Regions Financial Corporation

Good morning, and welcome to the Region's 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 Region's third quarter 2020 earnings call. John and David will provide high-level commentary regarding the quarter. Earnings documents, including forward-looking statements, are available under the investor relations section at our website. These disclosures cover our presentation materials, prepared comments, and 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. Before we get started, I want to mention that we're taking a slightly different approach to our call today. Rather than walk you through our results in detail, we will speak to key highlights we think are most important and then open it up for your questions. Hopefully, you'll find this approach to be a little more efficient use of your time. We are very pleased with our third quarter results. We reported earnings of $501 million, resulting in earnings per share of 52 cents, a 33% increase over the prior year. We continue to experience nice revenue growth while prudently managing expenses, generating the highest adjusted pre-tax, pre-provision income in over a decade. Our core banking operations remain strong. We achieved record levels of deposits with growth across all three business segments. We continue to see growth in consumer and small business checking accounts, and despite the uncertain environment, our customers appear to be relatively healthy and are appropriately adapting their spending habits. As a result, most credit metrics improved, and we've been very pleased with a significant decline in loan deferrals. Our customer assistance program appears to have worked as intended, with the vast majority of customers who previously received deferrals now return to a normal payment schedule. Our results also reflect the success of Simplify and Grow, our continuous improvement initiative. We continue to carefully manage expenses while making strategic investments to grow our business. Our third quarter adjusted efficiency ratio was the lowest in 12 years, and our investments in mortgage and digital are paying off. Year-to-date mortgage production is more than double that of last year. Our focus on enhancing the digital experience is also resonating with customers Digital logins are up 22%, mobile deposits are up 50%, and digital account openings are up 24%. And our recently redesigned iPhone app currently has a 4.7 star rating. Thus far, the Southeast seems to have fared generally better economically during the pandemic than other areas of the country. States across our footprint were among the last to shelter in place and the first to reopen. As a result, the unemployment rate has generally been around 200 basis points below the national average, contributing to a relatively stronger GDP. We remain cautiously optimistic about the pace of economic recovery in our footprint, and client sentiment continues to improve. As a result, given what we know today, we believe the credit risk in our loan portfolio is appropriately reserved and losses will be manageable. Before I turn the call over to David, I want to recognize Barb Godden. Earlier this quarter, Barb announced her plan to retire by the end of the year. So this will be Barb's last earnings call. Barbara will retire after 45 years in banking. She joined Regions in 2003 and was named Chief Credit Officer during the height of the financial crisis. Over the last 10 years, As Chief Credit Officer, Barb has done a terrific job leading our credit risk organization through a period of tremendous change. Over that time, Barb's contribution was recognized by the American banker as one of the most powerful women in banking. She's truly done a great job for Regions and we'll miss her presence every day. I hope you all will join me in thanking Barb for all she's done and congratulating her on a well-deserved retirement. Thank you, Barb. With that out, thank you for your time and attention, and we'll now turn it over to David.