Citizens Financial Group, Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Citizens Financial Group Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. My name is Alan, and I'll be your operator today. Currently, all participants are on 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.

Thank you Alan, good morning everyone and thank you for joining us. First this morning our Chairman and CEO Bruce Van Saan 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'll 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 outlines 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. And with that, I will hand over to Bruce. Thanks, Kristen. Good morning, everyone.

Thanks for joining our call today. We continue to execute well through an uncertain environment. We've made good progress on our strategic initiatives. Our balance sheet remains strong across capital, liquidity, funding, and loan reserves, and our profitability has stabilized and is poised to move higher. Let me start with an update on our initiatives. First, the private bank delivered another terrific quarter. We reached $5.6 billion in deposits, up from $4 billion in Q2, and our assets under management reached $4.1 billion. During the quarter, we opened two new private bank offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we added a new private banking team to cover Southern California. We reached break-even in August and September and expect to be profitable in Q4, with good momentum entering 2025. Next, our commercial bank continues to demonstrate its capacity to serve private capital well. For the quarter, we were number two in the league tables for sponsor leverage loan arrangements, and we remain number one over the past 12 months. We continue to add quality talent to our coverage and our capital markets teams. Our New York City Metro initiative continues to show nice growth. We have 5% year-on-year growth in households and 7% growth in deposits. We look forward to being a key sponsor of the upcoming New York City Marathon as we continue to raise our brand profile in the market. We've executed well on top nine, achieving a Q4 run rate benefit of $135 million, and we're finalizing the details of top 10, which should have a $100 million-plus run rate benefit by end of 2025. Our BSO actions continue to proceed as planned, non-core reduced by a billion dollars in the quarter, and we continue to use the liquidity generated to pay down higher-cost funding like brokered CDs. We continue to execute actions in commercial to exit lending-only relationships, and we're focused on our medium-term plan to reduce CRE exposures. With respect to our balance sheet, our set one ratio is at 10.6%. Adjusting for OCI puts us at 9.2%. We repurchased $325 million in stock during the quarter. Our spot LDR was 80.8%. And our federal home loan bank advances remained low at well under $1 billion. We are not seeing much loan demand, though we remain hopeful this should start to pick up in coming quarters. Our P&L was impacted by the drag from forward starting swaps, which commenced in July, as well as some fees that pushed out to Q4. Nonetheless, we did a good job managing expenses, and credit is performing broadly as expected. Our Q4 guide shows a nice rebound in both NII and fees, leading to positive operating leverage in the quarter. We expect credit to remain broadly stable, and we will continue to repurchase shares. For the full year, we will hit most of our beginning of year guide with the exception of balance sheet volume impacting NII and a modestly higher ACL build. We continue to have strong confidence in our medium-term outlook, and we've added to the materials in the appendix to show more detail on our NIM progression. Lots of uncertainty in the environment remains, but we feel good about our capacity to manage through that and continue to execute on our broad strategy. Our strategy rests on a transformed consumer bank, the best positioned super regional commercial bank, and the aspiration to have the premier bank-owned private bank. We will continue to execute with the financial and operating discipline that you've come to expect from us. With that, let me turn it over to John.