By Nupur Anand
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Wells Fargo’s Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo said consumer loan growth is likely to remain muted for the rest of the year and could potentially slide.
“I wouldn’t expect large growth on the consumer side in any way, potentially even a net decline,” Santomassimo told investors at a conference on Tuesday. It was a bit more difficult to predict growth in commercial loans, given uncertainty over U.S. tariff policies.
The CFO 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.
The lender 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.
It 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 and Mark Potter)
