According to Fitch Ratings, most US banks are well positioned to weather more volatile market conditions this year. The credit-rating agency cited their strong capitalisation levels, loss reserves that are generally still above Day One CECL (current expected credit losses), excess levels of liquidity, positive sensitivity to rising interest rates and historically strong asset-quality metrics as reasons for its optimistic outlook.
With expectations of interest-rate hikes in 2022 having ratcheted up substantially over the past few months as a result of “multi-decade highs in inflation and the negative economic consequences…[that] persistent high levels of inflation impose on the broader economy, particularly small businesses and lower-income consumers cohorts”, Fitch noted that most US bank earnings are positively levered to higher interest rates. Nonetheless, a faster than anticipated increase in interest rates “could sharply…increase market volatility and stymy loan growth, slow capital raising and merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, and cause a sharp contraction in asset valuations, none of which would be favourable developments for banks”.
Canadian banks continue to search south of the border for viable growth opportunities. With the Big Six [Bank of Montreal (BMO), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD Bank), Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank), Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) and National Bank of Canada (NBC)] commanding almost 90 percent of domestic market share, these leading Canadian banks are more aggressively setting their sights on the fragmented US banking sector—with Bank of Montreal’s recent $16.3-billion acquisition of Bank of the West from BNP Paribas one of a handful of likely consolidation deals to be in play over the coming months.
Canada’s biggest lender, Royal Bank of Canada, is seeking opportunities in wealth-distribution businesses in the United States and Europe as well as US commercial-banking businesses, according to Dave McKay, RBC’s president and chief executive officer. And TD Bank, Canada’s second-biggest bank and already a top 10 lender in the US, is considering a wide range of potential deals—as long as they make strategic, financial, risk and cultural sense and also accelerate growth, according to Bharat Masrani, TD Bank’s group president and CEO. “We’re a huge bank domestically in the U.S…. We don’t need to acquire just to get scale.”
CIBC, meanwhile, recently confirmed its ambitions to invest in its US business; the bank’s US earnings accounted for 21 percent of its total earnings in the fiscal year 2021—up from just 2 percent five years ago, according to its chief executive, Victor Dodig. “Our bank’s investment in the US has been increasingly appreciated by our investor base,” Dodig said, adding that CIBC expected “continued growth in our franchise across the board” and planned to invest more in the US platform.
After operating in the country for nearly a century, Citigroup announced in mid-January that it would be exiting its retail-banking business in Mexico. With $44 billion in assets and $4 billion in equity, Banco Nacional de México (Citibanamex) was a major presence within the Latin American banking sector, and, as such, the recent sale announcement has sent shockwaves throughout Mexico and beyond.
For Nubank, Brazil’s largest digital bank, the coming months will present opportunities to build on its already impressive growth, despite the precarious situation in which the country’s economy finds itself. Indeed, Nubank was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in December as Latin America’s most valuable financial institution with a valuation of $52 billion. And although its share price has since taken a moderate tumble, Nubank’s founder and CEO, David Vélez, projected that the bank will grow further this year. “We might…actually have an opportunity to accelerate and take even more [market] share and leave interest rates even lower to make our products much more competitive,” Vélez recently told Reuters. Nubank currently has 48 million clients to its name, making it one of the world’s largest digital banks.
Uruguay’s central bank has delivered a decidedly hawkish tone for its coming monetary policy and warned that it will keep raising interest rates to bring inflation expectations down to within the bank’s 3-to-6-percent target range. According to Diego Labat, president of the Central Bank of Uruguay and former Banco Santander executive, the goal is to converge inflation with its target. “We are going to tighten monetary policy, raising rates by whatever is needed to achieve that convergence,” he told Bloomberg in January.
The central bank raised its key rate by 75 basis points to 6.5 percent on January 5, becoming the first in the Latam (Latin America) region to tighten monetary policy this year. It also indicated that further monetary tightening could push rates as high as 8 percent by early April.
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