Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

Please stand by, your meeting is about to begin. Good morning and welcome to the CIBC quarterly financial results call. Please be advised that this call is being recorded. I would like to turn the meeting over to Jeff Weiss, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Jeff.

Thanks very much and good morning, everyone. We will begin this morning with opening remarks from Victor Dodik, our President and Chief Executive Officer, followed by Raj Panosian, our Chief Financial Officer, and Frank Goose, our Chief Risk Officer. Also on the call today are a number of our group heads, including Sean Bieber, US Region, Harry Cullum, Capital Markets and Direct Financial Services, and John Hontalis, Canadian Banking. They are all available to take questions following the prepared remarks. Once again, this quarter we have a hard stop at 8.30. To give everyone an opportunity to participate, please limit your questions to one. As noted on slide two of our investor presentation, Our comments may contain forward-looking statements which involve assumptions and have inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially. With that, I will now turn the call over to Victor.

Thank you, Jeff, and good morning, everyone. On today's call, I'll provide a brief high-level overview of our Q1 results, followed by an update on the progress we're making against key strategic initiatives. Building on the growth momentum we've established over the last few years, we delivered a strong start to this fiscal 2024 year. We continue to successfully navigate to a fluid economic backdrop and execute on our client-centric strategy, supported by the addition of 700,000 net new clients over the last 12 months. Our performance this quarter was a reflection of our diversified business model and a strategy that is working. Turning to our adjusted results in the first quarter, we reported net earnings of $1.8 billion and earnings per share of $1.81. These results were driven by record revenue and prudent expense management, resulting in 8% pre-provision, pre-tax earnings growth and 2% positive operating leverage. Our capital position remains strong, with a CET1 ratio of 13%. This positions us comfortably above regulatory requirements and internal targets, allowing us to continue deploying capital in support of our clients. Our adjusted return on equity was 13.8% during the quarter. Helping our clients realize their ambitions is our North Star. As we've articulated in the past, our strategy is supported by four key priorities that are aligned to long-term market opportunities and competitive advantages that we have built within our bank. Our first strategic priority is to grow our mass affluent franchise in Canada, as well as our private wealth franchise on both sides of the border to drive growth in deposits, investments, and enhanced returns. To enable this, we've made important investments in our unique imperial service and private wealth businesses to elevate our platform capabilities. As an example, we're leveraging our predictive client analytics to deepen relationships, and accelerate high-value client introductions from personal banking to imperial service, resulting in robust inflows of client assets. In Canadian private wealth, financial plans completed by our clients were up 54% year-over-year. This is a great example of how we're leveraging modern financial planning technology and our strong advice capabilities to deliver an improved client experience and build deeper, longer-term relationships. Finally, in the U.S., we're building on our industry-leading CIBC private wealth platform for high-net-worth client segments because during the quarter, we continue to invest in our talent and our physical presence in strategic growth markets, including Boston, South Florida, and San Francisco. Our second priority is to attract and deepen relationships with our personal banking clients by leveraging our CIBC digital capabilities, including through our Simply Financial platform. Improvements in our digital channels meet our clients' evolving needs for self-service capabilities. This quarter, we were the first of our competitors to introduce a new digital banking solution bundle, leveraging AI to streamline the application process for newcomers to Canada into a single digital application. In our Canadian personal banking platform, we're seeing a digital adoption rate of 86%, while improvements in our retail offering have resulted in 38% of product sales originated digitally. In Simply Financial, our direct digital bank, we're also seeing strong momentum with 180,000 net new clients added over the last 12 months. We'll continue to expand our digital channels and capabilities to build our pipeline of clients for future growth. The third priority of our strategy centers on our highly connected platform across the bank to drive referrals, to generate recurring revenue, and to enhance relationship returns. It's something our clients say differentiates us, and it provides us with a competitive advantage in a world where capital requirements and costs continue to increase. On both sides of the border, we have a unique organizational structure that combines commercial banking with wealth management. In Canada, 31% of our commercial clients have a CIBC private wealth relationship. In the US, that number is 17%. While we've been making progress on both sides of the border, there is room to grow. Also core to this strategic priority is our differentiated capital markets business, which delivered record revenues in the first quarter. Global markets client activity was seasonally higher this quarter and is likely to normalize, but we expect a continued recovery in M&A activity and a pickup in corporate bond issuances through the year to provide a tailwind to this business. We're excited about the opportunity ahead as we continue to leverage a connected approach across our bank to deliver a seamless and a holistic client experience to deepen our relationships and enhance returns. Finally, our fourth priority is to enable, simplify and protect our bank to ensure that we maintain operational resilience and improve the efficiency with which we deliver for our clients. Over the past few years, we've made significant technology investments across our businesses to improve client experience, enhance revenue growth, increase productivity and generate positive operating leverage. As we look forward, we are increasingly leveraging AI to drive this strategy and have already unlocked high impact use cases across our bank. This kind of innovation presents tremendous opportunity and we will continue to be responsible as we adopt these tools to create sustainable benefits for all stakeholders. A review of our strategy would not be complete without highlighting our commitment to supporting a more sustainable world through our focus on the environment, social investment in our communities, and delivering on high standards of governance. During the quarter, we were selected by the Government of Canada as the sole structuring advisor on its recently updated Green Bond Framework. We also issued our own €500 million CIBC Green Bond to fund eligible projects aligned with our sustainability strategy. Putting it all together, Our disciplined execution will lead to growth in our client franchise and improved returns for our shareholders as we focus on targeted client segments, advance our digital capabilities, and deepen connectivity, all while maintaining a laser focus on efficiency. And we expect the relative outperformance we've demonstrated to continue, supported by the positive outcomes of our strategy. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Raj. Over to you.