“We still believe, we have an achievable path to a sustainable 15% ROTCE over the medium term as we continue to make progress on transforming the company.”

In context

“path to improving returns on the fourth quarter 2020 earnings call, we had an 8% ROTCE. Since then, we have taken multiple actions to improve our returns, including executing on our efficiency initiatives, investing in our businesses to help drive growth and returning excess capital to shareholders, including increasing our common stock dividend $0.10 to $0.35 per share and repurchasing $32 billion of common stock. These actions help to improve our ROTCE, our reported ROTCE in the fourth quarter was 9%, but as we highlight in the table, our ROTCE was impacted by a number of notable items. Our 2023 returns also reflected the benefit of rising rates, which helped to drive strong net interest income growth, and as I’ve already highlighted, we expect net interest income to decline this year. We still believe, we have an achievable path to a sustainable 15% ROTCE over the medium term as we continue to make progress on transforming the company. There are several key factors that support our belief. Our ability to return excess capital, we currently have a significant amount of excess capital, 2.5 percentage points above our regulatory minimum buffers for CET1 and as I already highlighted, we expect to increase our share repurchases this year. I highlighted the progress we’ve already made to reposition our Home Lending business, including reducing the amount of third party mortgage loans serviced by 18% from a year ago. As we continue to streamline this business, we expect the profitability to improve. We’ve grown our Credit Card business with balances up 40% since the end of 2021 and new accounts 25% higher than the fourth quarter of 2021. However, the current profitability of this business has been impacted by acquisition costs”