Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

Good morning. Welcome to the CIBC Q4 Quarterly Results Conference Call. Please be advised that this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Jeff Weist, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Jeff.

Thank you, and good morning. We will begin this morning's presentation with opening remarks from Harry Cullum, marking his first earnings call as our President and Chief Executive Officer, followed by Rob Cedran, our Chief Financial Officer, and Frank Goose, our risk officer. Also on the call today are our group heads, including Raj Panosian, Personal and Business Banking Canada, and Susan Rimmer, Commercial Banking and Wealth Management. I'd like to take a moment to introduce two new members of our executive leadership team, Christian Exshaw from Capital Markets and Kevin Lee from our U.S. region. Christian and Kevin have served with our bank for over 17 years and 23 years, respectively, and bring exceptional leadership, a proven track record of performance, and exemplify our purpose-led and collaborative culture. Please join me in welcoming them to our new group heads. We have a hard stop at 830 and would like to give everyone a chance to participate this morning. So, as usual, we ask that you please limit your questions to one and re-queue in the Q&A. We'll make ourselves available after the call for any follow-ups. As noted on slide one 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. I would also remind listeners that the bank uses non-GAAP financial measures to arrive at adjusted results. Management measures performance on a reported and adjusted basis and considers both to be useful in assessing underlying business performance. With that, I will now turn the call over to Harry.

Thank you, Jeff, and good morning, everyone. I'm excited to be speaking with you today as president and CEO of our bank. I'm energized by the opportunities ahead of us building on our strong performance we've delivered in fiscal 2025. Our performance reflects our momentum and the execution of our client-focused strategy right across our team. When we announced our CEO succession in March of this year, I stepped into the role of Chief Operating Officer and spent the last eight months listening and engaging with our stakeholders. And these discussions have reinforced my confidence that our client relationships are strong Our team is proud, and our bank is being recognized for delivering consistent, strong financial performance. Building on this foundation, we have united our leadership team and employees globally around an evolved ambition to be a client-focused, highly connected, and performance-driven bank, delivering industry-leading shareholder returns. And this ambition is underpinned by the same strategic pillars that have driven our success in and strength through the cycle performance over the past several years. So let me be clear. Our strategy remains consistent, it is working, and we are committed to delivering on what we set out to achieve. Our focus now is to accelerate the execution of our strategy to deliver relative outperformance. And to sustain our momentum, we have aligned our team around three key enablers. One, we'll sharpen our client focus and double down on our connectivity. Two, we'll drive efficiencies and modernization. And three, we'll elevate our focus on human capital by fostering a culture of engagement, development, and accountability. And with that, let me provide an overview of our adjusted results for fiscal 2025. We reported net earnings of $8.5 billion and earnings per share of $8.61, up 17% and 16% respectively from the prior year. Record revenues of $29 billion were up 14%, driven by double-digit revenue growth across each of our businesses. We delivered positive operating leverage and managed our enterprise efficiency ratio lower, both for a third consecutive year. Our top-tier credit quality remained resilient, with an impaired PCL ratio of 33 basis points, delivering at the favorable end of our guidance range. A robust CET1 ratio of 13.3%, Coupled with the earnings power of our bank gave us confidence to announce a 10% increase to our quarterly dividend to common shareholders. We also delivered a return on equity of 14.4%, which was up 70 basis points from the prior year. Our strategy and unique competitive advantages position us well to further our momentum and deliver for our clients. Our first strategic priority is to grow our mass affluent and private wealth franchise. we've cultivated a unique ecosystem to win in this segment, including our distinctive Imperial Service platform, strategic Costco partnership, industry-leading Wood Gundy brand, and our high-quality RIA in the U.S. In Imperial Service, our advisors are passionate about our clients, and they're engaged. Our NPS scores continue to hit all-time highs each quarter. Over the past year, our client-focused distribution channels have supported our market share gains in mutual funds, Asset Center Management in Canada. In 2025, CIBC ranked in the top two of the big six banks for total mutual fund net sales. And we're going to continue to lean into these strengths to generate capital light fee-based revenue, gather high value personal deposits, and drive wealth referrals. These are intentional outcomes directly aligned to our strategy and all accretive to our ROE profile. Our second strategic priority is to grow digital-first personal banking. Our leadership in digital banking is recognized industry-wide. This past quarter, we received the 2025 Mobile Banking Award by Service Corps. Leveraging our award-winning digital capabilities in Canada, we also launched a new digital banking platform for the U.S. market as well. So collectively, these efforts are enabling us to further attract and build new and deeper relationships through data-driven insights and adding value for clients and driving growth. Our third strategic priority is to leverage our connected platform, one of our greatest competitive advantages. Our culture of connectivity enables us to deepen and broaden our client relationships, expand our U.S. franchise and strengthen cross-business referrals. By connecting our commercial banking, wealth management and capital markets teams, we have built a strong internal referral system across our businesses. that results in greater agility and more innovative solutions for our clients. As a result, cross-business referrals in our U.S. commercial and wealth franchise were up 23% from the prior year. A connected capital markets footprint requires a strong presence across North America. In fiscal 2025, revenue and net income in our capital markets U.S. franchise were up 39% and 50% from the prior year, respectively. We expect the rate of growth in U.S. capital markets will continue to outpace Canada and other regions over the medium term. And finally, our fourth strategic priority is to enable, simplify, and protect our bank. Our performance-driven approach requires continually realizing expense and balance sheet efficiencies, modernizing our technology, and scaling our data and AI infrastructure. Building on our history of innovation, we launched CIBC Real-Time Experience, which we call Cortex for short. This is a proprietary AI-enabled client engagement engine that seamlessly integrates with our existing platform and shapes data-driven personalization. In fiscal 2025, we made significant strides in further embedding AI as a core capability across our bank. We are well-positioned to accelerate our AI adoption with a focus on agentic AI and and continued investment in talent and partnerships to continue to transform the banking experience. Looking to the operating environment in the year ahead, ongoing trade negotiations present uncertainty in Canada and abroad. Our outlook assumes a trade deal is extended, an outcome we strongly believe is in the best interest of the North American economy. We expect targeted fiscal policy relief for sectors affected by trade, as well as stimulative monetary policy to support moderate economic growth across our geographies in 2026. We're also supportive of nation building initiatives in key sectors of Canada's economy to help create a more prosperous future. We have deep client relationships in these sectors and we'll be there to support Canada's growth. Regardless of how the environment evolves, we will continue to stay close and proactively engage with our clients. So in closing, we're setting our sights higher to build on the clear momentum we've established. We have built an engine to deliver sustainable relative outperformance and a roadmap to generate profitable growth over the long term. We believe our unwavering client focus, the bench strength of our team, and accelerated execution of our strategy will drive value for our stakeholders through the cycle. It's an exciting time at CIBC, and I'm honored to have the opportunity to lead our team. With that, I'll now turn it over to Rob for a detailed review of our financial results. Over to you, Rob. Thank you, Harry, and good morning, everyone.