Citigroup, Inc.

Hello, and welcome to Citi's fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. Today's call will be hosted by Jen Landis, head of Citi Investor Relations. We ask that you please hold all questions until the completion of our formal remarks, at which time you'll be given instructions for the question and answer session. Also, as a reminder, this conference is being recorded today. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. Ms. Landis, you may begin.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, and thank you all for joining our fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. I am joined today by our Chief Executive Officer, Jane Fraser, and our Chief Financial Officer, Mark Mason. I'd like to remind you that today's presentation, which is available for download on our website, citygroup.com, may contain forward-looking statements which are based on management's current expectations and are subject to uncertainty and changes in circumstances. Actual results may differ materially from these statements due to a variety of factors, including those described in our earnings materials as well as in our SEC filing. And with that, I'll turn it over to Jane.

Thank you, Jen, and a very good morning to everyone. I'm going to start with a macro backdrop and then work you through our results for the full year. I'll share some thoughts on the progress we're making executing our strategy and then conclude with why we have decided to adjust our 2026 return target. We entered 2025 with strategic clarity and good momentum across all our businesses. From the global macro perspective, economies have done a good job tolerating hikes from central banks, and inflation has clearly been receding. While policies will certainly impact economic activity, whether in the form of tariffs or taxes, 2025 doesn't look that different from 2024. The US remains at the heart of the macro picture. Growth is not only being driven by the higher-end consumer, but also by a strong, innovative corporate sector. China's growth has been slower than expected, but there is still the prospect of further stimulus. Europe continues to underachieve, and many emerging markets have re-emerged as bright spots, a trend which certainly benefits us given our global network and deep presence in countries such as India and throughout the Middle East and ASEAN. I told you 2024 was a critical year, and I am proud of what we accomplished and how our businesses performed. We finished with a very strong fourth quarter, which Mark will detail shortly. For the full year, Our net income was up nearly 40% to $12.7 billion. We exceeded our full-year revenue target with revenues up 5% extra best years. Fee revenue was up 17%, and we saw a smaller impact from Argentina's currency devaluation. We delivered expenses within our guidance and improved our efficiency ratio by 340 bps, whilst increasing investment in our transformation. Our ROTCE grew over 200 bits, albeit from a low level. Our five core businesses each generated positive operating leverage for the full year, which we also achieved at the firm level. Services was up 9% and had another record year, despite the low rate environment, as a result of new mandates and our emphasis on fee growth. We grew share in both TTS and security services. Tapped by our best fourth quarter in a decade, markets was up 6%. The performance of this franchise in a low volatility year shows the benefits of our diversified product mix. Equities was strong throughout and was up 26% in what was a record year for us. Banking was up 32%. as we gained share across all three investment banking products, and we announced an innovative $25 billion private credit partnership with our long-term client, Apollo. Under Viz's leadership, we expect to continue to gain on our competition in 2025 and beyond. 2024 was the turning point for Wealth, as we sharpened our focus on investments, right-sized the expense base, and improved the client experience. Revenue was up 7% for the year, including fee growth of 18%. City gold in Asia were particularly strong, and net new investment asset flows grew a very pleasing 40%. We attracted top talent throughout the year in wealth, most recently bringing in Kate Moore as our CIO and Anne McCosker as our Head of Lending. This business has tremendous potential with both new and existing clients, and we're really leaning into it. USPB revenues were up 6%, driven by borrowing across both card portfolios and by fee growth. We announced a 10-year extension of our co-branded partnership with American Airlines, ensuring that this valuable relationship enters into its fifth decade. With the acquisition of the Barclays portfolio, We will become American Airlines' exclusive partner in 2026, and we expect to deliver more value for our cardholders and higher returns for our shareholders as a result. We grew our tangible book value per share by 4% and ended 2024 with a CET1 ratio of 13.6%, approximately 150 bps above our regulatory capital requirements. After repurchasing $1 billion in common shares during the fourth quarter, we returned almost $7 billion in capital to our common shareholders in 2024. Given how committed we are to returning capital, I am particularly pleased to announce that our board authorized a $20 billion share repurchase program. you can see the very tangible progress we're making in executing the strategy that we laid out at our investor day three years ago. We have materially simplified our firm since then. We exited consumer businesses in nine countries, a near completion of wind-downs in three, and are on track to exit the final two. This includes Banamex, which we legally separated from our institutional business in December. We're now fully focused on getting ready to IPO, with the timing heavily dependent on regulatory approvals and market conditions, of course. To align our structure with our strategy, we went through a significant simplification of our organization, removing management layers and the regional construct. This has accelerated decision-making and made us a better partner to our clients. We have strengthened our culture, by better aligning compensation with our shareholders' interests, enhancing our school cards to ensure we're delivering for clients. We attracted top industry talent throughout our organization, and that includes new leaders around my table for banking, wealth, and technology. We have raised the bar on what we demand from each other and what we expect to deliver to our clients. We have continued to innovate to improve the client experience and our efficiency. We are now live with City Payments Express in 18 countries and have converted 4 million retail bank customers to our simplified banking platform in the U.S. We accelerated our use of AI, arming 30,000 developers with tools to write code, and launched two AI platforms to make 143,000 colleagues more efficient. The investments we're making to modernize our infrastructure, streamline processes, and automate controls are changing how we run the bank. We consolidated our balance sheet reporting to one unified ledger. We implemented a cloud-based solution for risk analytics to better value trading assets. We have closed out three long-standing consent orders. Our capital, liquidity, and reserves are robust. Our focused strategies and for structure and targeted client selection have all reduced our risk profile significantly. We have made considerable progress on our transformation. While there are areas that are more advanced, there are others where we still have a lot more work to do, particularly around data and regulatory reporting, as last summer's regulatory actions reinforced. We have reviewed the entire data program and made changes to its governance and structure, as well as increase the level of investment. As CEO, I want this company set up for long-term success and to ensure that we have enough capacity to invest for that. In terms of expense guidance, therefore, most of the saves from the org simplification and stranded costs will be used to fund the additional investments we need to make this year in both transformation and technology. As a result, We expect our total expenses in 2025 to be slightly below the 2024 level and to deliver another year of positive operating leverage. We expect our elevated expense level to be temporary and for it to keep coming down beyond 2025. However, when we take the required investments into account, we now expect our 2026 ROTCE to to be between 10% and 11%. The 2026 ROTC is a waypoint. It is not a destination. Our intention is to continue to improve returns well above that level, and we are accountable for doing so. We are relentless in our determination to run the bank more efficiently, fulfill cities' potential, and meet the expectations of our shareholders. Before I turn it over to Mark, I'd like to acknowledge the catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles. Many of our clients and several of our colleagues have lost their homes, and we will do whatever we can to help them recover from this devastating event. They and their loved ones are in all of our thoughts at Citi. Now, over to Mark.