U.S. Bancorp

Welcome to U.S. Bancorp's third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Following a review of the results by Andy Ciceri, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, and Terry Dolan, Vice Chair 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 10 a.m. Central Time through Thursday, October 21st, 2021 at 1059 p.m. Central Time. I will now turn the conference call over to Jen Thompson, Director of Investor Relations and Economic Analysis for U.S. Bancorp.

Thank you, Erica, and good morning, everyone. With me today are Andy Ciceri, our Chairman, President, and CEO of and Terry Dolan, our Chief Financial Officer. During their prepared remarks, Andy and Terry will be referencing a slide presentation. 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'll 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 any questions you have. I'll begin on Slide 3. In the third quarter, we reported earnings per share of $1.30 and generated total revenue of $5.9 billion. Our linked quarter pre-tax, pre-provision net revenue growth of 2.7%, was driven by continued momentum across our fee businesses, growth in average loan balances, and continued focus on expense management resulting in positive operating leverage. We released $310 million of loan loss reserves this quarter, supported by our outlook on the economy and better than expected credit quality metrics. Turning to capital, our book value per share totaled $32.22 at September 30th, which was 1.5% higher than June 30th. Our CET1 ratio was 10.2% at September 30th. Slide four provides key third quarter performance metrics, including a return on tangible common equity of over 20%. Slide five highlights strong trends in digital engagement. On slide six, we are providing initial information about our business banking and payment relationships, which we plan to update every quarter. Our complete payments ecosystem is a competitive advantage for us and provides a number of cyclical and secular growth opportunities. Over the next few years, we believe there is a significant potential to expand and deepen relationships within this ecosystem. Our starting point is that we have about 1.1 million business banking relationships, which we define as businesses with under $25 million in revenue. Currently, about half of our payments customers of this size have a business banking product. and just under one-third of our business banking customers have a payments product. The opportunity is to both increase the number of business banking relationships and to deepen these relationships by connecting our banking customers with our payments products and services and connecting our payments customers with our banking products and services. As we discussed previously, we believe we can grow our small business relationships by 15 to 20 percent and related revenue by 25 to 30 percent over the next few years. Now let me turn the call over to Terry, who will provide more detail on the quarter.