Truist Financial Corporation

Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Truist Financial Corporation First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference. As a reminder, this event is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Alan Greer of Investor Relations.

Thank you, Katie, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining our call today. We have our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Kelly King, President and COO, Bill Rogers, and CFO, Darrell Bible, who will highlight a number of strategic priorities and discuss Truist's first quarter 21 results. Chris Henson, head of banking and insurance, and Clark Starnes, our chief risk officer, will also participate in the Q&A portion of our call. The accompanying presentation, as well as our earnings release and supplemental financial information, are available on the Truist Investor Relations website. Our presentation today does include forward-looking statements and certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please review the disclosures on slides two and three of the presentation regarding these statements and measures, as well as the appendix for appropriate reconciliations to GAAP. We also want to note that Ryan Richards, the former head of investor relations, has left Truist to pursue an opportunity outside of the company. If you have questions following today's call, please contact me or Aaron Reeves in investor relations. Our contact information is on the cover of the earnings release. And with that, I'll turn it over to Kelly.

Thanks, Alan, and good morning, everybody. Thank you very much for joining our call. You know, we have overall, I consider, a strong quarter with strong earnings and returns, very good expense control, strong fee income, especially in insurance and investment banking, excellent asset quality, which Clark will talk about, really good progress on merger integration, and excellent internal recognitions, including an outstanding CRA rating for our community development efforts. If you're following along on slide four, we always like to focus on the most important, which is our culture. As you've heard us say many times, we continue to reiterate culture as the primary determinant of our long-term success. Our purpose really connects with our teammates. We've been really excited about this. Our teammates are driven to really help our clients. We really enjoy serving our communities and our shareholders. Even with COVID, we've made great progress in activating our culture. created a cultural council, which works every day with our EL team, causing our culture to really come alive. So we've made excellent progress in terms of culture, which is ultimately the driver. On slide five, just a couple of points and some things that I think are good with regard to how we're serving our communities. We were very excited to be the first issuer of a social bond of the U.S. regional banks, $1.25 billion bond. bond that was well, well received, 120 investors, very favorable pricing. We're very excited about that in terms of our ability to focus on affordable housing and other community needs. We became the lead investor for Greenwood, which is very excited, an innovative digital banking platform designed for black and Latino consumers and business owners. We signed the Hispanic Promise, the first of its kind national pledge to prepare, hire, promote, retain, and celebrate Hispanics in the workplace. And We received a hundred percent score on human rights campaigns, corporate equality index, and we were named the best place to work in 21. We also continue to make great progress in terms of executing on our $60 billion community benefits agreement. Uh, and we already had 114% percent of our annual target. We were very proudly recognized once again by fortune as one of the world's most admired companies on slide six. Just a few indicators for you about how well the merger is going. I just want to point out to you that the risk of executing our merger has already been reduced substantially and is going down daily as we do conversions and getting a lot of the actual merger work done. A huge amount of work has already been done on the core bank conversion, and you'll see in the bubble chart there that a number of conversions have already been done. For example, truest securities conversions, wealth brokerage conversions, We did a huge amount of work in terms of grading all of the truest jobs, and that has all been executed. We're already in the process of testing protocols for our core bank conversion. Our wealth trust conversion is well along occurring in just a few weeks. So you can see that we're making tremendous progress, and I just want to emphasize the point that for those who think that the risk is going to remain high and won't subside until we do the final branch conversion, that is not a good way to look at it. The risk is being mitigated daily as we do these various conversions and make progress in terms of preparing for the final conversion. We did close 226 branches in the first quarter, which was part of our strategy. We have been very, very happy with our teammate reaction to that. They're very, very engaged. Recall that we promised all of our client-facing performing teammates that they would not lose their jobs. And so it's going very, very well. And our clients are very supportive. Because remember, most of these branches are very, very close to each other, and so it's no inconvenience to our clients. We are very focused on meeting our expense targets, which Daryl will talk about, and we believe we will be able to accomplish that. Just a few performance highlights on 7A. I think it was a very, very good quarter. We had strong adjusted net income of $1.6 billion, or $1.18 per share adjusted, both up 42% versus the first quarter of 20%. We had adjusted ROTCE of 19.36. Recall that we said our midterm target was in the low 20s, so we are well on the way to achieving that already, and we have huge call studies yet to come. We recorded investment banking and trading income at a record level along with insurance. It was all set some by decreases in residential mortgage income and commercial real estate-related income. Strong expense discipline. as our adjusted non-interest expense decreased 57 million dollars sequentially, and our merger related and restructuring charges decreased 167 million dollars. We significantly had lower provisions for credit losses of 48 million dollars versus 177 million in the fourth quarter, so we had a reserve of leaps of 190 million. Parker will talk about that more if we have questions. NPAs decreased 88 million dollars of 6.3 percent, which we were very happy about. We completed $506 million of share repurchases, so we had a total payout for the quarter of about 83%. We did redeem $950 million of preferred stock during the quarter at an after-sales cost of $26 million or two cents per share, which is not excluded in terms of our adjustment to net income. So overall, if you look at slide eight, you'll see how the adjustments work with the merger-related charges having a diluting impact of eight cents incremental operating expenses related to the merger that are not in our ongoing recurring charges going forward was 10 cents and an acceleration for cash flow hedge unwind expense of two pennies. So overall, it was a very strong quarter across a wide array of performance areas. Importantly, we continue to execute on our T3 concept, which is a concept of seamlessly integrating technology and touch so that we yield a high level of trust, creating a very high value proposition which is providing excellent client focus, which is ultimately the most important factor in terms of judging our current and our future performance. Now, let me turn it to Bill for some additional detail. Bill?