U.S. Bancorp

Welcome to the U.S. Bank Corp's third quarter 2019 earnings conference call. Following a review of the results by Andy Cesari, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer of and Terry Dolan, U.S. Bank Corp's Vice Chairman and Chief Financial Officer, there will be a formal question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your touchtone phone and press the pound key to withdraw. This call will be recorded and available for replay beginning today at approximately 1230 p.m. Eastern through Wednesday, October 23rd at 12 midnight Eastern Standard Time. I will now turn the conference over to Jean Thompson, Director of Investor Relations for U.S. Bancorp. You may begin.

Jean Thompson Thank you, Polly, and good morning to everyone who has joined our call. Andy Cesari and Terry Dolan are here with me today to review U.S. Bancorp's third quarter results and to answer your questions. Andy and Terry will be referencing a slide presentation during their prepared remarks. A copy of the slide presentation as well as our earnings release and supplemental analyst schedules are available on our website at usbank.com. I'd like to remind you that any forward-looking statements made during today's call are subject to risk and uncertainty. Factors that could materially change our current forward-looking assumptions are described on page two of today's presentation in our press release and in our form 10-K and subsequent reports on file with the SEC. I will now turn the call over to Andy.

Thanks, Jen. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. Following our prepared remarks, Terry and I will take your questions. I'll begin on slide three. In the third quarter, we earned $1.15 per share. Despite a more challenging interest rate environment, we reported record levels of revenue and net income driven by healthy loan and deposit growth and continued momentum across our fee businesses. Credit quality remained stable. Turning to capital management, our book value per share increased 10.6% from a year ago, And during the quarter, we returned 80% of our earnings to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. Slide 4 provides key performance metrics. In the third quarter, we delivered a return of average common equity of 15.3% and a return on average assets of 1.57%. Our return on tangible common equity was 19.4%. Positive operating leverage drove improvement in our efficiency ratio on both the link quarter and year-over-year basis. Now I'll turn the call over to Terry who will provide more detail on the quarter as well as forward-looking guidance.