The Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending January 31, 2023

February 28, 2023 8:15 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

John McCartney

Good morning, and welcome to Scotiabank's 2023 First Quarter Results Presentation. My name is John McCartney. I'm Head of Investor Relations here at Scotiabank. Presenting you this morning are Scott Thompson, Scotiabank's President and Chief Executive Officer; Raj Viswanathan, our Chief Financial Officer; and Phil Thomas, our Chief Risk Officer. Following our comments, we'll be glad to take your questions. Also present to take questions are the following Scotiabank executives; Dan Rees from Canadian Banking; Glenn Gollan from Global Wealth Management; Nacho Deschamps from International Banking; and Jake Lawrence from Global Bank and Markets.

Before we start and on behalf of those speaking today, I'll refer you to Slide 2 of our presentation, which contains Scotiabank's caution regarding forward-looking statements.

With that, I will now turn the call over to Scott.

Scott Thompson

Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. Given this is my first quarterly investor call, I would like to begin with sharing some early observations on the bank after 4 weeks in the CEO role. My approach has always been about transparency and partnership, and I'm committed to working with the investment community in this manner. I've had the opportunity to spend time with the leadership team as well as to meet with many employees and customers across Canada and in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia. I have been energized by meeting our teams across the bank. Our people are highly engaged, proud and committed Scotiabankers.

In addition to a rock-solid foundation, a diversified revenue base last year of approximately $32 billion and net profits of over $10 billion, we have many competitive advantages, unique areas of strength and opportunities for growth in the bank, including the credit quality of our loan book, our Scene+ loyalty program, which will be a key enabler in diversifying our Canadian P&C business mix. The long-term commercial banking growth opportunity across our platform, an outstanding wealth management franchise, the GBM platform across the Americas, and our performance in Mexico and the upside potential by improving the connectivity across Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. But we have not delivered the level of total shareholder return that our shareholders should expect of us.

To drive better shareholder returns, my focus will be on delivering profitable and sustainable growth through an even stronger customer orientation by building our solid foundation aligning on enterprise-wide focus areas and consistently executing with operational excellence. And I really do want to underscore the word's consistent execution as that is what we expect to measure ourselves on with established milestones and targets. To do this, I'm aligning our leadership teams around 3 areas of focus: first, purposely allocating capital. We need to build more discipline in our approach to capital allocation, and we need to view this through an enterprise-wide Second is focusing on long-term deposit growth, increasing our core deposits is critical. The current environment of rapidly rising rates and an inverted yield curve highlights the challenges with the structure of our balance sheet.