Truist Financial Corporation

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Truist Financial Corporation second 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 Millsop.

Thank you, Betsy, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Truist's second quarter 2025 earnings call. With us today are our Chairman and CEO, Bill Rogers, our CFO, Mike McGuire, and Chief Risk Officer, Brad Bender, 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 outlook for 2025. The company presentation, as well as our earnings release and supplemental financial information, are available on the Truist Investor Relations website. Our presentation today will 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. With that, I'll turn it over to Bill.

Great. Thanks, Brad, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call this morning. Before we discuss the second quarter results, let's begin like we always do at Truist with purpose on slide four. At Truist, our purpose to inspire and build better lives and communities, it's more than a statement. It's the foundation of our strategy. It's the lens through which we make decisions and the reasons teammates show up every day with conviction and care. In the second quarter, we continue to bring this purpose to life in meaningful ways. We welcome a dynamic slate of new leaders across our company, reinforcing our commitment to attracting top talent to our already highly experienced and very capable teams. These leaders were attracted to our purpose-driven culture and are already making meaningful impact, strengthening our presence in key growth markets and expanding our capabilities across high potential verticals. From sector-specific coverage to commercial and middle market banking to small business, wealth, premier banking, and payments, our teams are deepening client relationships, driving new business, and positioning Truist for the long-term sustainable growth, all which were evident in these second quarter results. So on slide five, for the second quarter, we reported net income available to common shareholders of $1.2 billion, or 90 cents a share, which included two cents of restructuring charges related to severance and one cent of losses from the sale of certain investment securities. At a high level, our solid performance in the second quarter reflects the diversity of our business model and the execution of many of our strategic growth initiatives that we've been discussing now for several quarters. These initiatives include accelerating growth through the addition of new clients and deepening existing client relationships in areas like payments, wealth, and premier banking. We're executing our plan while maintaining our expense and credit discipline and returning capital to shareholders. During the second quarter, average loan balances increased 2% and end-of-period loans increased 3.3% only quarter. Growth was broad-based across our consumer and wholesale segments, and driven by increased loan production and new client acquisition. Our lending pipelines remain strong, and overall loan production is up significantly year over year. Growth should also benefit from our expansion efforts in markets where we have smaller but growing share, and from many of the new teammates that have joined our company. This quarter's loan growth helped offset the equity and debt market volatility that occurred early in the quarter. This volatility impacted trading, capital markets, and M&A activity for the industry, resulting in lower revenue for investment banking and trading businesses. As you've heard me discuss previously, I'm 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 ongoing investments we're making in talent, products, and industry verticals. We believe that our investment banking and trading business is well-positioned for a as we saw steady improvement in overall investment banking revenue in each month during the quarter. Adjusted expenses did come in at the high end of the expected range, but we remain confident in our ability to deliver our 1% expense growth target and positive operating leverage in this year. That includes the impact of ongoing investments in talent and technology. We also maintain strong asset quality metrics, as both non-performing loans and net charge-offs were down nine basis points late quarter. In addition, we also received favorable results from the Federal Reserve's annual stress test. We expect that our stress capital buffer will decline and be floored at 2.5% effective October 1st. Finally, we remain in a strong capital position, which allows us to support our balance sheet growth and return capital to shareholders. During the quarter, we returned $1.4 billion of capital to shareholders through a common stock dividend and the repurchase of $750 million of our common stock. Our share repurchase activity in the second quarter included $250 million of repurchases above our recent $500 million quarterly target as we opportunistically took advantage of market volatility and weakness in our share price early in the quarter. We do plan to target approximately $500 million of share repurchases during the third 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 already 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 and deposit growth, net new checking account growth, and progress with our premier banking clients as we deepened relationships and acquired key new clients and households through digital and traditional channels. Net new checking account growth which is a key measure for the growth potential and health of our company, was once again positive in the second quarter as we added nearly 37,000 new consumers and small business accounts. Importantly, we're attracting younger clients with higher average balances and greater median income, which aligns with our strategy to engage clients early and build enduring relationships over time. Average consumer and small business loan balances increased 2.8% late quarter to And end-of-period balances increased 3.8% due to growth in residential mortgage, indirect auto, and other consumer, with production up significantly year-over-year. Over the last year, we've added significant numbers of new partners and dealers to our service finance and Sheffield platforms, which is helping drive the growth in other consumer loan balances. We also saw a significant increase in loan and deposit production per banker in our premier banking segment, which is a key area of strategic focus. We're growing while also maintaining our credit and pricing discipline. Consumer net charge-offs of 71 basis points reached their lowest level since the third quarter of 2023, and new production spreads remained accretive to the overall portfolio. 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 1.5% growth in average wholesale loans and 2.9% growth in end-of-period loans, driven by growth from new and existing clients and increased production. Average C&I growth was driven by all of our industry banking groups with particular strength in FIG and energy, middle market lending, and structured credit. As I've mentioned previously, we have a specific focus on capturing more of the middle market. We've seen these balances increase in each quarter this year, driven by new clients in a wide variety of industries and a targeted select geographies where we continue to expand. Year-to-date, we've attracted twice as many new corporate and commercial clients to our platform compared with the same period a year ago, while we're also seeing a 40% increase in revenue per client. In wealth, net asset flows were positive despite volatile equity and fixed income markets, as we saw a 27% increase in year-to-date AUM from wholesale and premier clients compared with the same period a year ago. 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 second quarter, we also experienced more digital innovation. Truist became the first financial institution to approve requests for payment over the RTP network via an alias such as a cell phone or an email address. This innovation is designed to unlock meaningful value for both commercial and consumer clients, accelerating cash flow, improving reconciliation, and delivering real-time confirmations. These enhancements, along with continued investments in our team, have driven a meaningful increase in treasury management penetration rates with our existing clients and helped drive a 14% increase in treasury management revenue versus the second quarter of last year. Enhancing the client experience and growing our digital capabilities are also important parts of our strategy. Let me discuss that in detail on slide seven. We continue to see strong momentum in our digital strategy with meaningful progress, platform integration, engagement, and production. In the second quarter, digital account production rose 17% year-over-year, with 43% of new-to-bank clients joining us through digital channels, a 900 basis point increase versus the second quarter of last year. This momentum reflects investments we've made in our digital platform and improvements we've made to the digital onboarding experience. A key milestone this quarter was fully integrating Lightstream lending products into our digital platform under the new Lightstream by Truist brand. This integration expands access to lending solutions for all Truist clients and further strengthens our digital offerings. We're also seeing deeper engagement across our digital platform. More than 1.8 million clients are now using our digital financial management tools, and that's a 40% increase from last year. Together, these results highlight the strength of our digital foundation and our continued focus on delivering value, operating efficiently, and deepening client relationships. We expect to continue growing 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 more detail. Mike?