(Corrects typos in paragraphs 2-3, changes conference date to Tuesday from last week in paragraph 6)
By Nupur Anand
NEW YORK (Reuters) -U.S. consumer loan growth is likely to remain muted for the rest of the year and could potentially slide, Wells Fargo Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo said on Tuesday.
“I wouldn’t expect large growth on the consumer side in any way, potentially even a net decline,” Santomassimo told investors at a conference. He said it was a bit more difficult to predict growth in commercial loans, given uncertainty over U.S. tariff policies.
Santomassimo spoke days after the Federal Reserve released Wells Fargo from a seven-year, $1.95 trillion cap on its assets imposed as a punishment in the wake of the bank’s fake accounts scandal.
Wells Fargo plans to focus on growing most of its businesses, including credit cards, investment banking, wealth management and commercial banking, CEO Charlie Scharf told Reuters in an interview last week.
Industry leaders have praised the banks for its efforts.
“Wells Fargo went through a long, arduous road to get out of it,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said at the same conference on Tuesday. “I think it was grossly unfair for a million different reasons, punishment should fit the crime,” he said, adding that Wells Fargo has been earning good returns and has ambition.
Dimon has also applauded Scharf, once his protege and a former executive at JPMorgan.
Wells Fargo is also seeing signs of improvement in dealmaking, Santomassimo said.
“We are starting to see a little bit of share growth” in investment banking, he said. “We are certainly seeing lots of green shoots in terms of deals that we just wouldn’t have been a part of earlier.”
Dealmaking has slowed this year as U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff and fiscal policies roiled markets, fueling economic uncertainty. Still, bank executives have expressed optimism about a resurgence.
Citigroup’s head of banking, Vis Raghavan, told the same conference that discussions for mergers and acquisitions continue to be “super active.”
(Reporting by Nupur Anand in New York; Editing by Lananh Nguyen, Mark Potter and Leslie Adler)
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