Truist Financial Corporation

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Truist Financial Corporation Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Currently, all participants are in a 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 Milstap.

Thank you, Betsy, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Truist's second quarter 2024 earnings call. With us today are our Chairman and CEO, Bill Rogers, our CFO, Mike McGuire, our Vice Chair and Chief Risk Officer, Clark Starnes, as well as other members of Truist's senior management team. During this morning's call, they will discuss Truist's second quarter results, share their perspectives on current business conditions, and provide an updated outlook for 2024. The accompanying presentation, as well as our earnings release 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 will now turn it over to Bill.

Thanks, Brad, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. So before we discuss our second quarter results, let's begin with purpose on slide four. As you all know, Truist is a purpose-driven company dedicated to inspiring and building better lives and communities. Purpose is the foundation for things that we do. We believe purpose and performance are inextricably linked. I'd like to share some of the ways we brought our purpose to life last quarter. During the quarter, Truist Securities advised and served as an active joint book runner for Oglethorpe Power's inaugural $350 million green bond, which will be used to support their investment in Plant Vogel, the largest producer of clean energy in the United States. The company is committed to reducing GHG emissions while delivering cost-effective and reliable clean energy with a diverse energy portfolio. This transaction represents only the second green-labeled bond in the U.S. where the use of proceeds are allocated to nuclear energy. We also launched a new financial education program tailored specifically for high school and college students called Truest Life, Money, and Choices. This initiative is aimed at empowering younger generations with financial lessons and essential skills to navigate their financial futures. These are just a couple of examples of how we brought our purpose to life during the quarter. I'm very proud of the meaningful work we're doing across our businesses to have a positive impact on the lives of our clients, our teammates, our communities, and, of course, our shareholders as we work to realize our purpose. So let's turn to our key takeaways on slide six. On an adjusted basis, we reported net income available to common shareholders of $1.2 billion, or 91 cents per share, which excludes the gain on the sale of Truist Insurance Holdings, the loss on the sale of certain available-for-sale investment securities, a charitable donation to the Truist Foundation, and a few smaller items that Mike will discuss in further detail in the call. In addition, pre-tax restructuring charges of $96 million, which are primarily related to the sale of TIH and severance, and also negatively impacted adjusted EPS by $0.05 per share. So, looking through a few 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 grew adjusted revenue 3 percent on a linked quarter basis, which was driven by 4.5 percent growth in net interest income due primarily to the balance sheet reposition we completed during the quarter. Second, our results show our continued expense discipline and focus on managing costs. As a result of these efforts, adjusted expenses increased by 2.6 percent linked quarter and decreased by 3 percent on a year-over-year basis. We are fully committed to delivering our objective of keeping expenses flat in 2024 versus last year. We're also pleased that non-performing loans remained relatively stable for the fifth consecutive quarter and that net charge-offs were within our expectations. During the quarter, we also completed the sale of our remaining stake in Truist Insurance Holdings, which significantly strengthened our relative capital position and creates substantial capacity for growth in our core banking businesses. In recognition of the incredibly long-term positive impact of our insurance business, we utilized a portion of the gain to make a $150 million charitable contribution to the Truist Foundation to further our purpose-driven work across our banking footprint for years to come. Simultaneously with the closing of TIH, we repositioned a portion of our available for sale investment portfolio, which along with the proceeds received from the sale of TIH, is expected to provide an offset to TIH earnings contribution. Mike will provide more details on these transactions later in the call. In late June, our board authorized the repurchase of up to $5 billion of our common stock through the end of 2026. We plan to begin repurchasing our shares during the third quarter and will initially target share repurchases of approximately $500 million per quarter for the remainder of the year. Finally, we continue to actively pursue growth opportunities in our core consumer and wholesale banking businesses. Although overall loan demand remains slow during the quarter, I'm encouraged by the underlying momentum in terms of increased wallet share within certain businesses and the talent we're attracting to our company, which I'm going to discuss a little later in the call. So before I hand the call over to Mike to discuss the financial performance in more detail, let me provide a quick update on the progress we're making in improving experiences for our clients on slide seven. We continue to show strong and steady growth in our digital capabilities as client mobile app users grew 7% and the digital transactions increased 13% compared to the second quarter of last year. Transactions continue to shift towards self-service capabilities, primarily driven by strong growth in Zelle transactions, which are up 39% year-over-year. In addition, we added over 180,000 new accounts during the quarter, including nearly 70,000 new-to-bank clients through our digital channels, which represents a 17% increase over the second quarter of 2023. Importantly, digital checking account production among Gen Z and millennial clients is higher by 42% on a year-over-year basis. A new, more modernized small business digital onboarding experience has also resulted in new high in application completion rates, while we're also seeing increased digital engagement with our small business clients. We've also made enhancements to enterprise platforms that have empowered teammates to deliver knowledge and care through 1.8 million caring conversations, resulting in 1.4 million accepted recommendations for great Truist products and services. These enhanced offerings, coupled with strong growth in digital, have resulted in higher consumer digital client satisfaction scores as we continue to focus on accelerated adoption and efficiency using our T3 strategy. Overall, I'm really proud of the continued momentum Truist is making in digital engagement. So with that, let me turn over to Mike to discuss the financial results in more detail. Mike?