NEW YORK — A steadier mortgage business, higher commercial lending and an increase in deposits lifted Wells Fargo & Co.’s fourth-quarter profit by 20 percent.
The San Francisco-based bank reported Tuesday that the amount of mortgages it wrote in the last three months of 2011 jumped 35 percent compared with the third quarter, to $120 billion.
Overall loan balances rose to $769.6 billion, up 2 percent from a year ago. Wells Fargo, the largest bank in Colorado by deposits, reported a 2 percent increase in commercial loans, to $5.6 billion, reflecting both direct lending and the purchase of portfolios from other lenders.
Most of that growth came from new business, chief financial officer Tim Sloan said in an interview.
“We’ve been seeing good opportunities to grow the commercial loan business for a long time,” he said. “We think there’s a lot of opportunity there, and we think it will continue.”
The bank also benefited as more of its customers paid their bills on time. Wells Fargo wrote off $2.6 billion in loans as uncollectible, including $2.17 billion in consumer loans. That was down from $3.84 billion last year but did represent a slight increase from the third quarter.
Wells Fargo’s net income for the quarter rose to $4.11 billion, or 73 cents a share, compared with $3.41 billion, or 61 cents a share, in the year-ago period.
Revenue slipped 4 percent to $20.61 billion from $21.49 billion a year earlier.
Analysts, on average, were expecting profit of 72 cents a share, on total revenue of $20 billion, according to data provided by FactSet.
