Truist Financial Corporation

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Truist Financial Corporation first quarter 2026 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 Millsaps.

Thank you, Betsy, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Truist's first quarter 2026 earnings call. With us today are our Chairman and CEO, Bill Rogers, our CFO, Mike McGuire, and 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 first quarter 2026 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 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. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call today. Before we discuss our first quarter of 2026 results, let's begin, as we always do, with purpose on slide four. At Truist, our purpose is to inspire and build better lives and communities. And one way we bring that to life is through the work we do every day for our clients. One example of this is our project finance business, which is a client-focused platform that provides financial advice and capital to to help develop essential infrastructure that drives long-term economic growth, job creation, and stronger and better communities throughout our footprint in the United States. Our relationships with these clients have led to broad-based franchise engagement, which includes deposits, payments, and lead roles in capital market transactions. From a financial perspective, there are aspects of this business that generate returns somewhat differently than our other businesses. A meaningful portion of this benefit is realized through reductions to our tax provision rather than reported revenue. Mike's going to walk you through the impact of that later in the call, but this dynamic contributed to our lower tax provision in the first quarter as a factor in our expected lower tax rate for 2026 compared to 2025. This, though, is a great example of how serving our clients and communities is true to our purpose and also drives strong financial outcomes for our shareholders. Now, turning to our results on slide five. Before I get into the details of our first quarter, I want to spend a moment on the quality of what we're delivering across the company and how we're executing against our strategic priorities. What I'm most excited about this quarter is the underlying momentum we're seeing. New client pipelines are growing, activity levels remain healthy, and we're continuing to add talent and execute in the areas that matter most to our strategy of driving improvement in our profitability. During the quarter, we once again added new clients, deepened existing relationships, and grew profitably in the business and products where we're chosen to focus, with loan growth coming from priority segments, fee growth driven by core client activity, and stronger referrals and connectivity across the company. I can clearly say that we're focused, we're aligned, and we're executing well, which is evident in our first quarter results. As you can see on slide five, we delivered net income available to common shareholders of $1.4 billion, or $1.09 per diluted share for the first quarter, which represents a 25% increase over the first quarter of last year, earnings of $0.87 a share. Our performance was driven by continued execution against strategic priorities, including growth in both consumer and wholesale loans, along with strong non-interest income growth led by our investment banking and wealth management business. Together, those factors, along with our expense and credit discipline, contributed to 250 basis points of year-over-year positive operating leverage in the quarter. As a result of this execution in managing our capital through share repurchases, return on tangible common equity improved by 150 basis points to 13.8% compared to the first quarter of 2025, representing meaningful progress towards our full year 2027 ROTC target of 15%. While we remain firmly on track to achieve this target, as I've said before, it's not a ceiling for our company. The progress we're seeing today across our company gives us confidence in our ability to drop profitability higher over time. With continued execution against our strategic priorities, continued capital return, and the benefit of expected changes to the capital framework, we're establishing a long-term ROTC target of 16% to 18%. Before I hand the call over to Mike to discuss 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 another solid quarter that was consistent with our expectations and strategy to drive profitability improvement across the enterprise. Average consumer and small business deposits and loans were up 1% and 4%, respectively, versus the first quarter of last year of 2025. Average loans declined modestly for the fourth quarter, which is consistent with normal seasonality and our goal of emphasizing growth in categories offering the most attractive risk-adjusted returns. As you can see on the slide, Premier Banking was again a source of strength with both deposit and lending production up significantly, driven by deeper client engagement, advisor productivity, and continued momentum in financial planning activity. Digital continues to be a key growth engine for CSBB. Digital share of new-to-bank clients increased to 45%, with Gen Z and millennials representing more than half of the growth. Active digital users grew year-over-year, and digital transaction volumes remained strong, reflecting sustained client engagement with our platforms. Building on that digital progress, we're increasingly focused on how AI can further enhance productivity, decision-making, and client engagement across the company. We see AI as a real operating lever, one that improves the client experience while also creating productivity and operating leverage across our businesses without compromising control, safety, and reliability. Our focus is on using AI to strengthen relationships, giving clients faster, more personalized service, and enabling our teammates to spend more time advising and problem solving, not navigating processes. We're already deploying AI across consumer and small business banking in practical, client-facing ways. Truist Insights delivers personalized financial guidance at scale. Truist Assist handles most routine service requests digitally and around the clock, improving consistency and reducing call volumes. AI-enabled call summarization is live for care center agents, lowering after-call work and enhancing insight capture. Overall, our disciplined focus on capital allocation, pricing, productivity, and digital execution is translating into strong underlying performance and positions consumer and small business banking well as we progress through the year. Now turning to wholesale on slide seven. In wholesale, we delivered a strong start to 2026 with continued momentum across loans, deposits, and fees while maintaining a disciplined focus on relationship returns and capital efficiencies. Average wholesale loans and deposits increased 9% and 2% respectively versus the first quarter of 2025, reflecting diversified growth across our industry banking, middle market, and CRE teams as we continue to prioritize high-quality, relationship-driven loan growth. Middle market deposits in particular, an area where we've invested heavily, grew 11% year-over-year, driven by 7% growth in our legacy markets, and 30 percent growth in expansion markets such as Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Wholesale fee performance will also stand out this quarter with strong results in wealth management and investment banking and trading. Investment banking and trading delivered its highest quarterly revenues since 2021, driven by strength across a broad set of product areas. Importantly, we're also seeing even stronger connectivity among our commercial, corporate, and investment banking platforms. This is driving higher quality feed growth with an increase in the number of lead roles and meaningful contributions from existing commercial and wealth clients. We're also leveraging AI across wholesale to enhance productivity, underwriting, and client engagement using predictive analytics to improve advisor effectiveness, accelerate underwriting speed and precision, and scale lead generation and conversion among payments and wealth. These capabilities are helping us serve clients more efficiently while improving returns and speed to market. Overall, we see clear evidence that our strategy is working. We are pairing high-quality balance sheet growth with improving fee mix, stronger client engagement, and enhanced operating efficiency, which gives us confidence in Wholesale's outlook for the remainder of this year. Now, let me turn it over to Mike to discuss our financial results in a little more detail.