PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (The)

Greetings. Welcome to the PNC Financial Services Group Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Brian Gill, Executive Vice President and Director of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Well, good morning. Welcome to today's conference call for the PNC Financial Services Group. I am Brian Gill, the Director of Investor Relations for PNC. And participating on this call are PNC's Chairman and CEO, Bill Demchek, and Rob Riley, Executive Vice President and CFO. Today's presentation contains forward-looking information. Cautionary statements about this information, as well as reconciliations of non-GAAP measures, are included in today's earnings release materials, as well as our SEC filings and other investor materials. These are all available on our corporate website, pnc.com, under Investor Relations. These statements speak only as of October 15, 2024, and PNC undertakes no obligation to update them. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Bill.

Thank you, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As you've seen, we had a very good third quarter. We executed well and saw strong momentum across our franchise. We generated $1.5 billion in net income worth $3.49 diluted earnings per share. Rob will take you through the details shortly, but I wanted to highlight a few points. First, we generated positive operating leverage for the third consecutive quarter. And as an aside, our strong performance has positioned us to deliver positive operating leverage for the full year of 2024. Inside of the third quarter performance, NII grew 3% as we continue our growth trajectory towards expected record NII in 2025. Our fee income grew 10% with a very strong quarter in capital markets. and we remain disciplined on the expense front. Second, we continue to see strong growth and activity across our franchise. CNIB continues to have great momentum as new loan production and commitments increased this quarter. While overall loan utilization has remained soft, the recent Fed actions to lower interest rates and the expectation of further cuts is likely to spur greater demand as we move ahead. Importantly, we are well positioned to serve our customers when loan growth returns. Within retail, we continue to invest heavily in our branch network to build density in our most attractive growth markets, and we are seeing success. We continue to grow customer households and checking accounts with the highest customer growth being realized in the Southwest markets. AMG is accelerating growth in high opportunity markets and benefiting from favorable equity markets. Third, our overall credit quality remains relatively stable, reflecting our thoughtful approach to managing risk, customer selection, and long-term relationship development, while we expect additional charge-offs in the CRE office segment were adequately reserved. Lastly, we continued to strengthen our capital levels during the quarter, and with the ongoing improvement in AOCI, our tangible book value per share increased 9%. In summary, we delivered strong results in the quarter, and we remain well positioned to continue our momentum. In fact, we're in the middle of our strategic planning process, and I can't recall a time when our organic growth opportunities have ever been more attractive. Now, before I turn it over to Rob for more detail on the financial results and outlook, I'd like to say thank you to our employees for everything that they do for our customers and our company. And with that, I'll turn it over to Rob to take you through the quarter.