, and actually, Lee helps us drive. And actually, I picked up the phone and have spent a bunch of time with what we've done in the U.S. So, one of the things that has allowed us to really execute on this in a way that we think is sustainable and gives us an edge, is really investing in a country executive team that we spend a lot of time with.
We make sure that they own the business front to back, you know, from compliance to finance, HR, obviously working with their global colleagues. They think strategically about the countries. We took a country-by-country strategic approach. There wasn't a regional approach, so we measured them by a bunch of metrics, not just profitability, not just revenue, number of audit issues, what are our employee satisfaction scores? 'Cause we want each of them to be a mini CEO in their country, thinking holistically about the speed at which we should move with that country. They give us an early warning on new regulations that are coming in.
Because some of the regulations, as I touched on, can be complex and complicated, and you've got to think through, you know, how you manage through that. So that's been the bedrock of allowing us to deliver the entire firm to each situation in each country to drive, and I think that's been working well.
I guess you touched on something, but maybe you could help us, maybe key in on a few. As you kind of look across the businesses, maybe talk to the biggest product, client, or geographical opportunities.
I've touched on payments a little bit. For somebody who's a former trader, I found my new passion in the payment space. But maybe I can come back to that bit, but I'll switch to you touched on geography. For the first time this year, we thought we'd lean into a few countries, not for any particular reason, and none of the countries should feel left out, but we just thought, "Well, let's see if we can move the needle a little bit faster in these." You know, a lot of the time, my job is really to allocate resources, right?
I'm asked to run this business, so it allows me, at the top of the firm, to ask for resources, whether it's headcount or real estate or new offices or, you know, comm dollars or tech dollars, or whatever it is. And as a firm, we do that well in order to drive our growth the fastest, and that's the balance that we have to have. So four countries where we're sort of leaning in, three or four countries, to sort of see if we can, you know, crowd in resources a little bit more. One is Mexico, that I talked about, and that's really driven by... And none of these are particularly, you know, earth-shattering, but we're leaning into Mexico a little bit. We've been there a long time.
We have a huge amount of experience there and an incredible franchise there, and that's really driven from all of the nearshoring and the reshoring, et cetera. So, we're spending a little bit more time there. I talked about Switzerland. We, we're probably a little bit under-penetrated for the quality and the size of the country, but then we saw an opportunity with some of the changes that have happened in the Swiss financial services market. And again, because we've put this infrastructure in place, we can move. I think that's what's exciting about what we've built. If we hadn't built it in this way, even with that opportunity, it would've been more difficult for the firm to take advantage, because we want to do things right. We want to do things in a controlled way and a responsible way.
But now we can. We can move quickly. We can find those opportunities, hire people. We know it's well run. We had changed our country executive. We're very excited about the gentleman that runs it. We have terrific relationships, et cetera. The third country that we're spending a bunch of time on is Saudi Arabia, for the obvious reasons. And we've seen, for those of us... I have a little bit of an EM background as well, and so for those of us that were going there five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, there is just this incredible dynamic change in what is, I don't know, the 12th, 15th largest economy in the world. So we'll see how that develops. And so we're keen to lean into that.
Sometimes I say, that may not be for this current level of management. Who knows? I need to think through and enable us to do business in 10 years' time. So I may not be there, but if we get the call right, whoever's running international then or who's running the firm then would either thank me for having made the investment if they get it right, or curse me because, like, "What were those bozos doing back then? Why didn't they make the investment?" Assuming that the Saudis are able to execute on their strategy. If not, then maybe nobody cares. It's a moot point. So we're spending a lot of time thinking through that. By the way, we are already there. We're the largest equity player. We're the only foreign bank that is a market maker in Aramco shares.
We participate in all of the regular activity that you'll see. But there's more business that we can do, particularly as more international clients move to Saudi Arabia. So as more corporates are going onshore, as they're bidding for contracts and then guess what? They want payment services. They want banks that they can deposit money with. They want banks that can handle dollars and riyal and euros for them. And when you think about the global proposition for that, again, as I said, there are very few. So of course, the U.S. clients will look to us, but I think the large Asian clients and the large European clients would... You know, we have an ability to get some business there as well. And then India is one other country where, you know, we're leaning in.
They've also had a tremendous growth rate. They seem to have just, you know, gone round the corner in terms of accelerating growth. There seems to be some consistency around that. And we're, we're in the middle of getting our heads around how should we tackle that opportunity. We know it's a big opportunity, but, we, we want to be quite granular in terms of thinking through that. India is spectacular. On, on my last trip there, in each of the four cities I went to, you'd have dinner, and there were 20 or 30 global, not just American, global corporate clients that would come to dinner at the treasury corporate level because we do their payments, we do their transaction management. We just do the nitty-gritty for them, and, and I think that's appreciated.
You know, I think as an analyst, when you hear, right, a company's expanding internationally, we think expensive and complex. So maybe just talk to kind of how you manage the additional costs and complexity of operating globally.
Yeah. So you're right. So I touched on that, about the complexity, which I touched on. And absolutely, you're in 35, 36 countries. You're not in one, in the US. So I talked about the country executives that we leverage. We put other processes and platforms in place. So we run a platform we call International Horizontal, and this is an evergreen platform that is constantly looking for efficiencies. So that's just a program that we put in place, which allows us to constantly look to see, how can we be more efficient? What can we learn in one country versus the other?
Where are we using resources that we can leverage in one place versus, but at the same time, bearing in mind that, you know, you want a compliance person in each country, maybe in each city, in some cases. So there is that that's going on. Absolutely leveraging our corporate, our global platform in terms of the tech spend that I was telling you about. So India is a good example. One is complexity. India has a data localization law that says that, you have to reconfigure your system so that all Indian data is local, and in fact, if you have any Indian data outside the U.S., you have to outside India, you have to only have it there for a short period of time. So that's an incredible increase in level of complexity.
Your ability to execute on that in a cost-effective way means that you need to have a global platform. You have to have terrific global colleagues that can arrive at the situation and make that investment as efficiently as possible. And make sure that is done in a compliant way as possible. But that also creates certain barriers to entry, 'cause I think there'll be some other institutions that say, "I know how much it costs," and I know there'll be other institutions that say, "Well, actually, I'm not sure if I wanna pay for that." And you have to be comfortable about the scale of business that you have to be able to make that investment and, you know, and be profitable over time.
So whilst we agree that it's more complex, actually, at some level, when you have the scale that we have, we're one of only two banks, we're one of only two banks globally that have that U.S. hinterland and the global reach as well, then it gives you the opportunity to continue to make those investments. And then at the same time, absolutely, you're constantly looking to make sure that you're running things as efficiently as possible, but not so efficiently that you start to lose out on, you know, on compliance and on all the regulatory issues. So that's a balance that you work on, but we think you've got that.
And you can see in the numbers that we have taken our profitability up, and whenever you're looking at your pre-taxes, at expenses or is it revenues, it's a little bit of, you know, of a mix of both. But we're laser focused on that because if, if, if a Japanese institution is buying U.S. mortgages, it's taking Japanese savings and exporting them to the U.S. to get a return back for Japanese savers. That P&L will sit in the U.S. because it's U.S. mortgages that are being bought. But our ability to service that Japanese client really well means that we get that business. I use that example to say that the fact that we run $13 billion, it could be $12 billion, it could be $14 billion.
You know, at some level, that's not what Lee and Brian are looking at, at the top of the house. But we use it almost as a metric to say that we think it shows that the business is not a drag or a cost center or something that's a nice to have because I want to deal with, you know, a U.S. tech company or a Korean car company. It's something that, in and of itself, has a decent return on allocated capital, so to justify the business.
Then, I guess, can you talk a bit about the competitive landscape, you know, just how do you think about competition globally and BV's ability to sustain market share growth outside the U.S.? And maybe talk to kind of what just key differentiating factors.
Absolutely. So competition is a very good question. It's a lot more competitive. If you look at the investment banking fee pool, I think the top four, and don't quote me specifically, we can get the specific numbers, but I think the top four in the U.S. have something like 35% of the market, and the top four globally have something like 27% of the market, something like that. So internationally, it's a lot more competitive, and in each of the sub-segments, it's super competitive. I sometimes talk about France, where we're not just competing with our U.S. brethren, we're competing with the big French banks in investment banking business. And then you're competing with the new boutiques that have turned up recently, are getting market share in the M&A league tables.
Then you've got some old 200-year-old boutiques, you know, that are doing business as well. If you're in the corporate banking space, in each country, if you're... As I said, if it's purely domestic, it's tough because each country will have its bank that is the favorite of the largest companies in that country, so you have it in that space as well. But for the truly global markets, FIC, equities, businesses, and the scale, I think that's a competitive advantage that we have. In the truly global payment space, there's a advantage that we have as well. Because actually the innovation that's going on in the payment space is quite incredible, and you need resources and investment, tech dollars and space to keep up with that.
Because what companies are asking for these days, and their ability to manage each of their payment nodes in terms of the clients that they want to interact with, requires a new level of complexity. So while we do have more competition, and I gave you the numbers earlier, and in each sort of silo you do, overall, there's things that we can bring to the table. So it means that there's a type of client that we have an advantage over versus the local. And then, in Europe especially, we have gained a little bit from the fact that, there has been some retrenchment since the Global Financial Crisis, and some of the very largest European institutions that when I was growing up, were running us ragged.
And so there's been a little bit of an advantage there over this period of time. So it's, I think net:net is a positive story, given how we're approaching it. What you have to do is marry that with the discipline of the franchise that you're going after, the products that you have, and the reason to be there. If you're not disciplined with that and you drift into other things 'cause you think you're BofA, that's when you start to get hurt. And if you... Whilst we're interested to, perhaps in some countries, cover maybe smaller but very high-quality companies, these days you have to look through some of the super fast-growing companies.
You have to be very thoughtful about that, 'cause if you can be negatively selected if you go a little bit lower down, and that's where it comes back to the country executives, again, like the market executives, who will give you a sense of, you know, who... So that client selection really underpins everything, everything that we do.
You talked, obviously global markets, global banking. You know, Bank of America has a really great consumer bank in the U.S., a great Merrill Lynch, wealth management platform. You know, one of your big competitors is kind of doing more on consumer side on leveraging digital. Any, I guess, aspirations to kind of export more of what-
Yeah
... BofA has done so successfully in the U.S. to overseas?
That's a good question. Oh, and I've talked about our research platform as well, which is, which is great. I think that, you know, Brian would be a good person to answer that. I haven't seen myself the global consumer retail proposition is really tough, and you guys would know better than me, some of the banks that are on that are in retreat to some extent. And even when I go around Europe, and since Brexit, we have been big advocates of Capital Markets Union and Banking Union. It's a little bit self-serving, but I think it's super helpful for Europeans, because I don't think that Europe is managing its excess savings very well because it doesn't have that.
When you get into the detail of it, even within Europe, there isn't much of a pan-European retail offering, and some of them will give you many historic reasons why, and some of them will tell you about the particular idiosyncrasies in each country and how all of that works. So I think that would be challenging. You could make a case for, well, take a specific digital sort of platform and see if that works and experiment with and sort of travel with that. I don't think that's our focus right now. We used to have a wealth business. We sold it in 2011 to a Swiss entity, and I think you can have a healthy debate as to... We have a fantastic wealth business in the U.S. We've got we invest in it.
We've got great technology. We've got great clients. And so you could have a very healthy debate with Lee and Brian at your next strategy session as to whether that should extend or not. I think the pros and the cons, I can see a lot of pros as to why you might want to do that. It plays into a bunch of our strengths, a bunch of the people that I met in Switzerland last week, classic Liechtenstein, Luxembourg companies or privately. Well, a lot of still family-owned companies, Northern Italy, Germany, Mittelstand, a lot of those, where that nexus through a wealth manager can be a very powerful driver into your investment banking, your corporate banking business.
On the other hand, the rules and the regulations are pretty tough, and the money laundering rules and know-your-client rules and the capital rules means that you really, really, really need to know what you're doing before you get into that space. So, you know, I'd say a little bit above my pay grade, but that's how I would, you know, look at those. I think Bank of America has incredible growth opportunities, which we are executing on, and the international franchise absolutely is one of them. And, you know, some of these may be another over time, but I'd rank wealth over consumer. But both of them, I would say, if I was asked, I'd say we have enough to be getting on with right now.
Any, any questions from the audience? Maybe just talk to, you know, some of the themes from the conference so far have been in the, you know, in the U.S., which we've kind of focused on, you know, still sluggish loan growth, kind of stabilizing deposit trends.
Mm.
Pretty decent investment banking fee, pipelines outlook. Let me just talk to... I know it's, it's hard because it's hard to generalize because you're in so many distinct countries, but kind of just generally speaking, kind of, you know, what are some of the, you know, thinking about the ground, some of the key metrics?
In terms of where we're seeing, client interest or activity?
Or growth or, yeah-
Yeah
... just general commentary.
Well, I think that the markets have opened a little bit, certainly. The capital markets have opened a little bit. There was some pent-up demand, so I think that has happened as it has to some extent in the U.S. And so that is driving some activity through, you know, March, April, May, and we'll see how long that lasts. My sense is that corporate balance sheets are in decent shape. When I looked at the earnings and the earnings beats in the last quarter, there was nothing dramatic there. So, insofar as the overall macro environment stays stable, I expect, you know, just increased corporate activity in the capital market space.
I haven't seen as much activity in the private space, with, you know, private equity, et cetera, but they're always active in drawing their, their rulers over many situations. So, my sense is that, internationally at least, there'll be a decent low level of activity through the quarter, and then we'll see what the next set of either, you know, interest rate outlook or, or geopolitical tensions, give on that. I think in the institutional space, there's a lot of conversations you can have, and you can have very decent, meaningful disagreements on the path of rates and the path of rates in each of the, of the different countries.
And whenever that happens, then there's activity, 'cause people can reasonably disagree as to the shape of the curve or what, you know, interest rates are going to do, et cetera, the relative value of assets. And so that is driving a, a decent, you know, not exuberant, but a decent sort of low level of activity as we enter, as we enter May. You've had just some of the data coming out of the U.S., which suggested, you know, it was, you know, pricing and cuts and not pricing and cuts, and then when you mirror that with what the ECB might do, and then you've had the yen moving in a way in which there's been some intervention, so you can have some conversations about that.
Of course, a big dialogue around, you know, China macro policy in terms of where the, the rate is. So when that happens, there's, there's a decent amount of sort of activity. I expect, I'm sort of scratching my head through to when the next big sort of numbers are. I expect that to continue at a sort of low, decent rate. I was saying to Lee earlier that, at some point through the summer, I don't know when you would expect, particularly the institutional money, maybe the corporate money, to pull back a little bit with the U.S. elections coming ahead. If I were a big money manager, at some point, I'd be like, "Well..." Particularly if the polls stay very close, and I say, "Well, I'm not sure which way it's going to go.
Let me just stay at home and be, you know, and just wait for that." And we've seen that in, you know, previous election cycles as well. If the polls move in a particularly different way, depending on which way it's going, you know, actually, either way, probably people will have a little bit more certainty as to what the sort of policies might be, and there might be a little more activity there. But whether that happens in July or August or September, it's sort of difficult to tell.
... Any questions? I guess you touched on payments, and it seems like some of your competitors maybe talk about it a bit more. But why don't you just talk about the opportunity there, you know, how, you know, BofA differentiates itself, and, you know, your, your, what... Maybe just extrapolate more on the opportunity set.
Yeah, I think, we, you know, it's already a large business and is at scale. So, there's been some, there's been some innovation in this space. There's been some growth by clients themselves. There's been, you know, it's it's, it's a space where often you go pitch, and it takes a while. It takes maybe six months, a year, and then you get the mandate, and you're in, and then I'm talking to my colleagues nine months later, and they say, "We're still sort of getting to be in the seat." It's, it's just what it is. If you're providing treasury management and transaction management for a corporate, and you're untangling the previous incumbent and getting yourself in there, it, it takes a while. So these things come up in cycles, and, and that's one of the that...
The upside with that is that once you're in place, you're there for a period of time, and that's what's good about that business. So in that cycle, we're constantly refining our ability to provide that service. We're leaning into all the things I said earlier about our ability to be truly global. The fact that we're dollar-funded is a help, and there's been some really interesting just innovations in the payment space, and then in some cases, there's been new regulations as well. So India's data localization, Europe continues to develop its SEPA, single European payments platform. In Brazil has a new sort of public payments rails called Pix that they've put in place. Real-time payments is going on around the world.
And then as some of the supply chains are moving, that comes up with new opportunities to win business because if people are saying, "Well, I'm moving my supply chain to Vietnam or to India," then you need to be there to sort of provide that service. So all of that activity allows us to turn up with our proposition, and our proposition works on our scale, our reputation in the market, our ability to, you know, and the fact that we've done this at scale for some of the largest providers and some of the innovations that we have put in place. I touched briefly on things like virtual accounts, et cetera. So that is what's been driving. And then just, as I said, deeper penetration into those clients.
If we have a client that is a Commercial Banking client in the U.S. that is doing business in Italy, there has to be a very, very good reason why, if we don't have that business today, we don't go and win it, and so we call our colleagues who are banking them in the U.S., and we say, "Can we..." you know, "Help us get in so that we can be there in the right place." And if there is a you know, Korean or a Japanese client that's looking to do business in Europe or in the U.S., then we want to persuade them that we're a better proposition than, you know, a European bank or Japanese or a Korean bank. So that's been driving that.
Some competitive tensions there in terms of, you know, some of our competitors not usually in the space try to break into it and retreat a little bit. Some fintechs trying to provide services around the edges. So all of that is going on, and each situation is very, very competitive. I'm not saying we win everything, but net-net, we really have been winning and gaining market share. And it's a business that throws off, right? It throws off FX flows. It throws off, you know, other markets flows and other activity that... It throws off card flows. You've got trade finance, you've got leasing, you've got, you know, a range of business around that. So it's a really important business for us. And we've been...
We've targeted some countries where we wanna look at the, you know, the regulatory framework, the opportunities, and crowd in more resources to really be best in class and anticipate some of the new regulations that are coming in other countries to make sure that we're, you know, we're fit and ready for that as well.
Great. With that, please join me in thanking Bernie for his time today. Thank you.