Truist Financial Corporation

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Truist Financial Corporation fourth 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 Millsap.

Thank you Betsy and good morning everyone. Welcome to Truist's fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. With us today are our Chairman and CEO Bill Rogers, our CFO Mike McGuire, our 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 fourth quarter and 2025 results, share their perspectives on current business conditions, and provide an updated outlook for 2026. 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 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.

Good morning, and thank you for joining our call today. Before we discuss our fourth quarter and 2025 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 remains at the heart of everything we do. It drives our strategy and fuels our commitment to our clients and the communities we serve. Despite market volatility early in 2025, we stayed focused on supporting our clients and executing our growth and profitability agenda. This discipline drove higher earnings, stronger client relationships, and attracting new business. A key to delivering on our purpose and performance is the investment in our business, markets, and teammates. Some of these significant investments include enhancing our tech and digital capabilities in areas like AI and improving the client experience, recruiting and developing talented teammates to advise and serve clients with more complex and industry-specific financial needs, announcing plans to open 100 new insight-driven branches in high-growth markets, as well as enhancements to more than 300 branch locations in all markets. These investments underscore our commitment to the communities we serve and position us to deliver more personalized advice and create opportunities for outsized growth. As we enter 2026, our purpose continues to guide our focus on growth, profitability, and deeper client relationships. We're expanding our presence and delivering more differentiated, advice-driven experiences. I look forward to sharing more of these priorities during today's call. Now let's turn to slide five. We closed 2025 with strong results and clear momentum heading into 2026. We delivered net income available to common shareholders of $1.3 billion, or a dollar per diluted share for the fourth quarter, and $5 billion, or 3.82 cents, or diluted share for the full year 2025. These results include certain charges such as severance and an accrual related to a specific legal matter that was settled in the first quarter of 2026, which totaled 12 cents a share for the quarter and 18 cents per share for the year. At the start of last year, we outlined five strategic priorities aimed at accelerating our performance and improving our profitability in 2025 and beyond. While there's more to accomplish, I'm proud of the progress we made as a company in 2025 and excited about the momentum we have entering this year. First, we continue to generate strong, broad-based loan growth in both wholesale banking and consumer and small business banking, driven by new loan production and increased client acquisition. Second, strong loan growth, better second half results in investment banking, trading, and wealth, along with continued expense discipline, drove 100 basis points of positive adjusted operating leverage in 2025. Third, we made significant investments across our business in talent and technology, laying the foundation for future growth, which we expect to accelerate in 2026. Fourth, we maintained strong asset quality metrics as net charge-offs declined versus 2024, and non-performing loans remained relatively stable. Finally, we returned $5.2 billion of capital to shareholders through our common stock dividend and the repurchase of $2.5 billion of our common stock. Our total capital turn in 2025 reflects a 37% increase over 2024. Looking ahead, our strategic priorities remain unchanged and our focus clear. Accelerate revenue growth. Drive greater positive operating leverage. continue to invest while maintaining our expense and risk discipline, and return capital to shareholders at an accelerated rate. Executing on these strategic priorities is central to improving profitability and achieving our long-term goals, including our commitment to deliver a 15% return on tangible common equity in 2027. So in summary, we closed 2025 on a strong note. and entered 2026 with significant momentum and confidence in our ability to deliver revenue growth at least twice the pace of 2025, greater positive operating leverage, higher levels of capital return, and improved profitability. Before I hand the call over to Mike to discuss our quarterly results, I want to spend some time discussing the positive momentum we're seeing within our business segments and with our digital strategy on slides six and seven. First, let me start with consumer and small business banking. CSBB delivered consistent, strong performance throughout 2025. As shown on the slide, we generated 5% growth in average consumer and small business loans and 1% growth in average deposits. This momentum was fueled by our market-leading consumer lending businesses, another year of net new checking account growth, and deeper relationships with our premier banking clients. Loan growth was broad-based across the portfolio with especially strong contributions from Indirect Auto and our specialty niche lending platforms, Sheffield Service Finance and Lightstream. These businesses continue to produce market-leading growth with attractive risk-adjusted returns. As part of advancing our consumer lending strategy, we fully integrated our digital end-to-end lending platform, Lightstream, into our truest mobile app experience and our branch banking account opening experience. This expanded scale is improving efficiency, broadening distribution, accelerating growth, and meaningfully enhancing the client lending experience. Beyond our national consumer lending platforms, Premier Banking also delivered strong results, with 2025 production of 22% in deposits, 32% in lending, and 12% in financial plans. This performance was driven by higher advisor productivity and strong branded mortgage and branch-led lending. We continue to see strong outcomes from our strategic investments in digital, delivering year-over-year growth across all core metrics. In the fourth quarter of 2025, we added 77,000 digital new-to-bank clients, up 10% from the prior year quarter, capping a solid full-year performance with digital production of 9%. We also took meaningful steps to deepen self-service adoption, expanding capabilities within our AI-powered Truist Assist mobile experience. The launch of Ask Truist Assist, our universal search capability, now delivers client quick, intuitive access from any screen. This drove a 97% increase in digital chat engagement in 2025 and is helping us improve efficiency and strengthen client connectivity as more activity naturally shifts to digital. Well, let's turn to wholesale on page seven. In wholesale, we delivered a strong finish to 2025, driven by meaningful improvement in the second half of the year in both loan and deposit growth, investment banking and trading revenue, and continued progress in strategic focus areas such as payment and wealth. We onboarded twice as many new corporate and commercial clients versus last year, spanning a diverse range of industries and markets. Building on these new client relationships and our focus on deepening existing ones, we saw our loan and deposit momentum strengthen as the year progressed. Average wholesale loans increased 3% in 2025, with momentum accelerating in the second half. Fourth quarter average loans were up 8% compared to the fourth quarter of 2024, fueled by new client acquisition and supported by focused talent investments as our strategy continues to gain traction. End-of-period wholesale deposit balances rose 6% late quarter. While seasonal public funds contributed to this growth, we saw growth from all of our industry banking teams and geographies. Full-year investment banking and trading income declined 6%, versus 2024 due to first half market volatility. However, activity rebounded strongly in the second half with fourth quarter revenues of 28% versus fourth quarter of 24, driven by increased M&A trading, equity, and debt capital markets activity. In wealth, net asset flows remain positive, supported by 8.5% increase in new clients last year, with almost 30% being generated by CSPB. Wholesale payment fees, which include merchant services, commercial card, and treasury management fees, rose 8% in 2025. Treasury management fees, a key strategic focus, grew 13% on the strength of new client acquisition and deeper relationships within our existing base. Importantly, our payments pipeline are up significantly year over year, positioning us for continued growth in 2026. So now let me turn over to Mike to discuss the financial results in a little more detail.