Discover Financial Services

Good morning. My name is Chelsea, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the third quarter 2023 Discover Financial Services earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you should need operator assistance, please press star zero. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Eric Wasserstrom, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Chelsea, and welcome to this morning's call. I'll begin on slide two of our earnings presentation, which you can find in the financial section of our investor relations website, investorrelations.discover.com. Our discussion today contains certain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our notices regarding forward-looking statements that appear in our third quarter earnings press release and presentation. Our call today will include remarks from our interim CEO, John Owen, and John Green, our chief financial officer. After we conclude our formal comments, there will be time for a question and answer session. During the Q&A session, you will be permitted to ask one question followed by one follow-up question. After your follow-up question, please return to the queue. Now it's my pleasure to turn the call over to John.

Thank you, Eric, and thanks to our listeners for joining today's call. As I shared a few months ago, I had three priorities in my role as interim CEO. First is to continue delivering a great customer experience at every touchpoint, which we do by providing our customers award-winning service and products. At the heart of this is a team of more than 20,000 employees connected by common values and a shared mission to help people achieve a brighter financial future. My second priority is to advance our culture of compliance. we made significant strides in this area. By now, you've all had the opportunity to review the consent order issued by the FDIC in September. Consistent with the terms of this consent order, we have made meaningful investments in improving our corporate governance and enterprise risk management capabilities and expect to drive further enhancements across the organization in the coming quarters. We have also started a process of engaging with our merchant partners on the card misclassification issue. remain in active dialogue with our regulators on this topic. The resolution of this issue is likely to be complex and anticipate it will take several quarters to fully resolve. Our third priority is to sustain our strong financial performance. In the third quarter, revenue was up 17% year over year, driven by strong asset growth, while credit losses continued to perform in line with expected ranges. In addition, we were off to a strong start with the launch of our cashback debit product. we continue to believe that this product will be an important channel to welcome many new customers into our company. To highlight the Discover experience and support our brand and banking products, we are proud to have just introduced a new national advertising campaign featuring celebrity spokesperson Jennifer Coolidge. As we continue to advance our priorities, we are focused on preserving and enhancing the elements that make Discover a great place to work. Last month, we were ranked among the 2023 Fortune Best Workplaces and financial services and insurance. This accolade builds upon our recognition as one of Fortune 100's best companies to work for. Before handing the call off to John Green, I will briefly comment on the CEO's search. The Board is considering several excellent candidates, both internal and external. Remain confident that we will identify the next outstanding leader for this organization in the coming months. In summary, We continue to target excellence in all parts of our business, driving sustainable, long-term financial performance. I will now hand the call off to John to review our results in more detail.