Credit card receivables & purchase volume YoY growth: 3Q21

Earnings call commentary

Growth

• Credit sales come in at $7.4 billion or up 20% year-over-year and flat sequentially. Average receivables were up slightly sequentially.” – Alliance Data Systems​
• “A key driver of performance is demand for premium fee-based products – new accounts acquired on these products more than doubled YoY and represent 65% of the new accounts acquired in Q3.”– American Express​
• “On credit cards, we crossed back over 1 million in new card production. That’s the same level as we were pre-pandemic.”– Bank of America​
• “Card marketing is the biggest driver of total company marketing trends. We see attractive opportunities to grow our domestic card business. Turning opportunities into growth requires investment. The domestic card business continues to deliver significant value as we invest to build our franchise.” – Capital One​
• “The question for card is whether growth in spend and card outstandings translates to revolve. Looking at data of our customers that have, card, deposit accounts and are likely to revolve, we see faster spend-down of excess deposit balances. That makes us optimistic about the potential going into next year.” – Chase ​
• “What we’re focused on is how we’re reentering into the market. We’re doing that through our Custom Cash Card launch, which is helping drive new acquisitions.” – Citi ​
• “The YoY increase in card receivables was driven by strong sales volume and robust account acquisition. This was mostly offset by high payment rates as household savings and cash flows remain elevated.” – Discover​
• “We saw broad-based purchase volume growth across all five platforms. Home & Auto, Diversified & Value, Digital, and Health & Wellness platforms each experienced double-digit YoY growth.” – Synchrony​

Credit quality

• “We continue to see extremely strong credit performance with card member loans and receivables write-offs and delinquency rates remaining around historical lows.”– American Express​
• “Credit quality metrics for our consumer portfolio show a continued low level of late-stage delinquency loans, driving expectations that card losses could decline yet again in Q4 before leveling off.” – Bank of America​
• “We expect it to take some time for revolving credit card balances to return to pre-pandemic levels given the amount of liquidity in the system. Credit losses and delinquencies remain extraordinarily low.” – Chase ​
• “Purchase sales are up but payment rates are still quite high. We’ve got to see how stimulus and liquidity plays out over time.” – Citi ​
• “Credit performance was strong across all products, as evidenced by the net charge-off rates on card, private student loans and personal loans.” – Discover​
• “The accumulated savings by consumers and lower discretionary spending continue to impact the payment rates during Q3, although we have begun to see signs of moderation in certain cohorts. ” – Synchrony​

Partnership/product

• “We’re deepening our relationship with Amazon, serving as their only credit-card alternative in the BNPL space. We’ll also be embedded as a payment method in Amazon Pay’s digital wallet, available to consumers and merchants using Amazon Pay at checkout in the US” – Affirm​
• “We announced a new partnership with Sezzle that will integrate with Bread’s Fintech payments platform for installment lending on big-ticket purchases.” – Alliance Data Systems​
• “We added TOURNEAU as a new retail-card partner and signed renewals with GameStop and Petland.” – Alliance Data Systems​
• “We negotiated long-term agreements with co-brand partners such as Delta, Hilton and Amazon. We expanded partnerships with digital giants such as PayPal and added a variety of new partners to our ecosystem, including fintechs such as Bill.com and Better, and lifestyle brands such as Equinox.” – American Express​
• “We have built a sizeable credit card portfolio with JetBlue. We are thrilled to have the privilege to continue our strong and collaborative partnership.” – Barclays​
• “We’re proud of our card-product value proposition. But this can be taken up notch with our work around lounges and cxLoyalty.“– Chase​
• “We’ve seen strong growth in our Flex portfolios, as we leverage existing partnerships such as American Airlines. We’ve expanded to new partners such as Amazon in POS lending for our cards customers.” – Citi​
• “Regarding BNPL, the market is not yet mature. At the lower end, there are many customers who are either debit-preferring or do not have access to significant amounts of credit. But I think you’ll continue to see it evolve.“– Discover​
• “We launched two retail health and wellness credit cards. Both the myWalgreens Mastercard and PLCC cards reward customers with savings on future health and wellness purchases.” – Synchrony​

Digital

• “We continue to see strong growth in online and card-not-present spending, which was up 27% versus 2019, even as offline spending fully recovered in the third quarter, demonstrating the lasting effect of the behavioral changes we’ve seen during the pandemic.” – American Express​
• “We continue to see that the acceleration in digital adoption during the pandemic has persisted with active mobile users up 10% year-on-year to almost 45 million.” – Chase ​
• “Our digital strategy is starting to pay dividends. Digital deposits stand at $19 billion, growing 26% YoY. More than two-thirds of digital-deposit balances come from customers outside of our branch footprint.” – Citi​
• “With an online sales metric of 40%, our digital partners have become a larger share of the overall business, but with our more traditional partners we have been instrumental in helping them transform their footprints to be more digital.” – Synchrony​

BNPL

• “We’re watching this product closely and certainly not taking this growth lightly, especially as many of these BNPL providers form new financial relationships with many consumers and merchants.” – Capital One​
• “Even though we have our offerings in the form of My Chase Loan and My Chase Plan, what we’re doing in the consumer business is think about the actual customer need driving growth in BNPL. And how to respond in a strategic, holistic way across all our customers and not narrowly and reactively respond to BNPL. ”– Chase​
• “There’s a component of BNPL that attracts a younger demographic, so Slice, our new program, is good for us, to be honest. We have a rather old portfolio—our average age is in the 50s.” – First National Bank of Omaha​
• “We have our Pay in 4 product available for partners. There is going to be a lot of testing and learning, understanding customer uptake and what the economic equation is back to the partner.” – Synchrony​

Reserves/provision

• “We are holding an appropriate but significant level of reserves. Regarding next year, what’s hard to predict is the uncertainty in the medical and economic environment relative to expected increases in loan growth and delinquencies.”– American Express​
• “Included in this quarter’s provision was reserve release of $407MM which incorporated our continued strength in credit performance and our optimistic macroeconomic environment, and the impact of reclassifying our Gap portfolio loan receivables to held for sale.” –Synchrony

Source: Bank quarterly earnings reports and earnings call transcripts.
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