Bank of America Corporation

Good day, everyone, and welcome to today's Bank of America Q1 earnings results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. I will be standing by if you should need any assistance. It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Lee McIntyre.

Good morning. Thank you. Thank you for joining the call to review our first quarter results. Our earnings release documents are available on the investor relations section of the bankofamerica.com website. Those documents include the earnings presentation that we will make reference to during the call. First, our CEO, Brian Moynihan, will make some opening comments before Alistair Borthwick, our CFO, discusses the details of the quarter. Let me just remind you that we may make forward-looking statements and refer to non-GAAP financial measures during the call. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Factors that may cause our actual results to materially differ from expectations are detailed in our earnings materials as well as our SEC filings available on the website. Information about non-GAAP financial measures including reconciliations to U.S. GAAP can also be found in our earnings materials on the website. With that, Brian, let's get started.

Thank you, Lee, and thank all of you, and good morning, and thank you for joining us. Given the recent events, we want to do a couple things with our time today. First, we want to provide a clear picture of how well the fundamentals of the company performed to produce another good quarter of earnings in the first quarter of 2025. So I'm going to talk through a little of those highlights, and I'm going to turn it over to Alistair for details on the quarter and some forward guidance. And second, given the market volatility and the concerns of potential changes in the economy and its outlook, at the end of the quarterly presentation, we're going to give you some facts to set the context about the quality of our credit portfolios, our capital, and our liquidity as we may face periods of economic change and set that in the context of how we fared prior to past periods of economic stress. So let's get going on slide two of the discussion. This morning, Bank of America reported $7.4 billion in net income and 90 cents in EPS for the first quarter of 2025. That's a solid start to 2025 and great work by our team. On a year-over-year basis, we grew revenue by 6%. We grew net income at 11%. We grew earnings per share at 18%. And we delivered more capital back to shareholders, and we reduced shares in the aggregate by 3%. We produced an 89 basis points return on assets and a 14% return on tangible common equity in the first quarter. So let me hit on a few highlights that drove that performance. Net interest income grew 3% year over year and is up from quarter four to the high end of our guidance range we gave you three months ago. We grew deposits for the seventh straight quarter. They reached nearly $2 trillion a quarter end and have now grown 8%. from their mid-2023 low point. We grew commercial loans in nearly every line of business. This is the second quarter in a row they've grown across the board. Holly O'Neill and our consumer team marked the 25th straight quarter of net new checking account growth. We saw annual flows to our consumer investments business of $22 billion over the last 12 months. Our wealth management businesses, led by Eric and Lindsey and Katie Knox in the private bank, Together, I added 7,200 net new households in this quarter and saw net AUM flows of 24 billion in the quarter. Jim DeMar and the team recorded a 12th straight quarter of year-over-year sales and trading revenue growth and achieved a 16 percent return on allocated capital. We generated these results working from a strong balance sheet with over $200 billion in regulatory capital and nearly $1 trillion in liquidity. This allows us to provide strong support and solutions for our clients. Turn to slide three on organic growth. One of the keys to our earnings improvement has been our ability to consistently drive organic growth. Organic growth remains strong across the businesses as highlighted on slide three. I won't go through all the statistics and all the points on the page, but as you can see, the momentum has continued. I noted the continued growth in net new checking, new households, new companies of commercial banking, and growth in our institutional markets business. Our clients continue to see the value in our capabilities in connected businesses as a company. Our digital engagement and sales continue to expand across all our businesses. We saw more than 14 billion logins in 2024. Erica has now surpassed 2.7 billion interactions since its inception. Our Cash Pro app for our commercial customers has continued strong adoption and usage rates, as you can see. Transactions sent through Zelle at Bank of America are not only three times the number of checks written by our Bank of America customers, but also 1.3 times the number of checks written plus the number of cash transactions taking money out of the ATMs. It's also worth noting that digitally enabled sales in our consumer product business across the board reach 65% of total sales. You can see these trends on digital in the slides we show you each quarter on slides 26, 28, and 30 in the appendix, and we commend those to you. As you go to slide four, we showed you some of the highlights in economic activity. We provide some of the current spending data by our consumers at Bank of America. There's a lot that could potentially change given the uncertainty around the tariffs and other policies in the future path of the economy. And our communications with all of you, just as we've done during other stress periods, we want to relay to you those facts, which we think give you some context. But before we do that, our research team, like many research teams led by Candace Browning, does not currently believe we'll see a recession in 2025. However, they've lowered their GDP growth rates for 2025 and continue to see no rate cuts during 2025. but expect as inflation gets under control, you may see them in the future, i.e. in 26. But going more to what our customer data shows, it shows that the money moving across all our consumer spending methods, debit and credit cards, ACH, checks written, Zelle, et cetera, all that aggregate shows it grew about 4.4% pace in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the first quarter of 2024. As you look in the chart and look across it, you can note that consumer spending has been consistently growing year over year, but during last year it actually slowed a bit, especially in the summer, and picked back up in the fall. That resulted in the fourth quarter of 24 over the fourth quarter of 23 being about a 4 percent pace, and that pace has continued. That pace has also continued through the first part of April. We note that some retailers may say that their sales are slower and others are picking up, and it really reflects the change in consumer spending behavior. But in the aggregate, the consumer keeps pushing money into the economy. As we look at our business side and what our business clients are telling you, in the current setting, they remain profitable, liquid, and have strong results. They all look ahead and worry about the same things that you hear reflected in your conversations with them also. So we continue to watch for signs of the environment actually changing, but we thought it would be good to share with you what we're actually seeing on our customer base at this moment. So in summary for Bank of America for the first quarter of 2025, I want to thank the team for another strong quarter. We saw good organic client activity. We enjoyed good growth in revenue and earnings. We continue to invest in the future growth of our company. We managed the risk well. That drove healthy returns for you, our shareholders. and we increase the capital delivered back to our shareholders. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Alistair to talk you through the quarter.