Regions Financial Corporation

Good morning and welcome to the Region Financial Corporation's quarterly earnings call. My name is Shelby and I'll be your operator for today's call. I would like to remind everyone that all participant phone lines have been placed on listen only. At the end of the call, there will be a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. I will now turn the call over to Dana Nolan to begin.

Thank you, Shelby. Welcome to Regions First Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. John Turner will provide some high-level commentary, and David Turner will take you through an overview of the quarter. Earnings-related documents, including forward-looking statements, are available under the Investor Relations section of our website. These disclosures cover our presentation materials, prepared comments, as well as the Q&A segment of today's call. With that, I'll now turn it over to John.

Thank you, Dana, and thank you all for joining our call today. I want to begin the call today by thanking our 19,000 associates who, despite tremendous disruption in their personal and professional lives, continue to come together as a team to support each other, our customers, and communities through the COVID-19 pandemic. The last few weeks have certainly been challenging. However, our top priority is the health and well-being of our associates and customers. In order to do our part to reduce the spread of COVID-19, we were one of the first banks to limit in-person branch activity to our drive-thrus and convert in-office services to appointment only. We also reopened previously closed locations to better serve our customers. Fortunately, due to our footprint, the majority of our branches have drive-thru capabilities, and I'm proud that we've been able to keep 97% of our branches open during this time. Additionally, almost half of our associates are now working remotely. Our teams remain committed to delivering the financial advice and guidance our customers have come to expect from their region's bankers. These changes will help us do so in a way that minimizes the associated health risks. We're offering special financial assistance to support our customers who are experiencing financial hardships related to the pandemic. Through Tuesday, We have processed approximately 17,000 consumer payment deferral requests, including approximately 4,000 related to residential mortgages. In addition, we've processed requests for approximately 12,000 mortgage loans serviced for others. From a business customer perspective, we've processed approximately 4,000 more. Also, as a certified SBA lender, we've been working very hard to help customers through the new Paycheck Protection Program. And I'm proud to say that through yesterday, we have facilitated assistance to our business customers, totaling $2.8 billion. We recognize the importance to our customers and their employees of access to funds through this program. In the span of eight days, we established a cross-functional team to create an end-to-end digital application, built automation around every feasible point in the process, reassigned several hundred staff from other departments, and trained them to accept and process loan applications for small business owners. We're hopeful Congress will appropriate additional funds as significant need remains. Importantly, the bank also continued to lend to customers outside of the stimulus programs. During the quarter, new and renewed loan originations to business customers totaled just over $10 billion. Further, through the bank and our foundation, we've committed approximately $5 million toward consumer and small business recovery efforts. We're also donating advertising time, originally purchased for promoting bank products and services, to food banks across our footprint. These advertisements encourage viewers to financially support food banks as they strive to help those in need. As we navigate through this crisis, our teams will continue to come together to identify innovative and meaningful ways to better connect with and serve our customers. For some time now, we have communicated our goal of generating consistent, sustainable, long-term performance through every economic cycle. All of our plans are built around this concept. Because of our focus and the deliberate steps we have taken, we enter these challenging times from a position of strength. underpinned by robust capital and liquidity. This will allow us to better support our customers as we work together to get through this unprecedented time in our history. We will incur some stress. That's just the result of the economy we're in as we combat this public health crisis. But unlike the crisis the financial services industry experienced a decade ago, we are providing solutions to meet the needs of our customers during this extraordinary time. We have spent decades strengthening our capital position and risk management framework. Through an intense focus on risk-adjusted returns, client selectivity, and robust concentration risk management, we have built a more balanced and diverse portfolio. Our strong capital and liquidity positions, combined with extensive de-risking efforts, give us confidence that we can weather the pressure from the abrupt economic slowdown. In addition, two years ago, we initiated a significant hedging strategy to reduce net interest income variability and protect us from the impacts of a lower interest rate environment. The benefit from our hedging strategy provides us with a substantial competitive advantage in the current low rate environment. All of this allows us to move forward confidently and remain focused on the things we can control, providing support to our associates and communities, and offering first-class advice guidance and education to our customers. Although we're at a time of significant economic stress, it's too soon to estimate its duration or severity. We are encouraged by the actions taken by government and bank regulators to provide relief to individuals and small businesses, while also supporting the smooth functioning of the financial markets. In light of this uncertainty, we are rescinding our financial targets for this year along with our three-year targets previously announced in 2019. We remain committed to our strategic plan, but acknowledge the need to remain flexible during this time of unprecedented and historic uncertainty. We will provide updates with respect to our financial targets once conditions stabilize and we have better visibility. We adopted a concept of shared value several years ago. whereby what we do as a business must create long-term value for customers, communities, associates, and shareholders. Frankly, I'm convinced that it has never been more important as we work through the current health crisis together with our customers and communities. Thank you for your time and attention this morning. With that, I will now turn it over to David.