PNC Financial Services
Q1 2022 Earnings Call
Apr 14, 2022, 11:00 a.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Bryan Gill
Welcome to today's conference of The PNC Financial Services Group. Participating on this call are PNC's chairman, president, and CEO, Bill Demchak; and Rob Reilly, executive vice president and CFO. Today's presentation contains forward-looking information. Cautionary statements about this information as well as reconciliations of non-GAAP measures are included in today's earnings release materials as well as our SEC filings and other investor materials.
These materials are all available on our corporate website, pnc.com, under investor relations. These statements speak only as of April 14th, 2022, and PNC undertakes no obligation to update them. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Bill.
Bill Demchak -- Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Bryan, and good morning, everybody. As you've seen, we had a solid start to the year as we grew loans and securities, controlled expenses and our credit quality reserves and capital levels remain very strong. As we previously disclosed, noninterest income was below our expectations for the quarter. And while we had expected fees to be down sequentially, reflecting typical first quarter seasonality, the decline actually exceeded normal interest rate volatility, and probably, the Russian-Ukraine conflict adversely impacted certain of our capital markets businesses among other areas.
As we look forward, we're clearly in an environment of uncertainty here. We're also in an environment with rising interest rates, which benefit banks with increased loan demand, which benefit banks. And in PNC's case, a business or a bank that never changed its credit box on credit terms got really easy business that has a very -- or a bank that has a very solid mix of fee-based businesses, and importantly our bank that has substantially expanded its geographic presence. And I want to hit on that in a second just as it relates to our progress on BBVA.
And I would tell you, I just -- I couldn't be more proud of what we've been able to accomplish over the last about 15 months in total now, but in particular, over the last couple of quarters. And we still have a lot of work to do, but to put it in perspective, our staffing is largely complete. And our calling effort and particularly versus the fourth quarter, has increased substantially, and our sales and pipelines are robust. Just to give you an idea of the activity behind this, in the legacy BBVA USA geographies, corporate commercial banking costs have doubled since the fourth quarter, and sales have increased almost 50%.