Ameriprise Financial, Inc.

Welcome to the Q4 2025 earnings call. My name is Tina, and I will be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. During the question and answer session, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your touchtone phone. As a reminder, the conference is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Stephanie Raby.

Stephanie, you may begin. Thank you, Operator, and good morning. Welcome to Ameriprise Financial's fourth quarter earnings call. On the call with me today are Jim Cracciolo, Chairman and CEO, and Walter Berman, Chief Financial Officer. Following their remarks, we'd be happy to take your questions. Turning to our earnings presentation materials that are available on our website, on slide two, you will see a discussion of forward-looking statements. Specifically, during the call, you will hear references to various non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe provide insight into the company's operations. Reconciliation of non-GAAP numbers to their respective GAAP numbers can be found in today's materials and on our website at www.ir.ameriprise.com. Some statements that we make on this call may be forward-looking, reflecting management's expectations about future events and overall operating plans and performance. These forward-looking statements speak only as of today's date and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. A sample list of these factors and risks that could cause actual results to be materially different from forward-looking statements can be found in our fourth quarter 2025 earnings release, our 2024 annual report to shareholders, and our 2024 10-K report. We make no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements. On slide three... You see our gap financial results at the top of the page for the fourth quarter. Below that, you see our adjusted operating results, which management believes enhances our understanding of the business by reflecting the underlying performance of our core operations and facilitates a more meaningful trend analysis. Many of the comments that management makes on the call today will focus on adjusted operating results. And with that, I'll turn it over to Jim.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call. I'll begin with an overview of the business and our progress, and then Walter will discuss our financials in more detail. Ameriprise delivered a strong fourth quarter to complete a very good year in 2025, reflecting the strength of our business, effective strategy, and excellent client experience. Looking externally, equity markets performed well in the quarter, supported by resilient U.S. economic growth, and the overall environment remains quite positive. With that backdrop, Ameriprise delivered new all-time records across the board in the fourth quarter. On an adjusted operating basis, revenue grew 10% to $4.9 billion, driven by strong organic client flows and markets. We also had double-digit growth in our earnings, up 10% to over $1 billion, as well as in earnings per share, which increased 16% to $10.83. And Ameriprise return on equity was again excellent, increasing over 100 basis points to 53.2%, our highest ever. We completed 2025 with assets on the management, administration, and advisement at $1.7 trillion, up 11%, and another new high. Across the firm, we're leveraging the strength of our businesses and capabilities to deliver good results while investing in organic growth opportunities and innovation. Supported by a strong financial foundation, we're making key investments across the company in top-tier technology, digital capabilities, AI, and cloud infrastructure. We're also bringing out new product solutions in each of our businesses to further serve more investor needs and deepen relationships. These investments help further enhance our client and advisor experience and drive organic growth. These investments extend to advice and wealth management, where our leading advisor value proposition and integrated technology continue to drive excellent client satisfaction as well as strong organic flows and advisor productivity. Total client assets reached a new record of $1.2 trillion at year end, up 13% from our focused action to drive flows as well as from positive markets. Total client inflows were $13.3 billion, up 18%, which is one of our best quarters for flows. These results reflect the strength of our legacy flows from our advisor engagement, client acquisition in the target market, and our recruiting success. Our wrap business also grew strongly. Assets increased 17% to $670 billion with meaningful growth and flows. This included good flow momentum in our new signature Wealth Unified Management account, which we launched at mid-year in 2025. It's been one of our most successful rollouts, and early advisor feedback has been very positive. We continue to build on these early results as more advisors integrate the new platform into their practices. Advisors are seeing real value in the enhanced personalization, automated portfolio monitoring, rebalancing, reporting, and centralized trading. We're also adding new capabilities and strategies to our Signature Wealth platform as we move forward. In addition, we continue to have good transaction activity up 5% year over year. Our bank products complement the business nicely with assets up to $25.3 billion. We're rolling out and testing new offerings, including expanding our lending book, where we saw good growth led by pledge and nice initial uptake in mortgage loans. After our initial launch of HELOX, we're seeing strong early interest. We just launched checking accounts, which rounds out our complete bank offering and will be important to enable greater uptake of savings and lending products in advisor practices going forward. Advisor productivity continues to increase nicely, as I mentioned, up 8% to $1.1 million per advisor in the quarter. Our proven advisor value proposition helps them achieve this level of productivity. This includes our interconnected systems of capabilities anchored by our strong digital advice, CRM and extensive practice management resources. As we shared, we're also innovating with AI and automation to help advisors identify meaningful client insights and growth opportunities while reducing time consuming tasks. Also key, our integrated capabilities drive strong system reliability, efficiency, and resiliency. Our best-in-class service is another competitive advantage. This year, J.D. Power recognized Ameriprise for the seventh consecutive time for delivering an outstanding customer service experience to advisors for our phone support. And for the second straight year, we earned J.D. Power's certification for our client phone support as well, which is terrific. We're known for our commitment to client and advisor success. Experienced advisors continue to choose Ameriprise. We've added 91 quality advisors, building on a strong momentum from the third quarter. And the pipeline for experienced recruits across channels remains attractive. And by the way, our total advisor count is up 1% year over year. Ameriprise Advisors continue to stand out industry-wide for exceptional service, growth, and high-quality practices. We had a record 478 teams named to the Forbes Best in State Wealth Management Team's 2025 ranking. Earlier this month, I attended the AWM Field Leader Kickoff for the year. Our AWM team is made up of a strong cadre of field leaders who help advisors leverage our value proposition and client experience to build even more successful practices. Our retirement and protection solutions are also contributing nicely to transactional activity, organic growth, and deeper share of wallet. Structured annuity sales were up 7% in the quarter, and life and health sales grew 14%, with most of the focus on accumulation-focused variable universal life. Our overall portfolio continues to perform very well. Here again, we're investing in product enhancements and leveraging AI and digital to increase efficiencies in underwriting and overall service. In asset management, we're delivering meaningful financial results as we leverage our global capabilities for greater efficiency and future growth. Assets under management and advisement reach $721 billion for the quarter, up 6%. We had continued strong investment performance with 103 4- and 5-star Morningstar-rated funds at year-end. Nearly 70% of our funds globally were above the medium for the one-year timeframe on an asset-weighted basis and stronger for long-term timeframes, with 80% of our funds above the medium for 3- and 10-year performance periods. Regarding flows, we generated $1.9 billion in net inflows in the quarter, which included higher reinvested dividends. Overall, we had net inflows in model delivery strategies and improvement in institutional growth sales. We continue to invest to further broaden out our investment capabilities to meet evolving market demand. That includes expanding our active ETF lineup and further building out our SMA model delivery and alternatives offerings. During the quarter, we launched six new active, managed, and research-enhanced ETFs in the U.S., along with our initial launch of ETFs in EMEA. Across asset management, we're leveraging our global footprint to generate additional operational efficiencies. Our back-office transformation and data foundation work will continue to increase the cost effectiveness of data delivery and help ensure our solutions are scalable. Reflecting on Ameriprise overall, our business and financial results remain strong with record revenue, earnings, EPS, and return on equity, as well as a differentiated level of capital return. As you saw, we increased our capital return to more than 100% in the quarter. We were opportunistic with a discount in the share price. And the size of the buyback brought our total capital return for the year to nearly 90%, one of our highest levels in recent years. We've also consistently maintained a healthy and resilient balance sheet. 2025 was another terrific year for us, our 20th as a public company. In just two decades, we've established Ameriprise as a premier brand built on helping millions of clients achieve their most important financial goals. And we're continually innovated and transformed how we go to market, earning best-in-class recognition and results across a wide range of environments. Equally important, we earned a highly respected reputation over the years for who we are and how we operate the firm. In fact, Ameriprise was just named one of America's most iconic companies by time. We rank among the top 50 across industries and we're also the leading diversified financial services firm on the list. And this award adds to many others. We were again included on the Wall Street Journal's list of best managed companies for 2025 and America's most responsible companies' 2026 list from Newsweek, as well as Ameriprise as one of America's best companies' 2026, according to Forbes. In closing, we feel very good about the business and how we're positioned as we look to 2026. We're executing our clear, consistent strategy and driving innovation and using operating leverage where we see opportunity. With that, Walter will discuss the numbers in more detail, and then we'll take your questions.