Bank of America at Financials CEO Conference: Strategic Insights

On Tuesday, 16 September 2025, Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) hosted its 30th Annual Financials CEO Conference. The event, led by Antonio and Alastair Borthwick, provided an in-depth look at the bank’s performance and strategic direction. The discussions revealed a robust consumer sector and stable asset quality, while also addressing challenges posed by regulatory changes and the evolving digital landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Bank of America reported a record increase in consumer spending, with credit and debit spending up 4.5% year-to-date.
• The bank is leveraging its digital infrastructure and AI to enhance client services and drive efficiency.
• Net Interest Income is projected to rise by 6% to 7% for the year, aiming for a record $15.5 to $15.7 billion.
• The commercial real estate office sector is showing signs of improvement.
• Bank of America is actively engaging in discussions about capital requirements and regulatory changes.

Financial Results

Bank of America reported a strong financial performance with several key highlights:

• Consumer Spending:

- In 2024, consumer spending on Bank of America cards increased by 3.5% compared to the previous year.

- Year-to-date, credit and debit spending rose by approximately 4.5%.

• Deposit Balances:

- Checking deposit balances remain robust, particularly at the lower end, with balances significantly higher than pre-COVID levels.

• Asset Quality:

- Both consumer and commercial asset quality are stable, with improvements noted in the commercial real estate office sector.

• Net Interest Income (NII):

- The bank is on track to potentially increase NII by 6% to 7%, aiming for $15.5 to $15.7 billion, a record figure.

- Q3 NII is expected to be around $15.2 billion.

• Capital Markets:

- Sales and trading are projected to achieve their 14th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth.

- Investment banking fees are expected to increase by 15% for the quarter.

Operational Updates

Bank of America is advancing its operational capabilities through significant investments in technology and AI:

• Digital Transformation:

- The bank invested over $4 billion in new technology last year, part of a $13 billion total technology investment.

- Tens of millions of customers are using digital-only services.

• Local Markets Integration:

- Operating in 97 local markets in the U.S., the bank facilitated approximately 9 million referrals between business lines last year.

• AI Deployment:

- Over 20 million customers use the Erika assistant, with more than 3 billion interactions.

- 65% of corporate clients using CashPro now utilize AI, representing about 40% of request volume.

Future Outlook

Looking ahead, Bank of America is focused on several strategic priorities:

• Organic Growth:

- The bank aims to enhance services for existing clients while attracting new ones.

• Expense Discipline:

- Efforts are underway to grow the expense base at a rate below GDP growth, leveraging efficiencies from digital and AI initiatives.

• Capital Management:

- The bank is managing excess capital to support clients, meet regulatory minimums, and return capital to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks.

• Regulatory Landscape:

- Bank of America is engaged in discussions on the supplemental leverage ratio and other regulatory metrics, aiming to balance safety with economic growth.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, several key topics were addressed:

• Stablecoin:

- The bank is developing Stablecoin solutions, though user acceptance remains a challenge.

• Capital Requirements:

- There is optimism about potential relief in capital requirements, particularly concerning the supplemental leverage ratio.

• Investment Banking:

- The bank is enhancing its investment banking services for middle-market companies across the U.S.

• Technology Investments:

- Bank of America continues to prioritize technology, with over $4 billion invested in new technology last year.

For more detailed insights, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Bank of America 30th Annual Financials CEO Conference 2025:

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: We’re playing on our own ground, really. A warm welcome to our own groups here for Alastair Borthwick. Alastair, it’s always a pleasure to have you with us.

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: Thanks, Bradley.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: It’s our 30-year anniversary. This conference in Europe has been going on for 30 years. That’s a legacy. We are seeing a big increase in terms of participation from U.S. investors, 35% versus last year. We’ve seen, of course, a big increase in global money coming into Europe. I think giving your perspective to a global investor base increasingly so, that would be, I think, super useful. It’s a great opportunity, of course, to cover ground with our European clients, understanding better Bank of America, but also you’re the only U.S. bank participating in this conference. I think you can provide a great window onto what you’re seeing in the banking industry. Maybe we’ll start from there. Obviously, Bank of America has a great insight into the U.S. consumer. We’re handling nearly $4.5 trillion in payments annually, as well as into U.S. businesses as the largest CNI lender.

Can you give us an update on the health of the U.S. consumer and business sentiment in general?

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: Yeah, of course. First of all, it’s great to be here. Thank you, everybody. It’s wonderful to be a part of 30 years. We’re grateful for all of your support. As you point out, Antonio, we’ve got a pretty good window into the U.S. consumer. Normally, what we’re looking for most is what’s happening with their credit and debit card spend, because that tells us how they’re acting rather than if you listen to a survey and what they’re saying they feel. Interestingly, in 2024, we hit a record for consumer spending. On our cards, we could see our customers spending 3.5% more than the year before. That was 2024. This year, just to give you some idea, credit and debit spending would be about 4.5% more than the year before. If anything, it’s actually accelerated year to date. That gives you some sense for how the U.S.

consumer is feeling today. We also tend to look at balances. We can see balances in checking deposits remain very healthy. At the lower end, they’re multiples of where they were pre-COVID. We can see, obviously, as you will all see, home prices in the United States remain in a very good place. Equity markets remain in a very good place. Unemployment, you know, it’s ticked up maybe 0.1% recently, but again, 4.3%. That’s a very strong place for unemployment in the United States. Income growth has been good. The consumer is doing well. We see that in our own asset quality numbers. We saw that last quarter. The asset quality continued to be very, very stable. We can see it again this quarter behaving in the way that we thought it might. On the consumer side, things are quite constructive. The consumer remains very resilient.

We feel good about that part of the picture. The commercial side is also very good right now by any historical standard. Our asset quality remains terrific on the commercial side. We’ve really only had one area in the course of the past couple of years that’s had any type of concern. That’s the commercial real estate office sector in the United States. That’s more of a systemic factor, a little bit of work from home impacting some of the demand for office space and a little bit of higher interest rates impacting cash flow coverage. Even there, this year, we’ve seen another improvement in the performance of that portfolio. We talked last year about how we felt like last year we’d see the majority of the losses as we cleaned out that portfolio. This year is performing the way that we thought it would.

It’s been better so far this year. Other than that, the commercial asset quality remains in a very good place to the point where it really would take an idiosyncratic loss to see something happen. We haven’t had anything like that recently. When you’ve got commercial asset quality at levels where there’s very little in the way of charge-offs, it doesn’t take a lot to change it. At this point, the commercial asset quality remains in a good place. Profitability is good. Cash flow is good. We can see corporate America is performing pretty well.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: Right. Now, you and Brian spend a lot of time around the world seeing clients, spending time with our global network. That obviously speaks to the international presence of the bank. Are you hearing anything different from international clients?

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: The biggest factor, you know, as we talk to our international clients, has largely been around trade and trade policy. I think what they’re benefiting from at this point is certainty around what that environment looks like. A year ago, people were speculating and concerned. Six months ago, they were speculating and concerned it could have a variety of different outcomes. At this point, most of the businesses that we talk to in the countries that we’re covering, they’ve got a pretty good idea of what the trade policy looks like and how that impacts their own supply chain. That’s something that I feel like our international clients are definitely benefiting from at this point. Otherwise, the United States remains a very important market for anyone outside the United States who obviously operates in or sells to.

We’re in a very good place to help them with their needs in the United States. For our U.S. clients, they’re very interested in doing business around the world. Obviously, we have a terrific international platform, and we’re able to help people as they grow their own businesses with countries outside the United States.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: Now, maybe also as a way to sort of give the audience an overview, you can give us a couple of reasons why you think our franchise is truly differentiated from other U.S. banks. Maybe we can start with sort of the institutional clients and their activities. Over the past few years, we’ve been investing in the global markets business, which is a large part of the international franchise. What benefits have you seen from these investments? What further growth opportunities would you see ahead for the business?

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: If I were to take a big step back before we even get to global markets, we’ve obviously got, when we report our business, four big segments: consumer, wealth, global banking, global markets. All of them are leaders in the world in their space. We have scale in all of them. We have differentiated capabilities in each of them. It would be very hard to replicate a franchise like that today, having acquired those capabilities over a very long period of time and then grown them organically. We feel like that’s already a differentiator. When we get to the global markets business on the institutional side, we’ve made a considerable amount of investment there over the course of the past five years. You can see that in balance sheet. You can see it in liquidity. You can see it in RWA.

Jim, Damar and the team have invested more in the way of technology. They’ve invested more in the way of people. They’ve executed in a really productive fashion to the point where you can see at this point 13 successive quarters of year-over-year revenue growth. That’s really hard to do in the markets business just because of the underlying volatility sometimes of the markets themselves. We’ve improved the return on allocated capital in that business. The scale and the way that we’re now helping our clients around the world in a different way has allowed us to improve the returns of that business. We’ve been really happy with the way that one has performed. More broadly in the institutional businesses, one of the big differentiators for us is our international platform. Remember, in the U.S., we compete in every local market around the United States.

I’ll get into that a little bit later on. When we’re in a particular city, we’re often banking the companies in that city. We’re competing with a variety of different competitors. Many of them are U.S. domestic regional banks. Many of those clients that we bank are operating in multiple countries around the United States, around the world. Maybe 80% to 85% of the companies we cover operate in or buy from or sell to customers in different countries around the world. Having an international platform like we do, a big international payments platform, a big international credit platform, a big global markets platform, allowing us to serve those U.S. domestically headquartered companies is a big differentiator for us. It’s been a core part of the growth that Wendy Stewart has seen in the global commercial banking franchise that serves middle-market companies in the United States.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: That’s very clear. On the banking side, we’ve heard, as you mentioned, that there are some strategic areas to focus on helping gain share. The middle-market investment banking is clearly a focus. What other growth opportunities and areas of investment do you see for this business?

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: You’re now talking about Global Banking?

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: Yes.

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: Yeah. As you pointed out, one of the things that Matthew Coder and his team have focused on is trying to deliver more investment banking expertise and advice to middle-market companies across the U.S. That’s where we have a big middle-market practice, U.S. headquartered businesses. We felt like we had an opportunity to add coverage bankers to make sure we were bringing that expertise to our clients around the U.S. We started with a group of about half a dozen bankers providing that investment banking advice. Today, we’ve got closer to 250. That’s come over multiple years. As we continue to penetrate that client base, we keep investing there. That’s been a really important part of our franchise development in Global Banking. The second piece that’s been really important for us is continuing to invest in the international platform, everything outside of the United States.

That’s one of those places where obviously it’s very good for our clients here in Europe. It’s very good for our clients in Asia. It’s also been, going back to the conversation earlier, a powerful differentiator for us as we serve our U.S. clients. They want advice on how best to expand their own business in places like Europe. I think what Matthew Coder and Bernard Mensah have done in terms of just building out our international platform to help clients around the world and the U.S. has been an important part of our growth story.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: That’s very clear. I know many of our European client base don’t appreciate as much or have a feel for how much such a large national bank competes locally in U.S. markets. Maybe you could discuss that further and tell us how we leverage the local markets organization in the U.S. to ensure that we deliver a unified company at the local level and drive sort of market share gains across businesses.

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: OK, so that’s another of the differentiating characteristics, I think, for our company. It’s easy to understand, but it’s harder to develop. It’s taken us a number of years to build a practice now of local markets integration. Here’s what we mean by that. We operate in an enormous market in the U.S., the size of Europe. We’re in 97, let’s call them, local markets, a lot of the big cities, a lot of the smaller cities. We’re in 97% of them. That would be an enormous percentage of the U.S. GDP. In each market, we’re likely to have our consumer bank, our wealth management franchise, business banking and small business banking, and our middle-market franchise. In some cities, we have investment banking. In some cities, we have global markets. The point being, there’s a series of different lines of business in each market. We have a local market president.

The local market president is there to make sure that each of those lines of business are talking with one another and working together. They’re not just reporting back to the big cities where the leaders of those particular lines of business might work. They’re talking to one another and solving client problems in that local market. Those 97 markets all report to Lee McIntyre, Lee’s in the room, our Head of Investor Relations and Head of Local Markets. We’ve got this group then of people who are deploying best practices across local markets to help one another. In addition, when, for example, somebody in consumer identifies that they’re talking to somebody very wealthy who needs help with wealth management, the team in consumer is then referring that person and that piece of business to our wealth management colleagues.

If somebody in commercial banking finds that there’s an opportunity for the consumer bank to deploy for their employees of that company or wealth management with the owners of that company, these are referrals going backwards and forwards between lines of business. Last year, we had about 9 million of those referrals, just to give some idea of the scale of this operation. That’s differentiated. That, in our mind, is integrating the lines of business in the local markets where we all live and work and compete. It’s one of the things that we’re really proud of that we built over the course of 10-plus years.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: Now, Alastair, one focus that is obviously very important for this year at our conference is how European banks have managed to cover some ground versus European versus U.S. banks’ profitability. Where the gap is still very large is, of course, on investments in technology. Bank of America is a leader in U.S. digital banking and digital adoption. When it comes to the digital infrastructure, it continues to grow. How do you see digital banking evolve in the near future? How important are physical locations to the bank’s relationship-focused strategy?

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: We’re very fortunate we don’t have to choose. We feel like our clients are best served when we offer them high tech, and we offer them high touch. I’m going to get into that in a second. Obviously, we’ve been working on a digital transformation at scale now for many, many years. If you were to look at our earnings presentations, you’d see that we’ve got tens of millions of customers who use digital only at this stage and very small numbers of our clients who are paper only. That is simultaneously a client experience enhancer. It’s one of the reasons that our client satisfaction scores are at their highest. They’re at a record level right now. We’re giving clients more convenience. We’re giving them cheaper. We’re giving them faster. They have the ability to do transactions sitting right in their pocket on their mobile phone.

That’s been an enormous part of what we’ve had to do over the course of the past 10 years. That doesn’t change at this point because we’re still not at the point where we’ve fully taken paper out of everything that we do. We will continue to make investments in our digital offering. Last year, I think most of you know, we invested just over $4 billion in new technology, so $13 billion in total, but $4 billion in new technology, new code, new capabilities that are aimed at client experience, or they’re aimed at cost savings, or they’re aimed at efficiency or risk reduction. They’re things that help to improve the company. That remains an important part of our future. We’re committed to those investments. We’re committed to, you know, adding to that over time, year after year after year.

At the same time, and I said we don’t have to choose, there’s still a number of our clients who would prefer to walk into a financial center. Typically, they’re going into a financial center today not for transactions. They’re not going in to deposit a check. They can do that over their phone, or they can do that at an ATM. They’re going in for advice. They might be going in to open their first-ever account. They might be going in to choose a new credit card. They might be going in to choose a mortgage and how to think about a mortgage. They might be going in to meet with a wealth management specialist.

The idea now that we’ve allowed people to use their digital app to open an account if they want to for their children or go into a financial center and arrange an appointment on their mobile so they don’t have to wait when they get there, these are the sorts of things that we’re integrating just to make sure that the clients have a great experience.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: Thanks for that. Now, AI.

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: I should say, by the way, to this day, somewhere, you know, today, at Bank of America, somewhere between 350,000 and $500,000 people will walk into our branches today, into our financial centers, looking for that type of advice. It’s obviously a differentiator to offer both.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: Thanks for that. Now, AI, of course, has been a key theme, I would say, across industries. How do you see that impacting the banking industry going forward? More importantly, how are we addressing the opportunity that this new technology brings?

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: It’s obviously exciting. It’s not just about the future. It’s right now. Many of you will know the best example of AI at scale, like a productive use case at scale for us, is our Erika assistant, which allows you to talk to your phone and ask Erika to do different things and give you different information. We have over 20 million customers who use Erika, and they’ve used Erika over 3 billion times, just to give you an idea of the cost save and the time save for our own employees handling that type of information. More recently, in our second quarter earnings, we also profiled the fact that today, corporate clients, commercial clients who use our CashPro payment service—this is our proprietary technology that allows people to manage their operating accounts—about 65% of our corporate clients now use AI for their requests.

It’s about 40% of the request volume that’s going through this. We’re increasingly deploying AI for the commercial side based on the experience that the consumers have asked for and they’re already getting. The third example is just interesting, again, at scale, is our coders, the same people who are developing new software and making sure that they take care of our base software needs. Today, they’re using GitHub and other type coding platforms that allow them to be much more productive than they were. This is already being used at scale at this point at the bank. Now the question becomes, what are some of the other things that we can continue to deploy in service centers, fraud protection, et cetera, so that we’re giving the clients a better experience on an ongoing basis?

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: Now, we’ve of course covered the investments for growth and efficiencies and all the investments in technology and AI. How do you combine these investments for growth while ensuring that expenses remain under check and you remain disciplined, which you require to deliver sort of the operational leverage in the business?

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: At our heart, we are an organic growth company. There was a time when some of our growth came from inorganic activity. Today, now that we’re above the depositor cap, it’s pretty clear that Bank of America is an organic growth company. Therefore, our focus is on do more with existing clients and add more net new clients over time. That’s the focus for each of our lines of business as they come in every day. When we talk about expense discipline and we talk about expense control, it’s with a view of how do we drive operating leverage? How do we make sure that the revenue is growing faster than the expenses, thereby creating the operating leverage that we need to keep driving pre-tax, pre-provision net revenue?

A lot of the things that we talked about earlier around, for example, technology, digital, AI, another tool in the digital use case toolbox, all of these things are aimed at expense discipline and expense control. It’s not the context of we have to cut expense. We have to invest in the platform every year. We’re looking for efficiencies to make sure that as we’re growing organically faster than GDP by taking market share, we should be growing the expense base at GDP minus, recognizing that there are efficiencies we can gain from things like digital, from things like AI in the future. When it comes to things like operational excellence, we’ve talked about this at this event in years prior.

Operational excellence to us is a firm-led series of, I suppose you could say, initiatives in a broader strategy, this idea of if we’re a collection of processes, how do we run those processes better each year? How do we run them in a way that reduces risk? How do we run them in a way that improves the client experience? How do we run them in a way that holds expense down or creates efficiency? Digital is a great example. When we do it in such a way that we have fewer visits in the financial center in terms of transactional visits, that’s probably good for the clients in terms of client satisfaction. It’s probably good for expense. When we do it where we’re removing paper, that’s very good for expense. There are a variety of things that we can do that manage to do all of those things.

They’re helping on the revenue side. They’re helping with employee satisfaction. They’re helping with client experience. They’re also helping to hold the expense base in a place that we want to see it. That formula has worked well for us over the course of the past 10 years. It’s part of how we think about responsible growth on an ongoing basis.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: That’s super clear. Thanks. Now, we’ve heard a lot about the opportunities that Stablecoin presents. What’s your view on that? How are you sort of managing the changing payments landscape?

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: We’ve yet to see a significant, ubiquitous employment of Stablecoin at this point because it’s only recently that we’ve got more clarity around the legislative side. I think what’s very clear to us is now that we have more clarity, it allows us to develop Stablecoin for our clients either on our own or in working with the industry towards something that makes sense for clients, very similar to the way that we work on Zelle, for example. That part, in some ways, is the easier part of the equation. The harder part is seeing whether or not the Stablecoin is actually picked up in terms of user acceptance. Because when it comes to one more payments method, a Stablecoin is going to be competing with our clients’ attention with things like cash, credit card, debit card, ACH, wire, checks. There are a lot of things in the U.S.

and in Europe where they’re pretty developed payment rails that are pretty easy for clients. They’re very cheap for clients. They move things very quickly. It may be harder to see Stablecoin in an environment like that. It might be a little more attractive in an area like small dollar volume cross-border payments where there’s perhaps a little more friction. We’ll need to see how user acceptance develops over time. Stablecoin’s got some pretty tough competitors.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: Now, another important point, I think, which is a debate also for European banks, but it is for global banks, really. It affects the sort of level playing field around capital. We’ve talked about the IT and the gap that exists between European banks and U.S. banks. Another focus point, of course, is capital and regulation. We take the opportunity to ask you sort of what’s the latest you’ve heard in regard to the U.S. regulatory proposal and what impact would you expect that this will have on Bank of America?

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: The first thing as it relates to capital has really been around the supplemental leverage ratio. There’s a notice of proposed rulemaking out there in terms of what that might look like. It would give banks some relief in the U.S. We’re not bound by the supplemental leverage ratio at the bank, so any changes there, we certainly welcome the way this is developing. It would allow us a little more flexibility on an ongoing basis, but it’s less of an immediate concern for Bank of America. More broadly, the question relating to capital, I think we’re encouraged by the fact that the Vice Chair’s supervision brought everybody together in D.C. to talk about the capital environment holistically, not just supplemental leverage ratio, but also the stress capital buffer, where already the Fed is talking about a variety of different things that could be interesting there in terms of changes.

The GSIB ratio, where the U.S., I think everybody here knows, the U.S. gold plates GSIB in a different way than the rest of the world, and then obviously Basel III final. We’re eager to help contribute to conversations in that area. We’re encouraged by the Capital Conference. There’s work to do in each of those three areas. We’re really, I think, encouraged by the fact that the Vice Chair brought everybody together to talk about those. These are complicated issues, and they impact not just the banks’ capital bases, but they impact real lending in the economy. They impact the way that we’re able to support clients and communities. It’s appropriate that people take time and make sure that we’re balancing safety and soundness and promotion of growth in the economy and lifting communities.

That takes a little while, and it’s hard then, in the meantime, to react until we see a set of final rules. This interplay between each of the big three: stress capital buffer, Basel III final, GSIB, is very important, I think, for the big banks in the U.S.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: Thanks for that. That’s super useful color. Now, obviously, capital requirements are set to decline. How are you thinking about managing the bank’s excess capital as a result?

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: We’re fortunate to be in a position where we have significant excess capital at this point relative to regulatory minimums. There was a period of time where we built capital thinking that actually capital ratios might go up in the U.S. We find ourselves in a position where we’ve got a very strong capital base, and that affords us a lot of flexibility. For those who follow Bank of America, you’ll have seen that we have increased our share buyback over time while also increasing the pace at which we can support loan creation. We haven’t had to choose. We’ve been able to do both things. The priorities for our bank remain the same. Number one, we always want to support our clients, and we want to support the future growth of the company. That’s always going to be the highest priority for our capital base.

Number two, we need to make sure that we have enough to comfortably hurdle our regulatory minimums, and we want to be in a position to raise our dividend every year. Last year, we raised our dividend another 7% or 8%. That’s what we’re trying to do each year. Number three, with anything in terms of excess capital, we want to be in a position to return that to shareholders over time. Last quarter, we bought back, I think it was $5.25 billion. That’s up very significantly from a year or two ago where we were buying back $1 billion or $2 billion or $3 billion. We’ve continued to help support the loan growth and buy back more shares. We are in a position right now where we continue to have excess capital. We’re probably not going to have to choose either/or for a while here.

The question becomes, when do we have the kind of clarity that allows us to know we’ve now got a final resolution around stress capital buffer or a final resolution around GSIB and a final resolution around Basel III final that allows us the clarity to operate and decide exactly where we want to be on an ongoing basis. We have plenty of time. We have a lot of flexibility, a lot of options, and we like our position right now.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: That’s a good problem to have. We’ve covered, of course, a lot of ground around the outlook for the business and investments. Is there anything more near-term for Q3 that you’d like to talk about, like in AI, expenses, and capital markets activity, how those are evolving more near-term?

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: I think, you know, again, for those of you who follow our bank, we’ve talked about the fact this year that when we execute according to our plan, we thought at the beginning of the year, we might be able to lift net interest income by 6% to 7%. If we did that, we would get to the end of the year right around $15.5 to $15.7 billion. We remain on track for that, and we felt good about that at the end of Q2. Here we are, we’re most of the way through Q3. We feel like we’re still on track to deliver that. If and when we do, that will be a record for NII for the company. That would be nice. In Q3, you know, we feel like we’re going to end up somewhere around $15.2 billion.

If we can do better, we will, but we feel like that sort of medium point between where we were at $14.8 going towards our guidance at the end of the year, somewhere around $15.2, we continue to feel good about that. In terms of the capital markets, global markets is the big, you know, sales and trading engine. Sales and trading feels like right now we’re in a pretty good environment. We think that business ought to have its 14th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth, probably around mid-single digits, just to give some people some idea. It remains a very constructive environment for sales and trading because, as many of you in this room will know as investors, this is the sort of environment where people are continuing to reposition based on all the various things going on in the world.

It feels to us like we’re on track for a 14th consecutive quarter there. We’re having a pretty good investment banking quarter. Investment banking fees are probably up 15% or so. We feel like we’re in line, maybe slightly better. We feel like the investment banking environment, maybe it’s 10% to 15% overall. We should do pretty well relative to the rest of the street because we feel like we’re having a pretty good investment banking quarter again.

Antonio, Host, Bank of America: That’s great. Now, Alastair, will you stay with us for a few meetings today in London so you’ll get a chance to sort of ask any additional questions in the group meetings? I want to thank Alastair very much for joining us once again for our 30-year anniversary conference. Thanks for all of you to join in and listen.

Alastair Borthwick, Bank of America: Thank you, Antonio. Thank you.

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