Charticle - Banks and Non-Performing Assets

The banking sector is always worth close scrutiny, to ferret out possible signs of economic emphysema that might be lurking somewhere in the vast number of disclosures that banks make. 

Exhibit A this week: non-performing assets as a percentage of total assets — which, while small in absolute dollar numbers, are rising rather swiftly in relative terms. 


Figure 1, below, tells the tale. We pulled disclosures from the Q4 2024 earnings releases of 167 banks, and found that the percentage of non-performing assets was hovering at a three-year high at the end of last year.



The good news is that non-performing assets are still only 0.5 percent of total assets, a tiny fraction. Then again, that number is up from a low of 0.2 percent at the end of 2022. This means that the relative percentage has more than doubled in two years, which is a steep increase.


Of course, Figure 1 only depicts average numbers derived from a group of 167 banks. The numbers for individual banks might paint very different pictures. 


For example, Wells Fargo ($WFC) reported $7.94 billion of non-performing assets at the end of 2024, which was 0.87 percent of all Wells Fargo loans. Meanwhile, Triumph Financial ($TFIN) reported a non-performing assets ratio of 2.49 percent, down from 2.62 percent in the prior quarter but up from 1.65 percent from the year-earlier period.


Also remember that banks do report plenty of detail about their loan portfolio in the footnotes. For example, Bank of America breaks down its loans by consumer real estate, commercial real estate (which is then broken down into yet more categories), credit card loans, and other loan types. Then BofA reports loans in arrears by 30, 60, and 90 or more days past due, for each category. See Figure 2, below.



You have to squint to see the numbers as reported in the above footnote (it’s titled “Outstanding Loans and Leases and Allowance for Credit Losses,” and most banks will title their footnote something like that), but you can also pull out the numbers using our Export Data Tables feature or searching by XBRL tag. As always, Calcbench offers several ways for you to find and study the data you want.

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