Citizens Financial Group, Inc.

conference will begin momentarily. Thank you for your patience. Your conference will begin momentarily. Welcome, and thank you for standing by. All participants will be on a listen-only mode until the question and answer session of today's call. At that time, to ask a question, please press star 1. Today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kristen Silberberg. Thank you. You may begin.

Thanks, Julie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. First this morning, our Chairman and CEO, Bruce Van Saan, and CFOs, Anoy Banerjee, will provide an overview of our fourth quarter and full year results. Brendan Coughlin, our president, and Don McCree, our chair of commercial banking, are also here to provide additional color. We will be referencing our fourth quarter and full year 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 in the presentation. We also reference non-GAAP financial measures, so it's important to review our GAAP results in the presentation and the reconciliations in the appendix. And with that, I will hand it over to Bruce.

Okay, thanks, Kristen, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining our call today. We were pleased to finish the year with another strong quarter. Our financial results were paced by net interest margin expansion of seven basis points, strong wealth and capital markets fees, positive operating leverage of 1.3% sequential and 5.2% year-on-year, favorable credit trends, and a robust balance sheet across capital, liquidity, and funding. We are executing well on our strategic initiatives. Our private bank finished the year with $14.5 billion in deposits, $10 billion in client assets, and $7.2 billion in loans. The business was 7% accretive to pre-tax income in 2025, ahead of our 5% target. Importantly, we managed this business to a 25% ROE for the year. We continue to grow nicely in New York City Metro, and our corporate banking expansion into new geographies, verticals, and sponsors is delivering good results. We made significant progress in running down non-core assets from $6.9 billion at the beginning of the year to $2.5 billion at the end, which included a sale of a student loan portfolio. Our top 10 program hit the mark with 100 million plus run rate benefits in Q4. For the quarter, our EPS was up 8% sequentially and 36% year over year. NII is up 9% year-on-year, as net interest margin is up 20 basis points, and spot loans grew 3%. Fees are up 8% year-on-year, paced by capital markets and wealth. Revision is down $25 million year-on-year, as losses reduced on CRE office and credit in general looks good. We retired 3% of our shares in 2025, and delivered an 80% return of capital to shareholders. For the full year, our EPS of $3.86 was up 19% relative to 2024. We hit most of our line items in the beginning of year guide, which is included on slide 31. Our expenses were up 4.6% versus the guide of 4% given the fee performance beat and associated incentive compensation and our desire to keep building out private bank and wealth. We delivered positive operating leverage of around 1.25% for the year. As we think about 2026, our focus will continue to be strong execution of our strategic initiatives. The biggest new addition will be Reimagine the Bank, which has been launched and is creating real excitement at Citizens. We've included a couple of slides in our presentation on this program. What I'd like to call out is that the deployment of new technologies and approaches under Reimagine the Bank will deliver meaningful enhancements to customer experience. This will drive some real revenue benefits in addition to the targeted expense efficiency improvements from the program. This program has around 50 initiatives at the outset, but we will add to this over time, providing further upside. Looking ahead, the macro environment for 2026 should be favorable. We see solid GDP growth, stable unemployment, and inflation falling by the end of the year. We project two more Fed rate cuts, with the yield curve steepening as the 10-year stays anchored around 4.25%. We anticipate the regulatory environment to stay positive. We will look to take some basic steps on stablecoins, but we do not see a big liftoff and impact in 2026. Notwithstanding several of our peers gauging on acquisitions, our focus for the foreseeable future remains on our attractive organic growth agenda. With respect to the 2026 outlook, we expect very strong revenue performance, controlled expenses, significant positive operating leverage, and lower credit costs. NII growth of 10% to 12% will be paced by strong continuing NIM expansion and solid loan growth led by private bank and CNI. Fees will continue to grow off a strong year in 2025. The capital markets backdrop is highly favorable and citizens is well positioned. Our wealth business is in a great position to grow, both with private bank customers as well as branch-based customers. Expense growth is projected to be comparable to this year as we seek to maintain the growth rate of the private bank. We have been disciplined in ensuring that the private bank achieves sustainable growth with attractive returns. The Reimagine the Bank impact in 2026 will deliver one-time costs of around $50 million versus benefits of $45 million, which are incorporated in this guidance. We do not intend to break out the one-time costs as notables as we've done in the past. Credit costs should continue to improve as the CRE office portfolio continues to be worked out. We continue to see mixed improvements delivering benefits to the charge-off and provision rates over time. We will manage our set one ratio to 10.5% to 10.6% throughout 2026. We envision share repurchases of approximately $700 to $850 million. We also are hopeful that the Fed modeling improvements will meaningfully lower our SCB. We've included some slides on our medium-term outlook and how the drag from our legacy swap portfolio will dissipate with time. We remain confident in our ability to achieve our medium-term 16% to 18% ROTC targets. To sum up, we are feeling very good about our positioning for the future. 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 continue to make steady progress and will continue to execute with the financial and operating discipline that you've come to expect from us. I'd like to end my remarks by thanking our colleagues for rising to the occasion and delivering a great effort in 2025. We know we can count on you again this year. With that, let me turn it over to Anoy for his debut performance. Anoy?