PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (The)

Greetings and welcome to the PNC Financial Services Group First Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on 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. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, 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 April 15th, 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, PNC had a strong first quarter of 2025. But before we go into the results, I want to spend a second just on the current environment. Obviously, there's been an increased level of volatility due to uncertainty regarding tariffs that has dominated the headlines over the past two weeks, roiling the markets and raising concerns of a potential recession. As you would expect, we continue to monitor and evaluate the situation, communicating with our clients to gauge their understanding of the potential impact on their businesses and daily lives. However, it's still very early, and the fluidity of the news coming out of Washington makes it difficult to narrow the range of potential outcomes for the broader economy at this point. Irrespective of that outcome, we have demonstrated time and again that we will perform well in periods of uncertainty. The foundation of our success has been built upon the strength of our balance sheet, client selection, our interest rate risk positioning, our diversified business mix, leading technology, and our people, and that has not changed. As always, we will continue to focus on the things we can control with an emphasis on providing superior products and services to meet the needs of our customers while executing on the organic growth opportunities in front of us. And we saw that play out this quarter as we grew customers and deepened relationships across our coast-to-coast franchise. We delivered another quarter of strong results, generating net income of $1.5 billion or $3.51 per share. While loan growth remained challenging for the industry, we were pleased to see 3% growth on our spot C&I loans, as well as strong new commitments during the quarter. As expected, total revenue this quarter was primarily impacted by lower day count and seasonality, but expenses were well controlled and our net interest margin expanded. Importantly, we remain on track to deliver positive operating leverage and achieve record NII for the year. Credit quality is strong and we remain well reserved. Rob is going to cover that in some more detail in a few minutes. Finally, we continue to build our capital levels during the quarter while also providing significant shareholder returns through dividends and share repurchases. In summary, we delivered strong results in the quarter and we remain well positioned to deliver on our strategic priorities. Before I turn it over to Rob for more detail on our financial results, I'd like to welcome Mark Weidman, who we appointed to the role of president last week. I'm thrilled Mark has joined us in this role. Mark brings deep experience in financial services that will complement the strength of our existing team. I have known Mark for 20 years, and we were fortunate that the timing was right for him to join our team. I'd also like to thank our employees for everything they do for our company and our customers. And with that, I'll turn it over to Rob to take you through the quarter.