Citizens Financial Group, Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Citizens Financial Group third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Alan, and I'll be your operator today. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a brief question and answer session. As a reminder, this event is being recorded. Now I'll turn the call over to Kristen Silberberg, Executive Vice President, Investor Relations. Kristen, you may begin.

Thank you Alan. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us. First this morning our Chairman and CEO Bruce Van Saun and CFO John Woods will provide an overview of our third quarter results. Brendan Coughlin, Head of Consumer Banking and Don McCree, Head of Commercial Banking are also here to provide additional colour. We will be referencing our third quarter earnings presentation located on our investor relations website. After the presentation we will be happy to take questions. Our comments today will include forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause our results to differ materially from expectations. These are outlined for your review on page two of the presentation. We also reference non-GAAP financial measures, so it's important to review our GAAP results on page three of the presentation and the reconciliations in the appendix. With that, I will hand over to Bruce.

Thanks, Kristen. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining our call today. We delivered another very strong quarterly result in Q3. Rising rates positively impacted our net interest income and net interest margin. Fees and expenses were broadly stable and credit performance remains excellent. We grew average loans 2% and deposits 1% as our liquidity and funding position remains strong and our set one ratio of 9.8% is above the midpoint of our 9.5 to 10% target range. Our TCE to total asset ratio sits at 6.1%. Performance metrics include a net interest margin of 3.25, and that's up 21 basis points. We had positive sequential operating leverage of 6%. We had hit an efficiency ratio below 55%, and our return on tangible common equity was around 18%. We built our credit reserves by $49 million with our ACL at 1.41%, and that's above the 1.3% day one seasonal reserve adjusted for the investor's acquisition. Beyond these impressive financial results, we've continued to make good progress in executing our strategic initiatives. In consumer, we launched Citizens Private Client, which will help drive wealth opportunities. We migrated our national digital bank to a modern cloud-based platform. We continue to grow share with Citizens Pay, and we're executing well on our expansion into New York City metro region. In commercial, we've successfully integrated recent acquisitions like JMP and DH Capital into our coverage and product model. Our M&A pipelines are at record levels and our geographic and industry vertical build out is delivering strong results in terms of market share gains. Enterprise-wide, we're successfully wrapping up our top seven program while building out top eight. Stay tuned on that. Our next gen tech program has really been the standout initiative that has been a game changer for us. These programs demonstrate our mindset of continuous improvement, finding ways to run the bank more efficiently so we can deliver positive operating leverage and self-fund investments for our future. We're also doing some interesting things in ESG, such as developing a carbon offset program for clients, as well as investing in a virtual power agreement that delivers clean energy. And we have more interesting innovation in the pipeline. As we look forward to Q4 in 2023, we feel that we are well positioned to deliver strong results and to keep growing and enhancing our franchise value. We are well prepared for challenges that may materialize in the macro environment with a really strong balance sheet position and highly prudent credit risk appetite. But we also plan to keep playing disciplined offense with continuing investments in our growth initiatives. The current environment gives us a great opportunity to prove our mettle and deliver responsible, sustainable growth. One aspect that we emphasize in today's presentation is our confidence in the quality of our deposit base that we've been able to transform over time. We've had good deposit stability over the past couple of quarters as some peers are seeing outflows and our deposit betas are back in line with the pack. We're seeing very strong loan betas and expect these to remain above deposit betas through 2024, assuming the current forward curve. As a result, our NIM will continue to rise more gradually as time goes on. We've also layered in sizable net interest rate hedges to protect NIM and ROTCE through 2024 if the Fed reverses and brings down short-term rates. Moving off of the zero bound for short rates has unlocked the value of our deposit franchise and significantly benefited our ROTCE. With a clearer macro outlook and less market volatility, we feel the value of our commercial bank build-out will also manifest, benefiting further our ROTCE. So very exciting time for citizens. And with that, I'll stop and turn it over to John to cover the financials in more detail.