First Horizon Corporation

Good morning and welcome to the First Horizon Corporation First Quarter 2021 earnings call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note, this event is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Alan Taylor, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hey, Jason, and good morning, everybody. We really appreciate you joining us. We know this quarter's been quite a whirlwind. To start things off, our CEO, Brian Jordan, and CFO, BJ Loesch, will provide some opening comments and an overview of our results. And then, of course, we'll be happy to take your questions. Our Chief Credit Officer, Susan Springfield, is also with us today. Our remarks will reference the earnings presentation, which is available at ir.fhmc.com. I also need to remind you that we will make forward-looking statements that are subject to risk and uncertainty, and we ask you to review the factors that may cause our results to differ from our expectations, which you can find on page two of our presentation and in our SEC filing. We also will address adjusted results, which exclude the impact of notable items, and these are non-GAAP measures, so it's important for you to review the GAAP information in our release and on page three of our presentation. And last but not least, our comments reflect our current views, and you should understand that we aren't obligated to update them. With that, I'm going to turn things over to Brian.

Thank you, Ellen. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our talk. I'm really proud of the great progress we've made over the last nine months in integrating our merger of equals, the great momentum I see building in the business. We're off to a strong start in the first quarter of 2021. We demonstrated success. our results reflecting the resiliency of our more diversified business model. While loan demand continued to be muted as clients were still cautious, we were starting to see growth in the loan pipelines and expect demand to pick up some in the back half of the year. Our deposit growth remained strong with inflows from government stimulus and clients continuing to preserve cash. During the quarter, we generated impressive results in our fee income businesses and are gaining traction by capitalizing on additional revenue synergies tied to our merger of equals. I'm also proud of the work we're doing to control the things that we can control, particularly around expenses and deposit pricing. Despite some seasonal headwinds, we reduced our late quarter adjusted expenses driven by our ongoing cost deficit. we achieved annualized merger-related cost savings of $76 million in the quarter. The improving economic backdrop from January to March and our continued prudent risk management largely helped drive a $53 million reserve release. The power of our diversified and counter-cyclical model, our strong risk profile alone, strong risk profile along and the benefits from our MOE helped us deliver a return on tangible common equity of 20%. Excluding the impact of a $53 million reserve release, we generated a return on tangible common equity of over 17.5%. We're making great progress toward our key merger milestones. We've completed early systems conversions, including our mortgage and retail brokerage conversions, with wealth and trust scheduled for the summer. Our core deposit systems conversion is still on track for the early fall of this year. We have and will continue to make strategic investments in new technology that optimizes the client experience and improves productivity. we continue to leverage FinTech capabilities to enhance our product offerings, drive efficiency, and improve the customer experience. Our capital levels remain healthy with a common equity tier one ratio of 9.96%, and we grew our tangible book value per share to $10.30 a quarter end. Given the relatively limited loan demand, we chose to opportunistically deploy capital through sharing purchases and fought back about 4 million shares in the first quarter. So, including dividends, we returned a total of $143 million of capital to our common shareholders. I'm incredibly proud of our efforts to serve our clients, communities, and associates throughout the pandemic with PPP loans, charitable contributions, and by offering our associates increased flexibility and benefits. Our team is also intensely focused on capturing revenue synergies across markets and product lines, leveraging our expanded suite of products, services, and expertise, all instrumental in retaining and growing our client relationships. We are increasingly optimistic about the economic recovery as we've seen improved rollout of the vaccine in our markets, which is helping accelerate reopening. We are also mindful of the fact that the past year had a number of unexpected turns and that the path forward is unlikely to be a straight line with no surprises. So while we're prepared for a recovery in this year, we also are prepared for the unexpected. We remain confident that the strength of our highly attractive franchise, more diversified business model, and benefits of the merger of equal position us well to deliver top quartile returns over the medium term. With that, I'll hand it over to BJ for some comments.