KeyCorp

Thank you, everyone, for standing by. Welcome to the 2024 First Quarter Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press 1, then 0 on your telephone keypad. You will hear an acknowledgement tone that your line has been placed in queue. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brian Monee, Key Corp's Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to thank you for joining Key Corp's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. I am here with Chris Borman, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Clark Kyatt, our Chief Financial Officer. As usual, we will reference our earnings presentation slides, which can be found in the Investor Relations section of the key.com website. In the back of the presentation, you will find our statement on forward-looking disclosures and certain financial measures, including non-GAAP measures. This covers our earnings materials as well as remarks made on this morning's call. Actual results may differ materially from forward-looking statements, and those statements speak only as of today, April 18, 2024, and will not be updated. With that, I will turn it over to Chris.

Thank you, Brian. I'm on slide two. This morning we reported earnings of $183 million, or 20 cents per share, which incorporates 2 cents per share impact from an additional FDIC special assessment charge this quarter. I would characterize our underlying results as solid. Revenue was essentially flat sequentially despite expected first quarter seasonality as investment banking reported its best first quarter result in our company's history. Fees were up 6% against both the prior quarter and prior year. Retail relationship households were up 2.5% year over year, and commercial clients were up 6%. Customer deposits were up 2% year over year and essentially flat on a sequential basis. We continued to reduce our reliance on higher cost brokered CDs and wholesale borrowings. Expenses remained well controlled at $1.1 billion. Non-performing assets and credit losses remained low. Additionally, we continued to build our credit reserves this quarter. Our capital ratios, including tangible common ratios, were flat to improved across the board, despite the impact of higher interest rates on the fair value of our available for sale securities. We ended the quarter with a common equity Tier 1 ratio of 10.3%, up 120 basis points from a year ago, representing our fastest rate of organic capital build over a 12-month period since the industry began tracking this metric. I'm also encouraged by the momentum we are seeing in areas where we have a differentiated advantage and have been investing. While only one quarter, I am encouraged by the strong broad-based results we saw in our capital markets business across M&A, equity, and debt capital markets, and our commercial mortgage group. We also are seeing broad momentum across our targeted industry verticals, such as healthcare, power, industrials, and renewables. While I would expect to see some pullback in fees in the second quarter, Our pipelines are up from a year ago and from year-end levels. Market conditions are clearly starting to normalize. We also continue to raise significant capital on behalf of our clients. In the first quarter, we raised over $22 billion, holding 12% on our balance sheet and distributing the balance in the capital markets. To this end, last month we announced a strategic forward flow origination partnership with Blackstone. This partnership will allow us to accelerate growth and manage credit concentration risk within our differentiated commercial platform. It is another example of how we are delivering best-in-class execution for our clients. This deal also further validates our distinctive underwrite to distribute model in that one of the largest private credit providers has recognized our platform for its ability to originate, soundly underwrite, and service at volume with our high-quality clients. As markets evolve, we will continue to evaluate the potential for arrangements with other leading providers, like this one. which allow us to offer a distinctive experience for our clients while concurrently managing our risk. Turning to wealth management, we recently launched Key Private Client, where we have the opportunity to penetrate a large growing mass affluent segment within our consumer base and with our commercial business owners. In this mass affluent segment, we enrolled another 6,000 households in this quarter, and doubled production volumes compared to last year this new business has added over 2 billion of household assets in just over a year overall our assets under management have now surpassed 57 billion dollars before i turn it over to clark i want to touch briefly on credit quality as i mentioned earlier our non-performing loans net credit losses and delinquencies remain at low historical standards with credit losses below our full year 2024 and through the cycle targets. In the first quarter, we saw an uptick in criticized loans, which was driven by our belief, which by the way, we have held for some time now, that we will remain in a higher for longer environment as inflation remains sticky. With that in mind, this quarter we performed a deep dive on over 90% of our clients that we believe would be most impacted under a hire for longer scenario, encompassing over 80% of our non-investment grade commercial exposures. Performing this deep dive confirmed our view that there will be low loss content in these loans. Approximately 96% of accruing criticized commercial loans are current, and 93% are current when also including non-accruing loans. Over 85% of our criticized real estate loans have recourse. I continue to feel very good about our ability to hit our net charge-off guidance of 30 to 40 basis points this year. In summary, While it's still early in the year, we are on pace to deliver against the commitments that we detailed at the beginning of this year. Key is back to playing offense, and I remain excited about our future and our ability to generate sound profitable growth moving forward. I also want to take a moment to thank our teammates for their continued commitment to our clients and our communities. I am very proud to share with you that for the 11th consecutive exam cycle, Since the passage of the regulation in 1977, Key received an outstanding rating from the OCC for meeting or exceeding the terms of the Community Reinvestment Act. This achievement reflects our collective commitment to our purpose and an enormous amount of hard work and dedication from every teammate at Key. With that, I'll turn it over to Clark to provide more details on the results of the quarter.