Sept. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Wells Fargo & Co., the nation’s largest home lender, may be reaching a peak for losses tied to troubled loans, President and Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf said.

“There are some indications that we’re seeing a top in some of our problem loan areas,” Stumpf said in an interview from Wells Fargo’s San Francisco headquarters broadcast today on Bloomberg Television. In some businesses, the bank is seeing “very high levels of loss, but they look like they’re flattening out.”

Assets no longer collecting interest climbed 45 percent to $18.3 billion as of June 30 from the first quarter, the lender said on July 22. Charge-offs widened to 2.11 percent of loans in the second quarter from 1.54 percent in the first quarter.

Stumpf has told investors that he must increase profit before taxes and provisions at a pace to offset credit losses. The more he can do that, the quicker Wells Fargo can build the capital it needs to repay $25 billion in government funding under last year’s Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Loss rates on auto loans are stabilizing, Stumpf said, and “some buckets” of home-equity lines of credit “seem to be maybe not getting worse than they were before.”

Stumpf also said he expects the gains Wells Fargo made in mortgage servicing to accelerate. While revenue in the bank’s mortgage business was about 60 percent origination and 40 percent servicing in the second quarter, that is moving closer to a 50-50 split.

To contact the reporters on this story: Erik Schatzker in New York at eschatzker@bloomberg.net; Dakin Campbell in San Francisco at dcampbell27@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: September 2, 2009 06:49 EDT