Good day everyone and welcome to the Bank of America earnings announcement. At this time I'd like to turn the program over to Lee McIntyre. Please go ahead sir. Thank you Catherine.
Good morning. Welcome. Thank you for joining the call to review our first quarter results. I trust everybody has had a chance to review our earnings release documents. They are available including the earnings presentation that we'll be referring to during this call, only investor relations section of the bank of america.com website.
I'm going to turn the call over to CEO Brian Moynihan and Alistair Borgwick, our CFO to discuss the quarter but before I do let me just remind you that we may make forward-looking statements and refer to non-gap financial measures during this call. Our forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and subject to risk than uncertainties. Factors that might cause those actual results to dip materially differ from those expectations are detailed in our earnings materials and the SEC filings that are available on our website.
Information about the non-gap financial measures including recommendations to US gap can also be found in our earnings materials and those are available on our website. So with that we'll turn it over to Brian. Thank you.
Good morning and thank all of you for joining us. I'm starting on slide two of the materials. Your company produced one of its highest core EPS earnings numbers in a challenge operating environment in the first quarter. Simply put we navigate that environment well. The preparedness and strength of bank of america and the trust of our clients reflects a decade-long response with growth model in relationship with nature of our franchise.
During quarter one, importantly, organic growth engine continued to perform. Let me first summarize some points and I'll turn over to Alistair taking through the details of quarter.
If you go to slide two of the materials, bank of america delivered strong earnings growing EPS 18% over first quarter 22. Every business segment performed well. We grew clients and accounts organically and in a strong pace. We delivered our seventh straight quarter of operating leverage, led by a 13% year-over-year revenue growth. We further strengthened our balance sheet with our CET-1 ratio increasing to 11.4%. Regatory capital ended at the highest nominal level in our history at $184 billion. We maintained strong liquidity. We ended the quarter with more than $900 billion in global liquidity sources. We earned good returns for you as our shareholders with a return on tangible common equity of 17% and 107 basis points return on average assets. Tainted book value for share grew 9% year-over-year.
We did this as economy slowed. Remember our research team continues to predict a shallary session that will occur beginning in the quarter three of 2023. The interesting thing we look at our consumer behavior, payments by consumer continues to drive the U.S. economy. We've seen debit and credit card spending at about 6% year-over-year growth pace. A little slower but still healthy. But remember, card spending represents less than a quarter of how consumers pay for things out of their accounts of Bank America. Overall payments from our customers accounts across all sources are up 9% year-over-year for March as a month. Year-to-date through up about 8% for the quarter. After slowing the back half at 22 a bit, we saw the payment, pace of payments, pick back up in quarter of one, especially in a lot of parts of the quarter.
Consumers financial positions remain generally healthy. They are employed with generally higher wages, continue to have strong account balances, and have good access to credit. As you think through all the tightening actions of the Fed, the flow is to alternative yielding assets, investments in the destruction of past quarter. Credit deposits continue to perform well and in the quarter of $1.91 trillion. If you think about it, that's about the same balance that we had in mid-October of 2022. So we've seen these balances stabilize and remain 34% above the lower end prior to the pandemic.
The team has managed well during these periods where our remaining folks saw the things we can control to drive value through our franchise. I thank them for a very strong quarter, near record earnings with strong returns.
Let me turn the call of an ouster to walk through the details of the quarter. Thank you, Brian. I'll pick up on slide three where we list some of the more detailed highlights of the quarter. And then on slide four, we present the summary income statement. So I'm going to refer to both of these together. As Brian mentioned for the quarter, we generated 8.2 billion of net income, and that resulted in 94 cents per diluted share.
A revenue grew 13%, and that was led by a 25% improvement in net interest income, coupled with strong 9% growth in sales and trading results, excluding DVA. Our non-interest revenue was strong despite the headwinds.
First, we had lower service charges as commercial clients paid lower fees for treasury services, and since they now receive higher earned rates on balances, and obviously that allows us to invest those funds to earn NII. On consumer, we had lower NSF insufficient funds in overdraft fees as a result of our policy changes announced in late 2021.
Second, we had lower asset management fees, and that just reflects the lower equity market levels and fixed income market levels. And third, investment banking fees were lower just reflecting the continuation of sluggish industry activity and reduced fee polls. Now, all that said, despite these headwinds, each of the fee categories saw modest improvement from the fourth quarter levels.
As a quality remains strong, and provision expense for the quarter was 931 million, that consisted of 807 million of net chargeoffs and 124 million of reserve build. And that reserve build compares to reserve release in the first quarter, 22 of 362 million. Our charge off rate was 32 basis points, and still well below the fourth quarter of 19, when our pre-pandemic rate was 39 basis points. And remember, 2019 was a multi-decade low. So credit obviously remains quite strong.
I want to make one other point on slide four, and that is simply to note that pre-tax pre-provision income grew 27% year over year compared to reported net income growth of 15%.
So let's start with the balance sheet. That starts on slide five, and you can see during the quarter, our balance sheet increased to 144 billion to 3.195 trillion. Brian noted our liquidity levels. At the end of the period, those rose to more than 900 billion from December 31.
That's 23 billion higher. And it remains 324 billion above our pre-pandemic level in the fourth quarter of 19. Shareholders' equity increased 7 billion from the fourth quarter, as earnings were only partially offset by capital distributed to shareholders. And we saw an improvement in AOCI of 3 billion due to lower long-term interest rates.
The AOCI included more than half a billion increase from improved valuations of AFS debt securities, and that flows through CET1. And the remaining 2.5 billion due to changes in cash flow hedges doesn't impact regulatory capital. During the quarter, we paid a billion in income and dividends, and we bought back 2.2 billion in shares.
Turning to regulatory capital, our CET1 level improved to 184 billion since December 31, and our CET1 ratio improved 14 basis points to 11.4%. Once again adding to our buffer over our 10.4% current minimum requirement, as well as the 10.9% minimum requirement that we'll see on January 1 of 24.
That means in the past 12 months, we've improved our CET1 ratio by 100 basis points, and we've supported our clients, and we've returned 12 billion in capital to shareholders. The CET1 capital improved 4 billion, and that reflects the benefit of earnings and the AOCI improvement partially offset by the capital we returned to shareholders.
Our risk-weighted assets increased modestly, and that partially offset the benefit to the CET1 ratio of the higher capital we generated. And then our supplement leverage ratio increased to 6%, that compares to a minimum requirement of 5% and leaves plenty of capacity for balance sheet growth, and our T-Like ratio remains comfortably above our requirements.
So let's spend a minute on loan growth, and we'll do that by turning to slide 6 where you can see the average loans grew 7% year over year driven by commercial loans and credit card growth. The credit card growth reflects increased marketing, it reflects enhanced offers, and higher levels of card account openings.
The commercial growth across the past year reflects the diversity of commercial activity across global banking and global markets and to some degree global wealth. And on a more near-term linked quarter basis, loans grew at a much slower pace, partly driven by seasonal credit card paydowns after the fourth quarter holiday spending, and then commercial demand slowed into one, and we saw some paydowns by our wealth management clients as they lowered leverage as rates rose.
So let's turn to deposits, and this obviously being a lot of additional focus this quarter. So I want to spend extra time here, and I'm going to start with slide 7 and talk about average deposits. Just a few points we need to make before focusing on a more detailed discussion of the recent trends. This total deposits for the first quarter were 1.89 trillion, that is down 2% linked quarter, and down 7% year over year.
Our deposits peaked in the fourth quarter of 2021, and even as the Fed has continued to withdraw money supply, our deposits have held around 1.9 trillion, because there's a lot more industry deposits today in a much bigger economy today compared to pre-pandemic.
Upper average deposits are up 34%, compared to our pre-pandemic 2, 4, 19 balance, and the industries deposits are up 31% to 17.4 trillion. So we've obviously fared a little bit better than the industry.
We put our pre-pandemic deposits for each line of business on this slide, so you can compare our balances then and now. I want to highlight consumer checking balances, which remain 53% higher than pre-pandemic. And as I think all of us would expect, G-WIM combined client deposits are up a lesser 23%, as those are the clients that generally move their excess cash into other off-balance sheet products.
And in global banking, you can see the rotation to interest-bearing across time as rates rose. So let's get a little more granular and a little more near-term, and we'll use slide 8 for that, where you can see the breakout of deposit trends on a weekly ending basis across the last two quarters.
You can also see that we plotted the timeline of Fed, Target, and rate hikes on the top left chart just for comparison through time. In the upper left, you can see the trend of our total deposits. We ended Q-1-23 at 1.91 trillion. That's down 1%. And as Brian mentioned over the course of the past six months, those balances have been relatively stable.
And consumer looking at the top right chart, we show the difference here in the movement through the quarter between the balances of low to no interest checking accounts and the higher yielding non-checking accounts. And across the entire quarter, we saw modest 4 billion decline in total.
Checking balances obviously have some variability around paydays in particular, but note the relative stability of checking deposits, because these are the operational accounts with money in motion to pay the bills and everyday living costs for families. I'd also point out that our checking balances were modestly growing, even ahead of March 9th upheaval, and continued to move higher through the quarter on the back of disruption.
Lower non-checking balances mostly reflect money moved out of deposits and into brokerage accounts where we earn a small fee. Rate paid increased six basis points from the fourth quarter to 12 basis points on this trillion dollars of total consumer deposits and remains low because of the 52% mix that is checking. Lastly, I just note that the rate movements in this business are concentrated in the small CDs and consumer investment deposits, which together represent about 5% of the deposits.
In wealth management, as you would expect, it shows the most relative decline. And you can see the continued trend of clients moving money from lower yielding sweep accounts into higher yielding preferred deposits and off-balance sheet to other investment alternatives. Now, if we went back further, you'd see that roughly 90 billion has moved out of sweeps in the past year, which leaves 80 billion in these accounts.
So you can see how with the pace and size of rate hike slowing, we expect the declines in balances to lessen from here. At the bottom right, note the global banking deposit movement where we hold about 500 billion in customer deposits.
These are generally operational deposits of our commercial customers, and they use that to manage their cash flows through the course of a year. Those are down to 3 billion from the fourth quarter. And what's interesting to note is that our total deposits in this segment have been stable at around 500 billion for the past six months, and this business just continues to see rotation into interest-bearing.
The mix of interest-bearing deposits on an ending basis moved from 49% last quarter to 55% in Q1, and obviously we pay increased rates on those interest-bearing deposits. And it's this rotation and global banking that's driving the rotational shift of the total company, and it's pretty typical and to be expected in this environment.
So in summary, deposits continue to behave as we would expect. The cash transactional balances have shown some recent stabilization. And for investment cash, we've seen deposits move to brokerage and other platforms for direct holdings of money market, mutual funds, treasuries, and we're capturing many of those flows. And our numbers just we expect that to slow going forward.
So now that we've examined trends for the different lines of business, I want to make some important points about the characteristics of our deposit franchise using slide 9. And this will just help reinforce for shareholders who on Bank of America that they're invested in one of the world's great deposit franchises, all of it based off of relationships we have with our customers.
And the value they place on the award-winning capabilities and convenience they have access to.
他们赋予获奖能力和方便性的价值。
So starting from the top, focus first on consumer. You can see that more than 80% of deposits have been with us for more than five years, and more than two thirds of our consumer deposits are balances with customers who've had relationships with the bank for more than 10 years. Also, more than three quarters of these customers are very highly engaged in their activities with us. Also, geographically dispersed across the United States given our presence in 83 of the top 100 markets. Lastly, whether you look at consumers or small business, the value proposition is what's driving the same result. We've got long tenured customers with deep relationships that are highly engaged.
Starting to wealth management, you can see a similar story around long tenure and quite active relationships. The average relationship of our G-WIM clients is around 14 years, and again, these clients are very geographically diverse. They're also very digitally engaged, and we continue to see deepening around banking solutions and products of all types. There's lots of options for these clients that extend from their operational checking accounts all the way up through preferred deposit options, and then we also benefit from having great alternatives for them within our investment platform.
In global banking, note that 80% of our U.S. deposit balances are held by clients who have had an account with us for at least 10 years. Furthermore, as we measure the number of solutions that clients have with us, we know that 73% of balances are held by clients that have at least five products on us, and just like the other businesses, they're highly diversified by industry and geography. So those are some of the things that make our quality deposit base stable.
So now that we've walked through both loans and deposits, I want to transition a bit to make some points on balance sheet management, and to focus on the liquidity we enjoy by having a surplus of customer deposits that far exceeds the loan demand of our clients today, and far exceeded the loan demand of our clients' prepandemic. Having the deposits alone doesn't pay the expenses to support these great customer bases, and it doesn't mean much to our shareholders unless we put them to work to extract the value of those deposits. So that's what we're trying to illustrate, and we want to show you how we do that.
You can see that on slide 10 where you note we had significant excess deposits over loans prepandemic, and during the pandemic that increased, that amount increased significantly. More the pandemic we had half a trillion more in deposits than loans, and that peaked in late 2021 at more than 1.1 trillion, and it remains high at roughly 900 billion still today. That's the context as we talk about how we manage excess cash.
So let's turn to slide 11. And here we're going to focus on the banking book because our global markets balance she has remained largely market funded, and just follow the graph from left to right. At the top of the slide you note, trend of cash and cash equivalence, and the two components of the debt securities balances available for sale, and held to maturity. And you can see the trend of the overall combined cash and securities balance movement, and it closely mirrors the previous slide's excess deposit trends as you would expect.
In 2020, deposits grew while loans declined, and that was pandemic borrowing from our commercial clients stopping, and then quickly paying it off. Throughout 2020, as we put deposits to work, we took a number of actions to protect our capital, and then included a build up in hold to maturity, better aligning our capital treatment with our intent to hold those securities to maturity. We also hedged rate risk in the available for sale book using payfixed, received variable swaps. So these securities acted like cash, and they earned higher yields, and guarded against capital volatility.
As we entered the middle of 2021, it became more clear that the stimulus payment would likely be the last one, and therefore we believed deposits would be peaking. As a result, we stopped adding to our hold to maturity securities book. That book peaked in the third quarter of 2021 at $683 billion, $562 billion were mortgage backs, and the rest were treasuries. And all that's happened is that notional balances have declined in each of the past six quarters, ending the quarter at $625 billion. And within that, the mortgage back portfolio is down $67 billion to $495.
As rates began to rise quickly throughout 2022, the value of our deposits rose. And at the same time, the disclosed market value of the hold to maturity securities is declined, resulting in a negative market valuation on those bonds. That negative market valuation peaked in the third quarter, came down in the fourth quarter, and it's come down another $10 billion in the first quarter.
In our 10K disclosure, we include a chart which shows the maturity distribution of our securities portfolio. And I'd remind you this is based on the maturity dates of those originations, i.e. the date of the last contractual payment. When we look at the actual cash flows of those bonds over time, it results in an average weighted life of the hold to maturity securities book of a little more than eight years.
And as you can see since the third quarter of 2021, we've continued to see increases in the overall yield on the balances due to both the maturity and reinvestment of lower yielding securities, as well as remix into higher yielding cash. And as you can see with deposits paying 92 basis points, that compares to our blend of cash and government guaranteed securities which pays 290 basis points. So we continue to benefit NII and yield.
And finally, one very important last point I want to make which is on the improved NII of our banking book. Because remember, we manage the entirety of our balance sheet that includes our deposits. And that's where you see the net interest income has improved significantly. NII excluding global markets which we disclose each quarter, troughed in the third quarter of 2020 at 9.1 billion. And it's now 5.4 billion higher on a quarterly basis at 14.5 billion in the first quarter of 23. And that's the acid test of managing the entire balance sheet.
So let's turn now to slide 12 and focus on net interest income. On a gap, non-FTE basis, NII in the first quarter was 14.4 billion. And the FTE NII number was 14.6 billion. Focusing on FTE, that interest income increased 2.9 billion from the first quarter of 22 or 25%. While our net interest yield improved 51 basis points to 2.2%. The improvement was driven by rates and that includes reductions in securities premium advertising.
Average Fed Fund rates are up 440 basis points year over year. Relative to that increase in Fed funds which has benefited all of our variable rate assets. The rate paid on our total deposits rose 89 basis points. And the rate paid today on interest bearing deposits is up 133 basis points. Average loan growth of 64 billion also aided the year over year NII improvement.
According to a link quarter discussion, NII of 14.6 billion is done 222 million from Q4. And that's primarily driven by the continued impact of lower deposit balances and the mixed shift into interest bearing. It's also influenced by lower global markets NII which remember still gets passed through to clients via higher non-interest income as part of the trading revenue. According to 262 million declining global markets NII, the banking book NII of 14.5 billion that was modestly higher as the benefit of increased short interest rates. Some modest loan growth and some deposit favorability was offset by two last days of interest in the quarter.
Turning to asset sensitivity on a forward basis, the plus 100 basis point parallel shift at Mark's 31st stands at 3.3 billion of expected NII over the next 12 months from our banking book. 96% of that sensitivity is driven by short rates.
Summary, the first quarter NII was 14.6 billion this quarter on an FTE basis and that was a little better than our 14.4 billion expectation as we began the quarter since deposits and rate pass-throughs were both modestly better. Starting forward based on everything we know about interest rates and customer behavior, we expect second quarter NII on an FTE basis to be around 2% lower compared to Q1.
So think about that NII as about 14.3 billion FTE plus or minus driven by expected deposit movements as well as lower global markets NII which again is offset in the trading revenue. So let me remind you of some of the caveats when it comes to that NII guidance. First importantly, it assumes that interest rates in the forward curve materialize and that includes one more hike and then a couple of cuts in 2023. We also expect funding costs for global markets client activity to continue to increase based on those higher rates and as noted the impact of that is still offset in non-interesting income and that obviously assumes our current client positioning and the forward rate expectations.
We continue to expect modest loan growth so that's in our NII expectation as well and it's driven by credit card and to a lesser degree commercial. And then finally we just expect lower deposits and rotational shifts towards interest bearing really for three reasons.
First we expect further fed balance sheet reductions to continue to reduce deposits for the industry. Second we anticipate lower wealth management deposits in second quarter that's pretty typical due to the seasonal impact of clients paying income taxes and to a lesser degree now a continuation of balance movement seeking battery yields off balance sheet. And third we just continue to expect some of the rotation of commercial deposits towards interest bearing.
Okay let's go to slide 13 we'll talk about expense and here what you can see is in the first quarter our expenses were 16.2 billion that's up 700 million from the fourth quarter and it's driven by seasonal elevation from payroll taxes mostly of 450 million. A little bit from higher FDIC insurance expense that was another 100 million this quarter and the cost of adding people call that another 100 million.
We ended the first quarter with a little more than 217,000 people the company that was 260 people more than year end. During the quarter we welcomed 3000 additional people into the company in January that's due to outstanding offers that we extended in the fourth quarter. That meant that our head count peaked in January at a little more than 218,000 and at the end of last week we were down to 216,000.
We continue to expect that to move lower over time and we expect by the end of the second quarter our full time equivalent head count will be roughly 213,000 excluding our summer interns. As we look forward to the next quarter then we would expect Q2 expense to benefit from the reduction of the seasonal elevation of payroll tax in Q1 and we would also expect to see expense reductions coming from head count reductions through attrition over time and our operational excellence work.
So we expect expense in Q2 to be around 400 or 500 million lower than Q1 so think of that as around 15.8 billion plus or minus in Q2 and then further we just expect continued sequential expense declines in the third quarter and then again in the fourth quarter as we benefit from continued head count discipline and attrition through time.
I turn to asset quality on slide 14 and I want to start the credit discussion by saying once again asset quality of our customers remains healthy and net charge offs continue to rise from their near historic lows. Net charge offs of 807 million increased to 118 million from the fourth quarter. That increase was driven by credit card losses as higher late stage delinquencies flowed through to charge offs.
For context the credit card net charge off rate was 2.21% in this first quarter and that compares to 3.03% in the fourth quarter of 19 pre pandemic. Provision expense was 931 million in Q1 and that included 124 million reserve built. That's obviously less than the 403 million bills we took in the fourth quarter and it reflects modest long growth and an ever so slightly improved macro economic outlook that on a weighted basis continues to include an unemployment rate still north of 5% as we end 2023.
We included a slide in the appendix this quarter that highlights the mix and credit metrics of our commercial real estate exposure. I just want to remind everyone here we've been very intentional around our client selection and very intentional around portfolio concentration and deal structure over many years and as a result we've seen NPLs and realized losses that remain quite low for this portfolio. We had a total of 66 million dollars of commercial real estate losses in 2022. 70% of that was in office loans and that resulted in an annualized loss rate of 26 basis points.
In the first quarter to give some perspective our office loan losses were 15 million dollars. We have roughly 73 billion in commercial real estate loans outstanding that's less than 7% of our loan book. It's highly diversified by geography and no part of the country represents more than 22% of the book. It's also very diversified across property type. Within property type our office portfolio is 19 billion it's about 2% of our total loans. The portfolio is roughly 75% class 8 properties and when we originate they're typically around 55% loan to value. Even though we've seen some property value declines these exposure still remain well secured.
3.6 billion is classified as a reserve will criticize and even on the most recent refreshes on our toughest loans we still have 75% LTVs. In our office book 4 billion is scheduled to mature this year another 6 billion in 2024 with the remainder spread over the following years. So we continue to feel that the portfolio is well positioned and adequately reserved given the current conditions.
On slide 15 for completeness we highlight the credit quality metrics for both our consumer and commercial portfolios and with that I'm going to turn it back to Brian to talk about the lines of business.
Thank you Alster and we're going to begin on slide 16. So I want to bring us back to the things that drive the long term value of this franchise and the value for you or shareholders. Every business segment grew customers and accounts organically in the quarter and used digital tools and capabilities to drive engagement even deeper and also to drive customer satisfaction to industry leading levels.
On slide 16 we've highlighted some of the important elements of organic growth. I won't go through all the line items here but in consumer we saw we opened 130,000 net new checking accounts 1.3 million credit card accounts and 9% more investment accounts that aided to record quarter one consumer investment flows. Consumer also has now has had 17 quarters of positive net new checking accounts. In global wealth we had a record quarter adding 14,500 net new wealth relationships. In global banking we had a client increase in number of products per relationship. In global markets as we said earlier Jimmy Demar and a team had one of the highest quarters of sales and trading.
The other elements of earnings the management team remains focused on throughout the inflation environment is our expense management efforts. But even given those we continue to make investments in the future. We continue to streak of operating leverage in our account and you can see that on slide 17, that on our company and you can see that on slide 17. We now have had seven quarters of operating leverage. The efficiency ratio went to 62 percent and the nominal dollars of expenses we had today are similar to what we had 8, 9, 10 years ago.
As we go to slide 18 let's talk about individual businesses and consumer banking first. For the quarter consumer banking earn $3.1 billion on good organic revenue growth and delivered its eighth consecutive quarter of strong operating leverage. Well we continue to invest in the future. Offline revenue grew 21 percent. Expenses rose 11 percent. These results demonstrate the true value of the $1 trillion deposit franchise in the deep relationship we have with the clients in that business. The business continues to have $700 billion in excess deposits over slow-impounds. And as we said earlier it grew checking accounts $2.5 million, $2.5 million new checking accounts since the pandemic started.
While earnings growth of 4 percent understates success as businesses prior year included reserve releases, what we built reserves is quarter. On a pre-tax, pre-provision basis, PPR grew 34 percent year-to-year. I also note that the revenue growth over came into client and service charges has resulted us lowering our NSF OD charges for customer several quarters ago. The expense of the consumers reflect the continued business investments for growth, including adding relationship associates for the development increases in the cost of technology and implementation of new tools.
As you think about this business, remember much of the company's minimum wage hikes during 2022, the ones we made mid-year in addition to our March the $25 an hour impact this business more than any other business. However, this helped drive the attrition of this business in the half compared to last year of this quarter.
In slide 19, you can see some of the digital statistics around consumer. We believe that those digital tools, our customers have access to or the key to growing and retaining customer relationships. These tools also help us deliver more efficiently. We now have 45 million users active engage with our digital properties. They log in one billion times a month. Erica, our artificial intelligence driven personal assistant, saw usage rise 35 percent just in the past year. The number of our customers using Zell grew 21 percent in the past year. Remember, these are new functionalities just being put in place. These are growing off a high scale and show the Bank of America impact on these products. On Zell, remember back in mid-2021, Zell transactions crossed the number of checks written for our clients. Now it's 60 percent higher, less than two years later. And you can see the growth in digital sales that continues.
We main focused on growing the customer base and delivering the best in class tools and service that make us more efficient and more important to our clients in the consumer business. In Dean Athanasian, the team continue to do a good job respect to those goals.
On slide 20, we moved to wealth management. The active results are earning about a little over $900 million after tax of the quarter. These results were down from last year's Alistair said, as asset management fees fell with a negative market levels in equity and fixed income. Those fees were mitigated by the beneficial impact of revenue from the size of banking business within the line of business force.
As I noted a moment ago, both Merrill and the private bank saw organic revenue growth and provided solid client flows at $25 billion in a quarter. Our assets under manager flows of $15 billion reflects some of the movement that deposits note earlier. But we also saw $33 billion of brokerage flows. Expenses reflect lower revenue related incentives, but also reflect continued investments in the business as we continue to add financial advisors. We've added more than 650 wealth advisors in the past year alone.
As we move forward, we are excited to have Eric Shimp and Lindsay Hans lead this business. They work close to the Katie Knox to drive our global wealth and investment management business across the company. As we go to global wealth and investment management digital on slide 21, you can see the statistics here. Just as with the concern of businesses, clients become more digitally engaged across time. Our advisors have led the way in driving a personal driven advice model supplemented by our digital tools.
On slide 21, you can see the client digital adoption rate of 84% with Merrill and the private bank is over 90%. More than 75% of the base digital delivery of their statements, which as a key tool their service, providing more convenience for them and our advisor. Eric and Zell, interactions continue to grow here also, even among these wealthy clients.
On slide 22, you see the global banking results. This business produced very strong results growing revenue 19% year-to-year to $6.2 billion. The business earned $2.6 billion after tax. While investing banking, banks, sluggish, or global treasury services business has been robust leading to strong, repetitive performance. Loan activity has been good across this business also. As noted earlier, the deposit flows appeared stabilized in March and we've been in for some customer flows during the flight to safety during the quarter.
The company's overall investment banking fees are $1.2 billion in quarter one. While down from quarter one to 22, we saw modest improvement from quarter four to 22. The bridge expense decline year-to-year is prior year-to-year is reserved bills compared to release in the current period. Credit quality of this business again remains very strong. Expense increase 10% year-to-year, given by strategic investments in business including relationship management, hiring, and technology costs.
Digital engagement is shown on slide 23 with our global banking customers. These commercial customers continue to grow in importance as treasures and others appreciate these are doing business with us through these tools. While the volume of transactions and sheer numbers are the same as consumer, the volume of money moved is tremendous.
Next business will go to as a global markets business on slide 24. Jimmy DeMar and the team had another strong quarter of results growing year-to-year earnings to nearly $1.7 billion after tax. The continued themes in inflation due to political tensions in central banks changing monetary policies around the globe drove volatility in the bond and equity markets which this team did a good job managing. As a result, it was a quarter we saw strong performance in our credit trading business, particularly in mortgages in munit trading and macro trading again farewell void by strong client activity and secure financing.
The investments paid in this business of the last few years continue to produce favorable results. Just focus on the sales and trading numbers alone. Next EVA revenue improved 9% year-to-year to $5.1 billion. 29% were down 19% compared to quarter one in 2022. Every year expense increased 8% probably primarily driven by continued investments as stated in this business.
过去几年这个企业所做的投资继续产生良好的成果。仅仅看销售和交易数字就能发现,下一个 EVA 收入按年增长了9%,达到了51亿美元。相比2022年第一季度,这个数字下降了19%。每年的费用增加了8%,可能主要是由于这个企业持续的投资。
Finding on slide five you can see the all other shows a modest loss which included the $220 million losses in security sold out as to mentioned earlier. The last I would note our 10% effective tax rate this quarter continues to benefit from a strong business with clients supporting environmental investments and housing investments to produce tax benefits.
It's including those and other discrete tax benefits our tax rate would have been 26%. So in summary a strong quarter by our team delivered for you are shareholders operating leverage organic growth strong credit capital turn and strong ROTC with that let's jump to Q&A. At this time if you would like to ask a question please press star and one on your touch tone phone. You can remove yourself from the queue at any time by pressing the pound key.
We'll take our first question from Jim Mitchell with seaport global your line is open. Hey good morning guys. Maybe just one question on the NII trajectory you guys remain asset sensitive in the banking book but the forward curve which I think you pointed out currently expects three rate cuts by the end of the year. Is that pleased out how do you think about that impact on NII in the back half of the year what are the puts and takes as we think about NII beyond to Q.
So Jim you know I think right now the expectations for the market in terms of whether or not there will be another hike in May that's bouncing around pretty good. Similarly you got a question of whether or not there's two two cuts of the back half or three. So we're operating with the same information you are. We're looking at the forward curve day to day thinking that through at the same time we're looking at our deposit balances they're performing kind of the way we would think and we're competing for rate paid so I'd say generally speaking at this point we feel pretty good about NII it's obviously going to be up this year pretty significantly.
And I you look we don't provide guidance for a full year for a very simple reason it just comes down to it's very difficult to predict what the Fed's going to do six months and nine months out but but but but this way we can see where consensus is consensus is right around 57 billion plus or minus that's sort of number that would imply us up for the year seven to eight percent I mean I think we're pretty comfortable there but it's just so many moving parts that's why we don't provide the guidance.
Now that's all fair and maybe just pivoting to the trading business you know you had another strong quarter and outperform peers in the fixed income business is there anything unusually strong there or do you believe you guys have made some sustainable market share gains in that business given your recent investments.
Well I think the team's doing a really good job Brian talked about that you know a couple years ago we've made a decision as a team that it was important for us to invest more in that business and we did that and we've made pretty significant investments in equities and in fixed income and we felt like in particular we could continue to grow our macro businesses which we've done and that's that's what has done a really good job until this quarter this quarter just happened to fire in more cylinders particularly in fake because this quarter we had a great quarter for our micro products and you kind of expect that because it was a better quarter for them we've positive returns there so mortgages credit munis financing futures effects all of them had a pretty good quarter and I think Jim and the team are just executing at a really high level so they just got to keep at it.
Fair enough thanks for taking my questions. We'll take our next question from Erica Najarian with UBS your line is open. Hi good morning I'm Alisa just a clarification you gave us the quarterly expected trajectory for expenses do you still expect to hit 62 and a half billion or so a full year expenses in 23.
Right now that's our expectation I mean we're 90 days into the quarter it's into the year rather obviously as we're looking forward we see we know the head counts coming down so that's going to be a tailwind all the way through the course of the year so we don't have any change in our expectations right now we're going to see how the year develops we still got a little bit of a headwind in terms of you know something like our sales and trading business have a very good revenue year and we're still investing in the business so it'll be a dog fight particularly as we get into the back half of the year but we still feel good about where we are with respect to expense.
Got it and my second question is for Brian. Now Brian you produced a significant amount of revenue this quarter and grew your C T1 at the same time I think that a lot of investors are looking down the path of significant macro uncertainty as we take that into account how should we think about the buyback activity going forward especially ahead of the stress test result in June.
I think you saw this quarter we continue to adopt our basic or apply our basic principles which is we support the growth in our customer base we pay the dividends that are what we think is the rational rate and then we use the rest to basically return to you through share buybacks. You know we're in a middle of stress test as you just mentioned we have to see the results of that we also we also but the good news is we crossed 1140 this quarter which basically is an excess has a cushion on top of what we need for the first quarter of next year and so we'll continue to follow our basic principles so we feel good very good about our capital and you know you should expect us to continue to follow the idea to pay the dividend or grow organic or to your organic growth pay the dividend and buyback shares but we've got to get through the your term sort of what goes on in our business every year at this time. Got it thank you.
We'll go next to Ken Usten with Jeffries your line is open. Good morning. Hey I just wondering on the on the deposit side if you can help us understand you know there's obviously the ongoing makeshift which you referred to and gave us a lot of great detail on it just wondering you know where as you think forward how much more makeshift are you expecting in terms of DDAs as a percentage of total deposits and how do you expect that to also look as you think across across the businesses with regards to just you know where customers are moving funds incrementally thank you.
Yeah I think Ken you know we think this everybody thinks it's a big bulk thing Bank of America but it's really and then looks at broad categories and just bearing in mind and sharing accounts and try to try to do it you have to really think about customer bases and what they do with their money and so there's transactional cash whether that's for a consumer running a household day to day a wealthy consumer run their household day to day which may have different level expenses and then you know then the commercial customers who run their business day to day and then have access cash from that if they're successful and then you know how they all play that through so I think we think transactional cash and investment cash you've seen a lot of the investment cash is so to speak as Alistair mentioned earlier you know we price competitively for that that move that moves around but the good news is we have a massive investment platform we put that money to work for our customers if they don't need to manage a day to day a household so in our NIS estimates are our view of what happens in the future I think the key for the consumer businesses to remember that's got $700 billion of excess deposits over its loans it's generating a lot of excess deposits that grew 300 odd billion from pre-pandemic it has been stable that checking balances if you look at those charts we gave you to show you the near-term move and unstable that generates at a total all in cost of 10 to 15 basis points a lot of the value in the franchise and meaning including the interest very part of that franchise when you think about deposits across time and in like businesses so you'd expect some of those trends to continue in terms of customers have excess cash putting it to work differently you we expect a deposit rates to move to continue to match the market but the broad value of this deposit franchise is driven by the money people leave this because it's transactional cash which is emotion and we don't pay interest on and that is both the consumers wealthy customers of businesses so it's hard you know it's a very detailed question of which we spend a lot of time looking at or the team does as you might imagine.
Okay and the other question is just then how you walk through how you've been changing the composition of the securities portfolio and still benefiting from those variable rates swaps I'm just wondering if you can help us understand you know what happens from here in terms of should you continue to get benefits from those variable rates swaps and then also just do you have you done any positioning repositioning underneath the surface it looks like there were some some securities losses so how much how much room do you have to continue to kind of you know rework the portfolio and and grind more you know income out of the book even as you shrink it.
Yeah so can think about I mean the easiest way to think about those treasuries they're swapped to floating so they're essentially cash and actually this quarter we ended up converting some of them in two cash just because it's simpler it's simpler for everyone to understand and obviously a pretty good bid for treasuries this quarter so we just converted them into cash that that's what accounted for some of the securities loss there was a couple under a million but I think the way to think about it is as the overall securities portfolio remember we got cash we've got available for sale you can almost think about as in hands cash and they've got whole to maturity as that continues to pay down we're just sweeping it right now into cash that's something I've talked about in the last couple quarters and we're putting in cash because number one it's a really high yielding asset number two it gives us a lot of options during a period of volatility so pretty straightforward at this point.
Okay got it thank you. Our next question comes from Mike Mail with Wells Fargo your line is open.
Hi well I guess the topic of the day week and a month is to what degree your assets matched with your liability and I'm staring at slide 11 and you've seen the front page of many papers highlighting your unrelized security losses you highlight the yield on your securities at 2.6 percent you highlighted your health and maturity portfolio at eight years that that would all suggest to some that you're not so well-matched on the other hand what you don't provide or at least I didn't see it you know the change in the value of your deposits or even the duration of your deposits so the basic question is can you describe what degree your assets are matched with your liability and where you think you may have been off or on the mark.
Yeah so Mike I'll start Brian can add in and he chooses to but one of the reasons that we spend as much time laying out the deposit franchises because in a rising rate environment you'd expect obviously that bond marks are going to turn negative and at the same time you and we have been expecting as rates go up and I would rise because the deposits are so much more valuable in that environment what we laid out for you and for everyone to see is just how broad and stable and diversified is this deposit base we think it's very long tenured that's why we're laying out some of these things around just how long the relationships are in consumer and in wealth and in global banking and it's one of the reasons I say it's like this and if I can just interrupt is when you say long tenured can you put any numbers around the rent is I think that's the one biggest most important number if you could just some kind of frame that. If you took a look at slide number nine we've tried to lay that out for you so you take a look at and consumer for example you're talking about 67% of the clients have been with us for more than 10 years that's pretty long tenured. I know from my time in the commercial bank our clients on average were 17 years with us you have you have a long operational deposits in all of these businesses so that's what we're trying to lay out in front of everyone so you can see that. Okay I'm sorry I interrupted but go ahead.
I can't remember where I was. You were talking about the unrelasional securities loss of the II when higher that's part of the benefits of having a product. I'm trying to convey to you too Mike and you know this works we've got to balance all of this because we have to think about the entire balance sheet and there's a lot going on with the entire balance sheet and so what we're trying to do is invest that excess which has existed now in hundreds of billions for many many years we've got to invest the best way we can the way we do that we talk about balancing it is we're number one trying to make sure we grow capital we've done that we're up a hundred basis points there in the last year. Number two we're trying to grow liquidity we added 23 billion this past quarter. Number three we're trying to grow earnings we're 8.2 billion is one of our best earnings quarters ever so look we can always be better you know that we're taking the portfolio and we're just making it smaller it's run off now six quarters in a row we're taking all of that and planning it into cash and loans that's what we've been doing we'll just continue doing that and the portfolio is going to get smaller and shorter over time and when you look at the asset sensitivity now relative to you know rates going up a hundred or rates going down a hundred we're pretty balanced there too we're sort of up 3.3 billion if rates go up a hundred we're down 3.6 if rates go down a hundred so we feel like we're in a pretty balanced place and what a flexibility at this point.
And then just a follow up I guess some will take your greatest strength as a weakness that is you don't pay as much on deposits as others I estimate that you have the lowest cycle to date deposit data and so what is it that keeps your customers around if you're not going to pay them as much.
Now I think if you look at the value proposition that we're talking about if you go to the consumer business for example they've invested so much in client experience whether it's the financial centers renovation whether it's the new the people that we've added in that business over a long period of time whether it's the digital the mobile preferred rewards hours is a relationship model and it has been and if you look then like just think about this quarter look at the organic growth in consumer again that's 130,000 net new checking 17 quarters in a row based on that relationship value proposition that's what we're attracting if you go to the wealth management business this was a record quarter for net new households or Maryland and a record for the private bank this quarter that tells you we're offering people something that's valuable and then we added 35,000 new bank accounts for people in our wealth management franchise so that again is a significant indicator that what we're offering has value to people and if I were to go back to my old business and business banking and commercial banking they're adding new logos and new clients over time in a way that we're really happy with right now so I think the ultimate answers we we are a purpose driven company who put our clients interest first that is helping make their financial lives better and in this period of time people want stability and that's what we offer. All right thank you.
We'll go next to Gwen Shore with upper core your line is open. Hi thanks maybe an easy one first it wasn't noticeable but do you feel like there was a flight to quality benefit during the March madness I would have thought that people would have flocked to the safety of BFA during times like that but you didn't comment specifically on that so thanks. So we're we're going to decline Glenn to get a specific number we're pretty confident we saw noticeable flight to safety and it comes in two parts part one is you know during a period like March 10th and around that week or two and then this is the second part that comes with onboarding clients over a period of time who are trying to move operational accounts here and that takes a while that has a lag so you can think about we get some of the deposits quite quickly but relationships take a longer time to build an onboard so you can see from our numbers it was improving before the disruption we've chosen not to put an exact number on it because there are typical ebbs and flows and any given quarter leading up especially to a you know payroll end of quarter but generally speaking I'd say we were improving anyway a lot of that is just organic growth but we obviously benefited.
Welcome. You noted the one more hike and then cuts to the back half the that's the forward curve which is interesting is the Fed doesn't have the same forward curve as the market has some curious if you could talk to the sensitivity of what if there are no cuts how much of that helps your forward and I I thought process. Well we do use the forward curve because we feel like it's the most you know kind of dispassion assessment with the most information out there in the market from the broadest set of people and importantly it's not just us making it up. So we use the forward curve and I even mentioned during my remarks things are bouncing around around is it one hike is it zero is it two cuts but the sensitivity that we provide around up 100 or down 100 is probably the best we can offer the sage and then depending on how things develop and they're developing quickly it'll allow you to adjust the model accordingly.
The last simple one is health maturity you talk a lot about I think the answer is I know it but I'll ask it lonely anyway so do you don't feel like you have to do anything material with your unrelasable species I get it it's in treasuries it's swapped it's it's agency mortgages we're under credit issue but at this point in the stability of your deposit base long growth capital growth you feel like you can just kind of ride it out and grind it down. Correct right now that's exactly what we've been doing we've communicated that pretty clearly and that's what we're continuing to do just keeps getting smaller and shorter. Thank you appreciate.
At the same time the business is a pretty material decline and pre tax margins both sequentially and year on year I wanted to better understand how the business might evolve under some of the new leadership and how we should just be thinking about the margin trajectory. Why the better understand how you're balancing investment needs with goal of delivering continued profitability.
The margin came down largely because you had this sort of incremental hit to the investment side revenues of markets value over year but we'd expect that margin to move back up to its more traditional 20 you had 25 to 30 percent but you also have to remember they if they are a big beneficiary or hit of the elevated payroll taxes and other things the first quarter because as a percentage of our compensation in the company they're not a small amount. But we expect that to move back in the high 20s but we've been working on this business to continue improve the digitization of the services side of it so basically if you think about it you get a dollar of the revenue and you take about half past the compensation and then the financial advisor regrets and the other payouts and then we take the rest of it and convert it to about a 30 percent deposit the other half and convert it about 30 percentage points or 60 percent at the profit pre-tax this quarter down a little bit because of payroll.
So we feel very good about where we stand on a relative basis but one of the things the team continues to work on across Eric and Lindsay and Katie is to drive operational excellence to new level and that business because we believe that there's still a lot of costs that can come out around the simplest more simple straightforward products the delivery of those products the paper-based usage and things like that and then also remember we are making investments to the visors we have 4,000 plus trainees in the businesses across the company and we believe that the best divisors one is grown with our own company and we continue to do that and that's a drag on a P&L that we're willing to take to make sure we have an advisor growth in the future.
I hope we'll call it Brian and just for my follow up was hoping that the URAllis Derrick could provide just an update on expectations around upcoming regulatory development specifically higher scenario planning for Valsal for any expectations around the FDIC special assessment there are a lot of items that have been floated just given recent events and the SVB fall out was hoping to get some perspective just in terms of regulatory market market.
I mean I think we don't have anything more than you do in a broad sense but I think at the end of the day I think this industry has extremely strong capital liquidity and capabilities that we just demonstrate through the pandemic and then through the aftermath of the pandemic and then through inflation and then through a tightening cycle that hasn't happened before so I if you're good about what the industry stands and I think people have to step back and think about it overall and then frankly this industry in the United States is so much stronger than Europe and has so much capital per square inch so to speak then Europe does to get to ratios which on numbers are lowers but they amount of capital to get theirs is pretty unbelievable so we have twice the capitals of your pinky.
We count parts of similar size and our ratios are considered to be lower so obviously it's a pull list together they've got to make sure they aren't counting the beans in different ways of the gold plating and those things in the United States so hopefully people start to see the wisdom and making sure they're careful here and we'll see that play out but we don't have any special understanding.
Good morning just a quick clarification on the balance sheet and a separate question. The cash obviously went up a lot and you did a lube to that moving some of the securities to cash but the short term borrowings was also up a lot and I didn't know if that's just to kind of hold more the cruising in a current environment and we should have seen that continues which I think weighs on them but not the $DI dollars or was that just temporary 1Q and we should have paid too much attention to the period and trends there.
Just a little bit of both Matt. You've got first quarter just normally a seasonal build for us so that happens and a little bit of borrow and you write doesn't impact them because you can invest in cash for a way and there's no drag there but it may hurt and I why slightly at the margin but you know a little bit.
Sorry I think you meant to say it doesn't hurt the $DI dollars that might hurt the $DI dollars and then for that right? Correct. Yeah okay.
抱歉,我觉得你的意思是这不会伤害$DI美元,可能会伤害$DI美元,所以是这样的吧? 对的。好的。
And then separately any kind of trends to call out in spending in March. Some of your peers talked about a slow down in March and you highlighted kind of for the full quarter. Debt and credit card was up 6% year year total payments up nine. Any kind of interquero trends that you want to point to?
Right I think you know we saw the first part of the quarter first quarter being a little bit softer and then we saw a kick back up in March. So far in April still early it's probably a little lower than it was for the month of March but it's a couple of weeks since we got a little careful about that just due to the different ways the occasions fall and things like that. But it's over the course of last year the total spending year-year increases a slow down and I think that means it's a precursor to the economy being a little bit slower and that we're seeing and then frankly consumers being more careful and the user of the cash because the cash in our accounts especially for the lower income cohorts continues to build honestly.
From P-Class April fell down a little bit all of course a year and it's built back up in the first part of this year. So we'll see that play out there's been a delay in some of the tax returns as you know this year that pushes them from quarter to quarter but stay tuned I think it's a little early to call but it is a little softer in the first part of April here.
Okay thank you very much. We'll go next to Vivek Shinage with JP Morgan your line is open. Hi thanks just a couple of questions. I was just clarifying the shift to interest bearing from non-interest bearing. I know you said you expect that to cut near do you expect the pace of that to slow or is it still running pretty high or even to accelerate any color on that.
Yeah I'd expect it to slow over time because we're getting pretty close now to Q419 levels anyway which was the last peak. And also you know you think about the big driver it tends to be global banking and as rates are rising clients are doing their rotation but we're getting towards the end of the hike now we would think so you'd anticipate there'll be a little bit of a lag there but generally speaking I'd expect it to slow at some point and I think we're probably getting close now.
One more Alistair. Office CRE you give the geographical mix in the slides for the total CRE portfolio can you give us some similar thing for the office CRE portfolio.
I can do but I'm going to need to follow up with you afterwards because I don't have it at hand. Okay. I don't think you're going to find anything there other than sort of you know typical geographic distribution similar to the way we serve our customers around the United States.
All right thanks. We'll go next to Gerard Cassidy with RBC your line is open. Good morning Brian. Good morning Alistair. Good morning. Alistair, can you elaborate a little further you talked about you know I think it's like 12 you show us a hundred basis point parallel shift impacts and then interesting income by a positive 3.3 billion over the following 12 months.
If rate environment does shift and maybe we do start to see lower rates by the end of the year how quickly can you guys move this from being as sensitive to neutral or liability sensitive on the balance sheet.
Well you know I think if you were to take that same metric on the downside it would be probably be down 3.6 billion you know for down a hundred just to give some idea and you know what's what's happening now is obviously as the interest bearing piece just continues to rise across the company we've got a we've got a hedge now is rates if and when they start to go back down it won't be a complete hedge but it'll be a little bit of a hedge there then you also get something back in terms of global markets and I that will start leading back positively so there's some puts and some takes but we'll see how that develops over the course of the year.
Very good then as the follow up question in the global blank global banking slide you guys give us slide 22 you had a negative provision in this quarter and you referenced that it's an improved macro economic outlook can you give us some color what you're seeing there to give you confidence to have a negative provision in the second does this also include the recent sheer national credit exam results in this line item as well.
It would it would always include those results those come through continuously it's there's not as this change over time that's a continuous set of things they look at we always do well in that and when we say macro environment remember this business is credit across the world so there's places that we finished up on cleaning up that allowed us to release some reserves on one side and then we had other places that you would have put up reserves but the end of the day you know that the overall credit quality here is very strong and very stable.
Very good and then you asked the question in commercial correct yes yeah okay so I mean I think there's a couple things going on number one we didn't have any real loan growth number two the as a quality remains terrific number three the you know the macro environment when you look at the blue chip consensus was ever so slightly better so we felt like we were pretty well provided for already and then on the commercial side we we had a little bit of exposure runoff and one or two places where we may have been reserved quite conservatively so it was all those things added together.
Actually Brian and Alistair you guys obviously have been through a few cycles why is commercial so strong as you know if you and your peers all have really good commercial credit quality any suggestions on what you're seeing that makes it so good.
Well you know their profitability remains in a good place cash flows remain in a good place I think corporate America learned something from 2009 and 2008 and top two so leverages in a good place you add all that up you get a decent environment overall for the economy and that's where that's where we are with respect to credit quality so we'll have to watch that over time but as of right now it's in terrific shape.
Our next question comes from Betsy Graystic with Morgan Stanley your line is open.
我们的下一个问题来自摩根士丹利的Betsy Graystic,请发言。
Hi good morning.
你好早上好。
Two questions one just keying off of the loan discussion just now could you give us a sense as to how you're thinking about lending standards and any changes in a post-SIVB environment.
Well you know we don't really have a significant change to our risk appetite we haven't changed our client selection those are largely speaking designed to be through the cycle. We will obviously adjust on specific concerns about as a quality performance in a sector or outlook but I'd say with respect to our long growth it you know where we're seeing it more as the fed raises rates those rates are changing our customer demand so we just don't see as much demand right now for security space lending or mortgage but it's less about credit tightening or standards it's more about just fed doing you know and having the effect that you would expect.
Okay and then two other quickies one on the consumer checking account balances you know in March was that uptick in part a function of seasonality and you know end of period end of pay cycle type of behavior or is there something more going on there.
Well I think as always you know that's a cohort of pre pandemic compared to where they were then and now and and they had been you know sort of bouncing around at a level for the last six months they moved up a little bit this is the time you do move up because the tax returns and other things and your impayments and stuff but you know but they clearly aren't going they basically are stable from November December January they started increasing February and then they bounced up a little bit so we'll see what ends up what clear message is despite people having said these consumers are spending down their money it would be out you know be out of these balances in mid to 2022 as a third quarter they clearly are still sitting with a fair amount of money and account relative to pre pandemic times.
Okay and then just lastly AI it's been a big topic recently as I'm sure you know you've got Erica just wondering about plans to leverage AI maybe you're you know going to be leveraging Erica and that maybe it's a different kind of strategy but but Fox there would be helpful thank you.
Yeah so Erica you know obviously the basic concept was built for us a number years you four five six seven years ago starting and came out came into the business it is a predictive language type of program where you put a question in and it answers it but we had to do a special language to make sure would work with our business it wasn't a general so we we did that then that then put us in a condition to start to deploy to our customers because it's captive to our data in other words it's looking our systems finding information given to clients is really a service capability and what the sort we've seen is that increase is a clear indicator of how valuable these types of artificial intelligence natural language processing predictive technologies can be for customer service and things like that.
We've also taken Erica internally and applied it to help us do work and we've seen it have those benefits you know ultimately we think this has you know extreme benefits for our company we think it has a lot and you've seen this written about in the computer coding areas in other words it can speed up the process of what they used to be called object programming that goes on we think it has a lot to do in terms of allowing teammates to work much more quickly and efficiently with our systems and get information out and can make you know even someone like me the ability to do analytics that I could you that have to send to somebody to have them put keyed in the system so there's a lot of there's a lot of value to this.
The key question will be you know when can you use it without the fear of with the reason why a lot of us stopped it in our industry and other industries was it it wasn't clear how it worked with your data and the in the outside world's data and how it would interact to pull stuff out and we have to be careful of that and then secondly we have to understand how the decisions are made to be able to stand up to the to our customers demands for us to be fair and frankly follow the laws and rules and regulations on on lending so you know I think all that is you know good good strong you know it's really an important thing it's so we're not a neophyte in this that's actually operating operating out that we understand the value of it but we will carefully apply it and we see a great value.
I don't think it's you know great value in the next month but you know in the overall sense it'll help us continue to manage the headcount down which we've been doing this quarter and remember we started this company management team started with this company you know in 2010 was 285,000 and 300,000 people working here and we're running the same size company with you know 216,000 people are bigger company doing more stuff and so all that's been aided by your digitization of which is a potential step function change. Thanks so much appreciate.
We'll take our final question at this time this is a follow-up from Mike Mayo with Wells Fargo please go ahead your line is open. Hi in terms of your guidance for lower expenses in the second quarter than the third quarter than the fourth quarter you know how much of that is expectations for slower business activity and how much of that is due to expected scale benefits from technology and I guess the bigger question too is you know are you seeing evidence of a banking crisis are you seeing evidence of a banking recession and is that part of the reason for the expense guide.
No it's it's not Mike I would say there could be the activity at first quarter was actually higher in some ways because of volatility and trading side and things like that so we aren't we're spending to get scale and operating leverage across activity taking less dollars to do it and the objects and the work we do we had built up more people largely because on the fear of last year of the turnover rate that has now gone in half in a year the cars to be hiring a lot to stay ahead of it and then when it slowed down we built up people and we're bringing that back down in line but there's no you know the expenses you know frankly are just managing to add count carefully because that's two thirds expense base and getting more leverage out of the activities but there's no you know we'll have more checking accounts we'll have more credit card accounts we'll do more wires on a given day we'll do more trades on a given day and that can have been flow but overall we're expecting activity continue to rise now we'll loan demand i.e. people want to borrow another $10 versus the $10 they have that's what we say slows down so that doesn't you know that's but that's not that they don't have a loan is that they borrow different amounts of money all right so this is really just managing the business not your reduced investment spend or anything like that.
Now and on the investment spend we're spending we increased this year versus last year you know three to four hundred million dollars and pure initiative spending and that's going through the run raise we speak and and we are we wouldn't cut that because we think to the point of Betsy's comment it gives us a chance to continue to leverage the franchise and nowhere is that more evidence in our consumer business where the numbers of branches year-to-year down a few hundred again customers are bigger more stuff's going through customer delights at all-time high you know attrition is an all-time low and and that's what makes that franchise valuable as you as you well know and that's by continuing to invest in new capabilities all time and last thing a big picture for you Brian just the evidence that a recession is coming and the impact on you guys where are you right now is it red is it flashing yellow is it green how is it moved just what's your what's the temperature can this in the research team you know have been consistent to see you know after the fed raises rates of amounts there would be a you know a recession they have a mild recession and that that they predicted basically say half to one percent negative annualized negative GDP growth Q3 Q4 and Q1 and then back to positive so I think you know in the end of day you know we don't we don't see the activity on a consumer side slowing at a pace would indicate that but we see you know commercial customers are being more careful and things like that but it everything points to relatively mild recession given the you know the amount of stimulus that was put that was paid you know to people and the money they have left over the fact that unemployment still at 3.5 percent is full full employment plus and then the wage growth is slowing and tipping over so the size of inflation and tipping down but they're still there but that translates into good you know relatively good activity so we see it as a slight recession and you know we'll see you know we'll see we'll see what happens but we built this company across the last decade even in the stress scenarios that you see somewhere in the slides last quarter we didn't reduce because they're the same answer you know our stress scenarios are always less than anybody else is because of how we built the company through the go through recessions without a problem including the pandemic got it all right thank you
Not this time I'd like to turn the program back over to Brian Moynihan for any additional or closing remarks thank you for your time and I want to thank my teammates for a great performance again this first quarter of 2023 a strong quarter of 18 percent year over your EPS growth the strength stability and our being there for our customers continue to show through including strong capital at 11.4 liquidity at 900 billion GLS but the most important thing and we just touched on it was really two things continue organic growth in our franchise and operating leverage as by going revenue fast and expensive so we feel good about that and look forward to talking next quarter.