The Bank of Nova Scotia (NYSE:BNS) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript December 3, 2024 8:00 AM ET
Company Participants
John McCartney - Head of IR
Scott Thomson - President and CEO
Raj Viswanathan - CFO
Phil Thomas - CRO
Francisco Aristeguieta - Group Head, International Banking
Conference Call Participants
Ebrahim Poonawala - Bank of America
Gabriel Dechaine - National Bank Financial
Matthew Lee - Canaccord Genuity
Paul Holden - CIBC
John Aiken - Jefferies
Mario Mendonca - TD Securities
Lemar Persaud - Cormark
Jill Shea - UBS
Sohrab Movahedi - BMO Capital Markets
John McCartney
Good morning, and welcome to Scotiabank's 2024 Fourth Quarter Results Presentation, and apologies for our late start this morning. My name is John McCartney, and I'm Head of Investor Relations here at Scotiabank. Presenting to you this morning are Scott Thomson, Scotiabank's President and Chief Executive Officer; Raj Viswanathan, our Chief Financial Officer; and Phil Thomas, our Chief Risk Officer. Following our comments, we will be glad to take your questions. Also present to take your questions are the following Scotiabank executives. Aris Bogdaneris from Canadian Banking; Jacqui Allard from Global Wealth Management; Francisco Aristeguieta from International Banking; and Travis Machen from Global Banking 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.
And with that, I will now turn the call over to Scott.
Scott Thomson
Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. 2024 was a foundational year for the bank. Nearly one year ago, we held our Investor Day and shared with you our new enterprise strategy to deliver sustainable, profitable growth and maximize shareholder value. We also committed to transparently sharing our progress as we entered into our first year of execution against our plans.
Our results reflect a year of transition as we focused on our enterprise-wide priorities, aligned our capital allocation to each of our business lines, and started our shift to a value over volume strategy. Our results demonstrate both early progress and areas more -- where more work needs to be done. Overall, earnings grew marginally in 2024, consistent with our expectations and Investor Day guidance.
Recapping our areas of focus. First, our North Star, increasing the number of primary clients. We continue to focus on growth in client segments where we have the scale and product capability to compete and win lead relationships. In our Global Wealth business, we are relentlessly focused on growing our advice channels and providing holistic wealth solutions to attract high-value primary clients to the bank. This is driving strong growth in the business. We are ranked number two amongst peers in earnings growth in the most recent five-year period and delivered record net income in 2024. We’ve increased personal and commercial deposits by 7% year-over-year. In Canadian Banking, 30% of our clients now meet our primacy definition, up 1.5 percentage points year-over-year. And across our retail markets, we have increased total primary clients by 280,000. While this progress is meaningful, in order to meet our 2 million incremental primary client target by 2028, we need to accelerate our progress in 2025 and beyond.