Truist Financial Corporation

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Truist Financial Corporation First Quarter 2025 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 Milsep.

Thank you, Betsy, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Truist First Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. With us today are our Chairman and CEO, Bill Rogers, our CFO, Mike McGuire, our Chief Risk Officer, Brad Mender, as well as other members of Truist's Senior Management Team. During this morning's call, they will discuss Truist's first quarter results, share their perspectives on current business conditions, and provide an updated outlook for 2025. 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 turn it over to Bill.

Thanks, Brad, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call today. So, before we discuss our first quarter results, let's begin as we always do with purpose on Slide 4. Truist is a purpose-driven company dedicated and inspired in building better lives and communities, which is the foundation and guide for everything we do. In times like this, with a little more uncertainty, our purposeful approach delivered with care resonates more than ever. We're committed to being a steady, reliable, and supportive partner, helping our clients with financial planning and personalized experiences from dedicated industry specialists that focus on understanding their needs. We're here to support our clients and communities with our strong balance sheet, expert industry advice, digital capabilities, and a comprehensive suite of products. Our capital position, our liquidity, our strong market share, and our talented, purposeful teammates delivering against a clear strategy have us well positioned for any environment. We're going to provide some more examples of how our purposeful approach is driving our results throughout the call today. So now turning to our results on slide five. Market volatility and economic uncertainty have certainly increased, which has resulted in a change in our view of the operating environment. Investment banking and capital markets activity has slowed materially, and the shape of the yield curve has shifted. As a result of these conditions, we're reducing our revenue outlook, which now assumes a flat year-over-year investment banking and trading revenue and slightly lower net interest income due to lower medium-term interest rates. Given this outlook, we've also reduced our expenses for the year and are opportunistically buying back additional shares in the second quarter. But what's not changing is our focus on our five key strategic priorities aimed at driving better growth, improving profitability towards our medium-term targets, and achieving positive operating leverage. First, we're executing against our strategic growth initiatives, which include deepening and expanding existing client relationships in areas like premier banking, middle market banking, payments and wealth, all of which represent significant opportunities to capture additional share within our existing client base. Second, we're fully committed to maintaining our expense discipline, which was once again evident in the first quarter. We continue to expect to achieve positive operating leverage in 2025, I believe that we can offset a portion of our lower revenue outlook by finding additional efficiencies in our company. Third, although the absolute rate of expense growth will be lower, we are continuing our investments in talent and our technology platform, which is improving the client experience, driving new account production, and delivering efficiencies. One example of these investments is a new patented artificial intelligence tool called Truist Client Pulse. that will give our teammates insights into friction points with clients. We'll be able to leverage real-time actionable data to effectively listen to our clients' needs and enhance their truest experience. Fourth, we'll never take for granted our strong track record on asset quality as we will continue to focus on maintaining strong risk discipline and controls. We have strengthened and de-risked our balance sheet over the last several years, and our credit and risk teams are fully engaged with our clients, to better understand the impact of the changing economic landscape. Finally, our relative capital advantage allows us to accomplish our strategic growth goals and return capital to our shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases over the next several years. As you can see, we continue to feel good about our strong foundation and our positive momentum across our banking franchise, which was evident in our first quarter results. For the first quarter, we reported net income available to common shareholders of $1.2 billion, or 87 cents a share. At a high level, a solid performance in the first quarter was defined by several key themes. The positive loan and deposit growth momentum we experienced in the fourth quarter continued into the first quarter as both average loans and deposits increased link quarter. Adjusted PPNR remained stable link quarter as we were able to offset a linked quarter decline in revenue with lower adjusted non-interest expenses reflecting our commitment to maintaining that discipline. From a credit and capital perspective, our metrics remain strong. Consistent with the fourth quarter of 2024, we returned $1.2 billion of capital to shareholders through our common dividend and repurchase of $500 million of our common stock during the first quarter of 2025. We've already completed $500 million of share repurchases in the second quarter of 2025, and given our strong capital position and current trading levels, we plan to target up to an additional $250 million of stock this quarter. Before I hand the call over to Mike to discuss the quarterly results, I want to spend some time discussing the progress we're making on our strategic priorities and the positive momentum we're seeing within our business segments and with our digital initiatives on slides six and seven. In consumer and small business banking, I'm encouraged by another solid quarter of consumer loan growth, net new checking account growth, and progress with our premier banking clients as we deepen relationships and acquire key new clients and households through digital and traditional channels. Average consumer and small business loan balances increased 1.3% linked quarter due to growth in residential mortgage, indirect auto, and service finance, with production up 47 percent year-over-year and pipelines continuing to increase. Importantly, we're not sacrificing our credit standards or pricing discipline to drive growth. Consumer credit metrics remain stable, and new consumer loan production spreads are accretive to the overall portfolio. Debit card spend for our consumer clients increased 4 percent on a year-over-year basis, with growth coming across all income bands and driven by spending in areas like travel and entertainment. Net new checking account growth was once again positive in the first quarter as we added more than 39,000 new consumer and business accounts, which reflects a 40% increase over the first quarter of last year. Importantly, we are seeing growth within our premier banking segment, which was one of our key focus areas as we've highlighted previously. During the fourth quarter, we generated nearly $1.8 billion of new deposit production in our premier managed segment, which represents a 23% year-over-year increase over the first quarter of 2024, driven by significant improvement in banker productivity and new hires. As an example, we increased the number of financial plans delivered per banker by 15%, which helped drive $1.6 billion of new investment production during the quarter, as those are highly correlated. In wholesale, I'm encouraged by this quarter's loan growth, improved production, and progress in key focus areas like payments and wealth. During the quarter, we saw 1% growth in average wholesale loans driven by growth from new and existing clients and increased production. As I've mentioned previously, we have a specific focus on capturing more of the middle market. I'm very pleased with the momentum we're already experiencing in production and results. Changing market conditions have made our outlook for investment banking and trading more challenging than we originally estimated to start this year. We did have our second-best quarter ever in debt capital markets, but lower overall M&A and equity capital markets activity resulted in growth coming in less than expected as many clients postponed planned transactions. However, I am confident that our advice-driven business model is well-suited to help our clients navigate current market conditions and continue to grow our share given the investments we continue to make in talent, products, and industry verticals. In Wealth, we launched a new digital client interface that significantly improved the client experience, increased new client and advisor acquisition, and helped drive higher net asset flows despite volatile equity and fixed income markets. Our payments team continues to launch new services that meet our clients' needs for solutions that provide them with speed, simplicity, and safety. During the first quarter, we enhanced our real-time payments capabilities, including launching Zelle disbursements, which enables wholesale clients to more efficiently pay consumers. These enhancements, along with continued investments in talent, have driven a meaningful increase in overall satisfaction scores, as well as ongoing increases in our payments penetration rate with existing clients. Enhancing the client experience and growing our digital capabilities has are important parts of our overall strategy. Let me discuss that in a little more detail on slide seven. Truist continues to demonstrate strong performance in digital with year-over-year growth across all core digital metrics. In the first quarter of 2025, we opened 195,000 new digital accounts, which reflects a 13 percent increase over the first quarter of last year and includes 77,000 new-to-bank clients. Over 60% of our new digital clients are millennials and Gen Z, aligning with our strategy to engage clients early and build enduring relationships over time. Truist Assist is our AI tool that supports client conversations and provides a seamless transition to a Truist teammate when an inquiry warrants further assistance. Truist Assist supported over 1 million conversations in the first quarter of 2025, with more than 80% requiring no further teammate interaction, which helps drive further efficiencies in our consumer business as client behavior shifts to more self-service. We expect to continue to grow our digital presence with clients as we further leverage our modern and scalable technology platform. Now, let me turn it over to Mike to discuss our financial results in a little more detail. Mike?