Truist Financial Corporation

Currently, all participants are in listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this event is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Mr. Brad Millsaps.

Thank you, Rocco, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Truist's fourth quarter 2023 earnings call. With us today are our Chairman and CEO, Bill Rogers, and our CFO, Mike McGuire. During this morning's call, they will discuss Truist's fourth quarter results, share their perspectives on current business conditions, and provide an updated outlook for 2024. Mark Starnes, our Vice Chair and Chief Risk Officer, Bo Cummins, our Vice Chair and Chief Operating Officer, Tante Wilson, Chief Consumer and Small Business Banking Officer, and John Howard, Truist Insurance Holdings Chairman and CEO, are also in attendance and available to participate in the Q&A portion of our call. The accompanying presentation, as well as earnings released and supplemental financial information, are available on the Truist Investor Relations website, ir.truist.com. Our presentation today will include forward-looking statements and certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please review the disclosures on Slides 2 and 3 of the presentation regarding these statements and measures, as well as the appendix for appropriate reconciliations to GAAP. With that, I'll turn it over to Bill.

Thanks, Brad, and good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining our call today. Before we discuss our fourth quarter results, let's begin with our purpose on slide four. As you know, Truist is a purpose-driven company committed to inspiring and building better lives and communities. I'd like to take just a few moments to highlight some of the ways we demonstrated our purpose during 2023. Through Truist Community Capital, we committed nearly $2.1 billion to support more than 15,000 units of affordable housing. This helped create more than 15,000 jobs and served more than 130,000 people in low and moderate income communities this year. Also, our teammates impacted 5,300 organizations and causes through their charitable giving and more than 62,000 hours of volunteer service. In addition, we started a small business community heroes initiative, which empowers our branch teammates alongside our virtual small business specialist, leveraging our digital solutions to proactively connect via caring conversations with small business owners who tirelessly work to serve our neighbors, create jobs, build our communities, and help drive our economy. So those are just a few examples of the meaningful work we're doing as a company to have a positive impact on the lives of our clients, our teammates, our communities, and our shareholders as we work to realize our purpose. All right, so let's turn to some of the key takeaways on slide six. Truist reported solid fourth quarter results, adjusted earnings after excluding several discrete items that impacted our results. The largest of these items, of course, is a $6.1 billion goodwill impairment charge. Mike's going to provide more details later in our call, but this is the result of our annual impairment test, which we conduct each year as of October 1st. Importantly, this charge is non-cash. It has no impact on our liquidity, regulatory capital ratios, the payment of our common dividend, or our ability to do business and serve our clients. On an adjusted basis, we reported net income of $1.1 billion, or 81 cents a share, which excludes the impact of the impairment charge, the industry-wide FDIC special assessment, and a discrete tax benefit. In addition, pre-tax merger-related and restructuring charges of $183 million negatively impacted adjusted EPS by 10 cents per share. Most of these charges were related to our cost-saving plan. Despite these discrete items in the quarter, we're pleased with our underlying results. As you can see on the slide, our solid performance was defined by several key themes. First, we made strong progress on our organization simplification plan during this quarter. Since these initiatives were announced in mid-September, we've reduced headcount, realigned significant elements of our organizational structure to improve efficiency and to drive revenue opportunities in 2024 and beyond. As a result of these efforts and others through 2023, the fourth quarter marks the second consecutive quarter we've seen our expenses decline. Although the first quarter will experience typical seasonal expense headwinds, We're on track and fully committed to delivering on the cost initiatives that we outlined in September, which will limit adjusted expense growth to flat to up to 1% in 2024, while also continuing to invest in initiatives for our core clients, technology, and risk management. Although asset quality is normalizing off historically low levels, we're encouraged that non-performing loans decline during the quarter while we continue to build our loan loss reserve considering the uncertain economic environment. Consistent with our capital planning strategy, our CET1 ratio increased 20 basis points sequentially to 10.1. Although we're committed to building capital, our balance sheet also remains open to core clients as our primary capital priorities are supporting the financial needs of new and existing clients and the payment of our common dividend. So before I hand the call over to Mike to discuss our financial performance in more detail, let me provide a quick update on our progress we're making on improving the experiences for our clients. We'll do that on slide seven. Bruce continues to see improved digital engagement trends with strong transaction growth over the last year. Mobile app users grew 9% versus the fourth quarter of 2022, which is contributing to increased transaction volumes, which now account for 62% of total bank transactions. As shown in the chart on the left, growth in digital transactions is primarily reflected by increased Zelle usage as clients continue to value efficient payment and money movement capabilities. While this is certainly positive, True still has a meaningful opportunity to shift the transaction mix even more towards digital, specifically by leveraging our T3 strategy, which is the concept that touch and technology work together to create trust. That further enhances the client experience and drives greater digital adoption and efficiency. Our goal is to create seamless experiences for our clients by offering more self-service capabilities to enhance the overall client experience. Trueist Assist is a perfect example of this concept. Since launching in 2022, we've seen increased client adoption with one-third of the total interactions represented in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone. Additionally, 85% of the conversations were completed using the automated assist at this quarter. As we look into 2024, we expect accelerated adoption of Truist Assist, which should lead to additional operational efficiencies for Truist. So overall, I'm pleased with the digital progress we've made in 2023 and excited about the opportunity to further leverage T3 in 2024 and beyond that. So let me turn it over to Mike to discuss our financial results in a little more detail. Mike?