First Citizens BancShares, Inc.

ladies and gentlemen thank you for standing by and welcome to the first citizens bank shares fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call at this time all participants are in listen only mode after the speaker's presentation there will be a question and answer session to ask a question during this session you need to press star 1 on your telephone keypad if you require operator assistance during the program please press star then zero as a reminder today's conference is being recorded I would now like to introduce the host of this conference call, Ms. Deanna Hart, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call. Our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Frank Holding, and Chief Financial Officer, Craig Nix, will provide fourth quarter business and financial updates today. During the call, we will reference our investor presentation, which you can find on our website. Our comments will include forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause our results to differ materially from expectations. We assume no obligation to update such statements. These risks are outlined for you on page three. We will also reference non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures against the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in section five of the presentation. Finally, First Citizens is not responsible for and does not edit nor guarantee the accuracy of earnings transcripts provided by third parties. I will now turn it over to Frank.

Thank you, Deanna, and good morning, everyone. I'm going to focus my comments today on our fourth quarter accomplishments and our 2024 strategic priorities before turning it over to Craig to cover our fourth quarter financial results and outlook for 2024. Let's start on page five. The fourth quarter capped off another exciting and successful year at First Citizen. We kicked off the year one year into our successful merger with CIT and rang out the year combined with SVB, all as we celebrated our 125th year anniversary. I'm really proud of what we accomplished in 2023 and believe we have tremendous opportunity ahead of us. There is an undeniable sense of momentum at First Citizens, and our ambition is to serve our clients in ways never imagined 125 years ago. And we're well positioned for the future thanks to continued focus on our clients and customers and our solid financial results. We delivered another quarter of solid financial results driven by a strong net interest margin and adjusted efficiency ratio of 48%. We're pleased that both our general and commercial bank segments grew loans by double digit percentage points in 2023. Due to strong deposit growth during the year, we improved our liquidity position significantly and ended the year with a strong capital position marked by a CET1 ratio of 13.36%. We recently announced two major additions to our team which will help us to continue to successfully navigate the ever-changing landscape for large financial institutions. First, David Leitch announced was appointed to the board of directors in January. David is a distinguished leader, executive, and attorney, and he brings extensive experience and valuable insight to our board. He retired from Bank of America in 2022, where he served as vice chair from 2021, 2022, and its global general counsel from 2016 to 2021. And we're excited to have David join the board. Second, we announced that Greg Smith will join our executive leadership team as the bank's chief information and operations officer. Greg joins our team from TD Bank Financial Group in Toronto, Canada, where he served as head of transformation and corporate operations. In this leadership role, he set the vision and built key capabilities to drive end-to-end transformational change. He was also responsible for managing corporate projects and technology platforms. In the CIOO role at First Citizens, he will be responsible for the strategic enablement of technology, operations, cyber, and data functions across the enterprise. Greg's extensive background and depth of experience will make him well-suited to take on these important responsibilities, and we're excited to have him on board. Moving to page six, we remain intently focused on our core strategies, and I'll highlight a few of them for 2024. First, we remain focused on our clients and customers. Our combinations with CIT and SVB introduced us to new strategic markets and allow us to deliver expanded products and solutions across our diversified lines of business. We continue to support SVB's innovation economy clients and are focused on capturing synergies with the commercial businesses we acquired from CIT. In the general bank, we have enhanced our deposit campaigns to continue to grow quality core deposits. As we noted last quarter, we continue to expand our wealth business across our geographic footprint and are expanding advisory and self-service options for our clients in that space. Developing our associates and adding talent to support growth remain important priorities. Our integration efforts are centered on ensuring that we retain our culture, which emphasizes a relationship-based approach to banking. a client-centric service delivery model, a long-term focus, and strong risk management. Operational efficiency is very important to us. In addition to disciplined expense management, we are managing our balance sheet to optimize our liquidity and capital positions to support continued profitable growth. Core deposit growth will be a major priority as we continue to increase deposits as a percentage of our total funding mix. We also continue to make regulatory readiness a top strategic priority. We have made meaningful progress on our efforts thus far, but acknowledge we need to continue to refine and mature our processes to support the change in the company's size and complexity. we will be intently focused on these efforts in 2024. Now let's look at page seven. We continue to make good progress on SDB's integration. Our efforts there have been extremely important, helping us retain clients, stabilize deposit balances, and develop strategic priorities for the combined organization. As we discussed on the last call, We developed an integration roadmap and we expect the majority of those efforts to be completed in 2024. Our goal remains to support the acquired lines of business, maintain their unique capabilities, all while improving efficiency and risk management, positioning us for future growth. We acknowledge the headwinds in the innovation economy as well as the increased competition in this space. However, we remain encouraged by the strength and value the SVB franchise brings to its client base and its unwavering commitment to providing relationship-focused service that is unmatched in the innovation ecosystem. To conclude, I am very pleased with our performance in 2023 and excited about growth opportunities as we enter 2024. Despite industry adversity in 2023, we were able to protect and grow customer relationships, stabilize deposits at SVB, grow core deposits and loans in our general and commercial bank segments, and build upon our strong capital and liquidity positions. I'd like to thank all of our associates for making 2023 a successful and positioning the bank for a successful future. With that, I'll turn it over to Craig Nix. Craig?