富国银行 2024年度报告

CEO Letter Dear Shareholders: I am proud to report that 2024 was another year of considerable progress for Wells Fargo on multiple fronts. We produced strongerfinancial results than the prior year, we executed well on our strategic priorities, and we are moving forward with excitement. Our earnings, earnings per share, and return on tangible common equity grew, we improved how we serve customers and are seeinggrowth from investments we have made over the last several years, we maintained a strong balance sheet while returning $25billion of capital to shareholders, and we made significant progress on our risk and control work. If I think back to the beginning of 2024, there was considerable uncertainty regarding how the economy would evolve through theyear. Inflation was high, many economists gave a low probability to a “soft landing,” and many were concerned that the economycould end up in recession. As a company, we were careful about how and where we extended credit, but we did not scale backinvestments in our infrastructure or investments for the future. As the year evolved, we saw strength and resiliency among our customers, though businesses were tentative about growing theirinventories and pursuing M&A. Fast forward to today, and inflation is lower, unemployment is low, and our customers continue to beresilient. All said, we are pleased with how we have navigated these circumstances. Our belief remains that we have one of the most enviable financial services franchises in the world, and we are working to be one ofthe most well-respected, consistently growing financial institutions in the country with high risk-adjusted returns over multipleeconomic cycles. Financial performance and earnings capacity Our results were solid in 2024 as Wells Fargo generated $19.7 billion in net income, $5.37 per diluted share, and 13.4% return ontangible common equity.1Our 11% increase in diluted earnings per share was driven by 15% fee-based revenue growth, lowerexpenses, good credit performance, and 7% fewer diluted common shares. Revenues benefited from our concerted efforts to increase fee-based revenue – which we have been pursuing so our performance isless sensitive to the interest rate environment and net interest income. We began investing several years ago in our core businessesand we are seeing the benefits in increased accounts, balances, market share, and revenues. In total, revenue was relatively stablefrom the previous year as fee-based revenue growth largely offset an expected decline in net interest income. It is also important tonote that this non-interest revenue growth was diversified, with each of our operating segments growing from a year ago.Investment banking fees grew 62%, investment advisory fees grew 13%, trading revenues grew 10%, deposit-related fees grew 7%,and we had strong performance from our venture capital investments. We continued to take a disciplined approach to expense management, and as a result, expenses declined 2% from a year ago. Wehave achieved over $12 billion in gross expense savings over the past four years, and this has enabled us to both reduce totalexpenses and invest part of those savings to make us better and stronger. Although since 2019 we have spent significantly more onour risk and control work, increased spend on technology, and made significant investments to expand our businesses, our expensesdeclined from $58.2 billion in 2019 to $54.6 billion in 2024. Our headcount declined from 272,000 in 2019 to 218,000 at the endof 2024. When we do our annual and long-term planning, we talk about efficiency and investment separately. We look for ways to do morewith less and eliminate unnecessary processes that take up time and resources, but do not add value. But we also spendconsiderable time looking for places to invest to build a stronger, higher-returning, and faster-growing company. It should gowithout saying at this point that we are spending what’s necessary to support our risk and control environment and will continue todo so. In addition, as we increase spending to strengthen and grow the company, we continue to believe we have opportunities toget more efficient. We maintained our strong credit discipline in 2024, and this has been a core strength of Wells Fargo for decades. We look to extendcredit to support our clients and communities but seek to do it prudently and adjust our standards based on the risks we see. Creditcard charge-offs continued to normalize to a higher level in line with our expectations, we continued to have net recoveries in ourhome lending portfolio, and auto charge-offs decreased. Commercial & Industrial loan charge-offs grew, and office-relatedcommercial real estate charge-offs increased, as we expected. All in all, credit performance was in line with our expectations and,other than large office properties, is still performing quite well. Overall, our provision for credit losses declined as the increase incharge-offs was more tha