PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (The)

Greetings and welcome to the PNC Financial Services Group fourth quarter 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, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Brian Gill, Executive Vice President and Director of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Well, good morning, and 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 January 16th, 2025, 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 solid fourth quarter and a very strong year. For the full year 2024, we earned $6 billion or $13.74 per share. We executed well against our priorities and continue to gain momentum across our franchise. While loan demand remained soft throughout the year, our net interest income benefited meaningfully from fixed asset repricing, and we expect to see further tailwinds from repricing over the next couple of years. We grew fee income by 6%, and we achieved record revenue. At the same time, we maintained our expense discipline, allowing us to deliver positive operating leverage, which is an aside, and you will recall that looked pretty much out of reach at the start of 2024. Finally, we grew capital and increased our tangible book value per share by 12% compared to last year, while returning $3 billion of capital to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. Now, Rob's going to walk through the financial results in more detail, but I wanted to take just a moment to reflect on the strength of PNC's positioning as we head into 2025. Our businesses are performing exceptionally well, and we continue to see positive momentum, particularly in our expansion markets. CNIB had record revenue in non-interest income in 2024 as new client growth continued at an accelerated rate. Our sales in our expansion markets grew 26%, with over 60% of those sales being non-credit. In retail banking, consumer DDA growth in 2024 was the highest it's been in eight years, and we produced record brokerage revenue at P&C Investments. And the asset management group delivered its strongest level of positive net flows in years. Going forward, we're investing in new products and an expanded footprint to further accelerate our momentum. We will soon be rolling out our new online banking platform. We are doubling our new branch builds to gain scale on some of the fastest growing regions in the country. And on the corporate side, we recently announced our entry into the Salt Lake City market. As Rob will highlight, our forward guidance solidly points to record NII in 2025, as well as strong fee income growth across our franchise. This combined with our ongoing expense discipline positions us to deliver meaningful, positive operating leverage this year. But there are a lot of uncertainties regarding the outlook for the economy, interest rates, the regulatory environment, We believe that PNC's balance sheet is well positioned. We are adequately reserved for our credit risk, and our strong capital levels provide substantial flexibility as we enter 2025. Before wrapping up, I'd like to spend just a moment to express our sympathies to those who have been impacted by the wildfires. PNC is, of course, committed to supporting our customers, our communities, and importantly, the more than 200 employees we have in the affected areas. I also want to thank our employees for everything they do for our company and our customers. We accomplished a significant amount in 2024, and we're entering 2025 with a lot of momentum. I've never been more excited about the opportunities in front of us to continue to grow our franchise and to deliver for our stakeholders. And with that, I'll turn it over to Rob to take you through the numbers.