PNC CEO on Q1 earnings beat

Joining us now for an exclusive interview is PNCCEO, Bill Genchek. Bill, it’s good to have you back on. Welcome. Hi Sarah, how are you? I’m good here in beautiful Washington today. So talk to me about the stock reaction. What are what are you hearing from investors because your comments on the call in the release, the better than expected report sound all pretty positive. Yeah, look investors have been negative on banks for the last week or so. I think the BKX is down 7% and I think a lot of that has to do with just rates going up. We end up, we’re down today even though we had a pretty good quarter versus estimates. But we’re you know I think one of the top performing bank stocks today. So there’s a negative sentiment out there largely on the back of rates backing up I think, but there was a revenue miss there. There were some other things you commercial real estate exposure for instance. How how are you adjusting to some of those headwinds The the revenue, I don’t know if it’s a revenue miss, it was lower revenue on the back of lower Nii which we had forecasted. Some of that’s on the back of weaker loan growth, some of it’s just on the back of the continued pressure on deposits repricing. We expect that to inflect in the middle of the year importantly and you know grow into 25 where we actually expect kind of record net interest income. The real estate exposure we’ve talked about a lot. It’s, you know, we’re well reserved against it. You know, the portfolios run down, I don’t know 15% since since last year. So I’m not particularly worried about it, but it’ll be a topic of conversation for the coming quarters. Hey Bill, one thing that’s really starting to piece together as a trend of these early financial earnings reports is, is cost control. When you got core expenses down 4, can you explain what’s happening and is this an early sign that either automation or even elements of AI are beginning to play out in productivity, some of its automation you know on the back of work that started years ago, I don’t know that much of it is on the back of AI specifically. You know in our case we’ve just been focused on it. It’s a tough revenue environment and so you know you pivot a little bit too expenses and and and in our instance I think we dropped every category of expenses year on year and we’re we’re saying we’re going to be able to hold expenses flat this year even though inflation is going to be you know plus 3% perhaps right. And what implications on headcount and your plans for either hiring, retention, attrition this year we we had a a work restructuring towards the end of last year. So the the headcount issue is largely behind us. We continue to expand headcount in our newer markets pretty aggressively. Those are our growth opportunities. So I don’t know that you’re going to see many headlines out of us with respect to headcount going forward. What’s your sense, Bill, of the economy right now of of loan growth? What are you, what are you hearing and seeing from consumers and from businesses? Yeah, the economy feels stronger than what we’re necessarily seeing out of individual companies. Certainly what we’re seeing out of loan growth, capital markets activity, just you know, the binge in the first quarter had something to do with loan growth and the lack thereof. But I think companies remain hesitant notwithstanding you know drawdown on inventories, retail sales being really high and capacity utilization remaining high. There still seems to be this hesitancy of, you know, when is the other for kind of drop.