Fifth Third Bancorp

Thank you. I'd now like to hand over the call to Matt Kuro. You may now begin the conference.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Fifth Third's first quarter 2024 earnings call. This morning, our Chairman, CEO, and President Tim Spence and CFO Brian Preston will provide an overview of our first quarter results and outlook. Our Chief Credit Officer, Greg Schreck, has also joined for the Q&A portion of the call. Please review the cautionary statements in our materials, which can be found in our earnings release and presentation. These materials contain information regarding the use of non-GAAP measures and reconciliations to the GAAP results, as well as forward-looking statements about Fifth Third's performance. These statements speak only as of April 19, 2024, and Fifth Third undertakes no obligation to update them. Following prepared remarks by Tim and Brian, we will open up the call for questions. With that, let me turn it over to Tim.

Thanks, Matt, and good morning, everyone. At Fifth Third, we believe that great banks distinguish themselves not by how they perform in benign environments, but rather by how they navigate challenging ones. In that sense, the uncertainty we face in the current environment provides us with an opportunity to demonstrate that our focus on stability, profitability, and growth in that order will produce consistently strong, some might even say boring, financial results. This morning, we reported earnings per share of 70 cents, or 76 cents excluding the Visa MasterCard settlement litigation charges and the additional FDIC special assessment. All major income statement captions were in line with or better than the guidance that we provided in our January earnings call. Our adjusted return on equity and return on assets are the highest of all peers who have reported thus far and the most stable when compared to results from the first quarter of 2023. We grew period-end deposits compared to the prior quarter and generated annualized consumer household growth of 3%, punctuated by 7% growth in our southeast markets. Since 2018, we have built more than 100 de novo branches in the southeast. As a portfolio, they are exceeding our expectations, having achieved 112% of their household growth goals and 132% of the deposit goals built into the business cases. Florida is our top performing de novo market with deposit dollars at 195% in gold. J.D. Power also recently named fifth third number one for retail banking customer satisfaction in the Florida market. Importantly, net interest margins improved in the quarter driven by stabilizing deposit costs. With interest bearing deposit costs increasing only one basis point sequentially. Consistent with our guidance last year, the fourth quarter of 2023 marked the low point for NIM And we believe the first quarter of 2024 will mark the low point for NII. While end of period loan balances were down 1% compared to the prior quarter, we saw solid middle market loan growth across our footprint with Tennessee, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Indiana, and Texas achieving the strongest results. Our footprint continues to benefit in an outsized way from federal incentives to bolster investments in domestic manufacturing and energy infrastructure. The Midwest and Southeast have received more investment per capita than other U.S. regions in industries as diverse as multimodal logistics, semiconductors, batteries, and pet food. Treasury management and wealth and asset management were the strongest contributors to fee income, driven by the strategic investments we have been making in both areas. Treasury management revenue grew 11% year over year, driven by our software-enabled managed services payments offerings and NewLine, our embedded payments business. Over one-third of the new treasury management relationships added in the quarter were payments led and had no credit extended. Wealth and asset management fee revenues grew 10% year-over-year, highlighted by strong growth in fifth-third wealth advisors. The RIA platform we launched in 2022, which recently crossed $1 billion in assets under management. Our credit performance remains stable, highlighted by continued strength in our commercial real estate portfolio. We posted another quarter of zero net charge-offs in CRE and have less than 3 million of NPAs in our non-owner-occupied portfolio. While we expect that broader credit trends will continue to normalize, our emphasis on client selection and credit discipline helps to ensure that we have a well-diversified portfolio, not overly concentrated in any asset class, industry, or geography. Expenses are well-controlled. Adjusted for discrete items highlighted in the release, Expenses declined 1% year-over-year driven by savings realized through process automation and our focus on value streams. Expense discipline is what has allowed us to make the long-term investments in our business necessary to generate superior returns and operating leverage through the cycle. Looking forward to the rest of the year, we remain cautious given the wide range of potential economic and geopolitical scenarios that could materialize. Depending on how you read the most recent data, inflation is either sticky at 3%, slowly moving down to 2% or moving back up past 4%. Geopolitical tensions remain elevated and deficit spending, green energy investments, and the domestication of supply chains are all inherently inflationary in the medium term. We believe the best way to manage in uncertain times is to stay liquid, stay neutrally positioned, and stay broadly diversified while investing with the long term in mind. That is what we intend to do. I want to thank our employees. Your hustle, heart, and dedication are why we've been recognized thus far in 2024 as one of the world's most admired companies by Fortune, one of the best brands for customer service by Forbes, and one of the world's most ethical companies by Ethisphere. Thank you for keeping our shareholders, customers, and communities at the center of everything we do. With that, I'll now turn it over to Brian to provide additional details on our first quarter results and our current outlook for 2024. Thanks, Tim.