First Horizon Corporation

Hello everyone and welcome to the First Horizon Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Bruno and I'll be operating your call today. During this presentation, you can register to ask a question by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand over to your host, Natalie Flanders, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Bruno. Good morning. Welcome to our Fourth Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call. Thank you for joining us. Today, our Chairman, President, and CEO, Brian Jordan, and Chief Financial Officer, Hope Demchowski, will provide prepared remarks, and then we'll be happy to take your questions. We're also pleased to have our Chief Credit Officer, Susan Springfield, here to assist us with questions as well. Our remarks today will reference our earnings presentation, which is available on our website at ir.firsthorizon.com. As always, I need to remind you that we will be making forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Therefore, we ask you to review the factors that may cause our results to differ from our expectations on page two of our presentation and in our SEC filing. Additionally, please be aware that our comments will refer to adjusted results, which exclude the impact of notable items. These are non-GAAP measures, so it's important for you to review the GAAP information in our earnings 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 are not obligated to update them. And with that, I'll turn things over to Brian.

Thank you, Natalie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I think what our company and our associates accomplished in 2023 was nothing short of extraordinary, dealing with a significant shift in the banking landscape and the termination of our planned merger. We've detailed some of our highlights on slide five. Despite all the disruption this year, our 2023 pre-provision net revenue was essentially flat to the prior year. We saw the benefit from our asset-sensitive balance sheet, with the margin expanding 32 basis points versus 2022. This offset the decline in revenue from our countercyclical businesses, demonstrating the benefit of our diversified business model. Most of you have heard me say that we manage our company with three top priorities in mind, safety and soundness, profitability, and growth. You saw the benefit of that when our balance sheet was well positioned to weather the crisis of a few banks this spring. This prudent balance sheet management enabled us to better serve our clients and strategically expand market share. We grew both loans and deposits at significantly higher rates than the industry as a whole. supported by our exceptionally strong capital levels. Our deposit growth was kick-started by our second quarter campaign. We raised over $6 billion of new-to-bank customer funds, and we have retained 96% of that money as of year-end. We have long-tenured, deep relationships with our clients, and we're excited to continue to deliver on the promo-to-promise efforts with the clients we acquired in 2023. We have some of the financial highlights of the quarter on slide six. We delivered adjusted EPS of 32 cents per share on pre-provisioned net revenue of $298 million, resulting in a return on tangible common equity of 11.1%. We grew the net interest margin 10 basis points from the third quarter as we improved our asset pricing and balance sheet mix. We anticipate the continued expansion into the first quarter as we successfully normalized pricing on our promotional deposits, reducing our interest-bearing deposit cost by approximately 15 basis points at the end of the quarter. We generated 29 basis points of common equity tier one capital this quarter, bringing us to 11.4% at year end. As I reflect on 2023, I'm incredibly thankful for the dedication of our associates as they continue to deliver value for our clients, communities, and shareholders. With that, I'll hand the call over to Hope to run through our financial results in more detail.