Brian Moynihan: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. As usual, we're starting on Slide 2. Our third quarter here at Bank of America was another strong quarter as we delivered $7.8 billion in net income. That is a 10% growth over the year-ago third quarter. And for the first nine months of the year, we have earned $23.4 billion, an increase of 15% over 2022. We grew clients and accounts organically and at a strong pace across all our businesses. Our operating leverage was about flat. We improved our common equity Tier 1 ratio by nearly 30 basis points in the quarter to a level of 11.9% against a current minimum of 9.5%. We saw an increase in our deposits and we maintained our strong pricing discipline. We continue to maintain $859 billion in global liquidity sources. We also deliver a good return for you, our shareholders, with a return on tangible common equity of over 15% and a 1% return on assets. Just a quick note of what we see in the economy. Our team of economists predicts a soft landing with a trough in the middle of next year. We see that in our customer data, our 37 million checking customers, we see their spending slowing down. You can see that on Slide 34. The third quarter was up about 4% over last year's third quarter. Earlier this year, that would have been more of a 10% increase year-over-year. And for the entire year of 2022, it increased 10% [round numbers over ‘21] (ph). This 4% level is consistent with the spending we saw in the pre-pandemic period from 2016 to 2019. That is consistent with a low-inflation, lower-growth economy. As we move into October, the spending is holding at that 4% level. So growing, but growing at a basis more consistent with low growth, low inflation economy. With that, let me turn to Slide 3. We provide various highlights, and Al's just going to cover a lot of this. Our team continues to focus on driving organic growth, driving digital progress, and operational excellence, which keeps us focused on operating leverage. A few words on organic growth as we flip to Slide 4. Every business segment had organic growth. In Consumer, in quarter three, we opened more than 200,000 net new checking accounts this quarter alone. We also opened another 1 million credit card accounts. We have 10% more investment accounts this year, third quarter, than we did last year. In Small Business, we have seen 35 straight quarters of net new checking account growth. We've also seen good small business loan growth, and our loans are up 14% from last year. That was -- in this quarter, our Small Business teammates extended $2.8 billion in credit to small business in America alone. In Global Wealth, we added nearly 7,000 net new relationships to the Merrill and Private Bank franchises. And our advisors opened more than 35,000 new bank accounts for the third consecutive quarter, fulfilling both investing and banking needs for those clients. We also increased our number of advisors. In the past year, across our wealth spectrum, in GWIM and in consumer investments, they have combined to gather $87 billion in total net flows. In our Global Banking team, we added clients and increased the number of products per relationship. Year-to-date, we've added 1,900 new commercial and business banking clients. That is more than we added in the full year last year. Even while activity is low, the investment banking team continues to hold us number three position. In the Global Markets, we continue to see performance establish new records for our firm. I'm going to cover that in a little more detail in a moment. As you can move to Slide 5, you can see the digital adoption engagement and volumes continue to increase. We lead the industry in digital banking and continue to provide the best-in-class disclosures. You can find those disclosures by line of business in the appendix on slides 26, 29, and 31. We also continue to receive top accolades from third parties around these capabilities. Most important, these capabilities are valued by our clients and customers and allow us to grow with great expense leverage. Let me give you a few examples. Our Consumer and Merrill clients logged into our consumer banking app a record 3.2 billion times this quarter. Even at this scale and stage of maturity of this operation, logins are up double digits from the year prior. Customer use of Erica continued to beat our expectations with almost 19 million users, up 16% in the past 12 months. CashPro App sign-ins with our business clients are up more than 40%. And we recently added the Erica functionality to CashPro to help corporate clients benefit from that artificial intelligence. Likewise, Zelle users continues to grow. Zelle transaction levels are up more than 25% from last year. And Zelle is becoming a meaningful way our customers move money. In fact, customers now send money with Zelle at twice the rate they write checks. We're nearing a period where the Zelle transactions sent will exceed the combination of checks written and ATM withdrawal transactions. As you move across the lines of business on the slide, the story is the same. All these capabilities help us deliver faster, safer, and more efficiently. And all of it gets strong customer and client feedback. When you put that together, that helps us drive operating leverage, and you can see it on Slide 6. We have a strong record of driving operating leverage in our company. We drove operating leverage every quarter for nearly five years before the pandemic. And then again, more recently, we've had an eight-quarter streak leading to this quarter. We acknowledged to you this last quarter that our operating leverage is going to be tough for a few quarters as we navigate through the trough of net interest income. But as you can see on Slide 6, we managed to grow revenue year-over-year faster than expense in dollar terms this quarter, even though the percentage change was basically flat. Now, in January, we told you we'd manage our head countdown to help make sure we got our expenses in line. Over the course of 2023 we've seen moving from 2022's great resignation to our current level of a record low attrition in our company. All that meant the team had to work harder to manage that headcount down. And they did it. Our headcount is now down over 7,000 FTEs [from a] (ph) peak in January, even with the addition of 2,500 college grads this fall. As a result, you've seen expense decline from $16.2 billion in quarter one to $16 billion in quarter two to $15.8 billion this quarter. By the way, we've done this without special charges or large layoffs. Expense will decline again in the fourth quarter, excluding any FDIC special assessment, of course. We expect to report $15.6 billion in expenses in 4Q. Now interestingly, the debt is up only around 1% from fourth quarter of last year. This is stronger expense guidance than we thought we could do earlier in the year and sets us up nicely for next year. Shifting gears, let's focus on the balance sheet. Slide 7 shows the breakout of deposit trends on a weekly basis -- ending basis across the third quarter. We gave you this chart last quarter also. In the upper left-hand, you can see the trend of total deposits. We ended quarter three at $1.88 trillion, up from quarter two and better than industry results. What you should also note is the cost of these deposits. Our team has rewarded customers with higher rates for their investment [or in cash] (ph), re-initiated deposit growth and grown share with always superior mix in cost. You will note we're now paying 155 basis points all in for deposits, which is up 31 basis points from last quarter. I ask that you remember two things when you think about the deposits. The rate remains low relative to many because of the transactional nature of deposit relationships with $565 billion in non-interest-bearing deposits. And you can see in the upper right alone, in low interest and no interest checking, there's $504 billion in Consumer. Secondly, remember the importance of the spread against the quarter's average Fed funds rate. This position is very advantageous compared to past cycles because the transactional counts in the current cycle are a much higher mix of Bank of America's deposits. I would also add that while we maintain discipline in deposit price and we pay competitive rates to customers with excess cash seeing higher yields across all the businesses, if rates fall, those particular products will see the rates come down also. Dropping into the business trends. In Consumer, if you look at the top right chart, you saw a $22 billion decline. Note, the difference in the movement through the quarter between the balance of low to no-interest checking accounts and higher-yielding non-checking accounts. You could also see the low levels of our more rate-sensitive balance in consumer investments and CD balances broken out. In total, we have $982 billion in consumer deposits. In Consumer alone, this is $250 billion more than we had pre-pandemic. The total rate paid on consumer deposits in the quarter was 34 basis points. This remains very low, driven by the high percentage of transactional -- high-quality transaction accounts. Most of the quarter's rate increase is concentrated in CDs and consumer investment deposits where about -- which are about 13% of the deposits. Turning to Wealth Management, balances were flat. We saw a slowing in the previous quarterly trend of clients moving money from lower-yielding sweep accounts into higher-yielding preferred deposits and off-balance sheet products ones. Sweep balances were down by $7 billion and were replaced by new account generation and deepening. At the bottom right, note the Global Banking deposits grew $2 billion and have hovered around $500 million for the past six quarters. These are generally the transaction deposits of our commercial customers used to manage their cash flows. Noninterest-bearing deposits were 37% of deposits at the end of the quarter. Sticking with the balance sheet but moving to capital, let me give you a few thoughts on the proposed capital rules. As you are well aware, our banking industry in the United States is the most highly capitalized the most profitable banking group in the world. It's a source of strength for our country and its economy. The annual stress tests over -- are now over a dozen years old, using ever-increasing harsher test scenarios have proven that capital is sufficient. Banks have proven to be a part of the solution during the more recent COVID pandemic and the banking disruption in March this year. We add to our capital and reduce our lending capacity to American business consumers, and those trade-offs are being debated. But as far as the rules are concerned, there are many parts of the rules that our industry doesn't agree with because of double accounts or increased trading and market risk. And we're talking to those proposals and working, and we're hopeful they'll change. But in any event, they may not. If they don't, how will they affect us? If you go to Slide 8, you can show the expected impact as we interpret those proposed rules. This assumes that they're proposed today without any changes. The proposed rules would inflate our risk-weighted assets by about 20%. So if I apply the inflation against this quarter's RWA of $1.63 trillion, that means, if nothing else changed in the rules, we'd end up with about $320 billion more risk-weighted assets. The biggest increase in RWA would be a couple hundred billion dollars in operational RWA. The next biggest category would be driven by a four-fold increase in the RWA against non-publicly traded equity exposures. In our case, that really is mostly about the tax-advantaged investments in solar and wind. Looking at the capital to be held against the inflated RWA on the right side of the slide, I'd remind you today that our minimum capital requirement is to hold 9.5% in on Common Equity Tier 1. But based on our G-SIB charges, that going to come in effect on January 1, 2024, we moved to 10%. So I'm going to use that as a requirement. Holding 10% today means $163 billion, that we finished the third quarter with $194 billion. So today, we have more than $30 billion excess capital. Now, let's assume the proposed change is going through in full. The proposed changes are phased in from '25 -- the middle '25 to '28 under the current proposal. When those are fully phased in, as we used to call Basel fully phased in, if you remember, we would have a need for $195 billion of total capital. Now if you look on the upper right-hand side of the page, you'll see that we're today, we're at $194 billion. So we hold the required capital today. And of course, we'd have to build a buffer to that throughout the implementation period. But if you look at the bottom of the page, you see just in the last nine quarters the kind of capital generation this company has. Once we understand the rules, we'll of course have a bit -- a chance to optimize our balance sheet and appropriately price assets to improve the return on tangible common equity. Now, before I turn it over to Alastair, I just wanted to highlight one of the businesses that we talked about over the many years. That's our Global Markets business. Global Markets represent 17% of the company's year-to-date earnings and it's one of the top capital markets platforms in world. It's one 'of a handful of firms that can do what is due, providing advice and execution in every major market around the world. Jimmy DeMare and the team who run the business asked us for additional investment around four years ago, and they've grown this business with an intensity that clients are appreciative and reward us with more of their business. This has produced strong revenue growth. We've grown the balance sheet here but have done it efficiently. That's allowed us to grow sales and trading revenue over the past 12 months consistently, and now stands 32% higher than the average of the five years leading into the pandemic in the investment in the business. And through effective cost management, we also generated 11% to 12% returns on capital in this business. This exceeds our cost of capital even as we continue to allocate more capital to the business. Returns are even larger if you combine it with the Global Banking business, that many show the businesses combined and take -- because our corporate clients also take advantage of these industry-leading capabilities. With that, let me turn over the call to Alastair to walk through the quarter. Alastair?

Consumer 200,000 net new checking accounts quarter three


Brian Moynihan: Yeah, there's always more to go. So if you -- I think we've got lined up. If you take what we're doing this year and next year, meaning '24, '25 and enrolled in '26, it's a couple of billion dollars plus, which helps us to the dynamic Erika was talking about avoiding growth and expenses, keeping below inflation. Because you think of us as rolling that expense taken out back into good things. This year will be, I think, $3.8 billion on technology initiatives. That's up from '21 to '22 by $500 million or more and then sort of flattish '22 to '23. They're being applied in different ways. We added relationship managers across the board. We keep opening the branches. We're largely through the rehab of the branches that we're keeping. And these are all spending to grow. And that's what you're seeing. So net new checking account, 600,000 for the year. That's 20 straight quarters of net checking account growth. All good core accounts flows into the asset manager business, $80 billion or more. In our Merrill Edge program, the advertising has driven the business. We have 10% more customers. And those customers, which is 300,000 to 400,000 customers added in the last 12 months, those customers bring an average opening balance of $80,000 to $100,000. To give you a sense, they're not small accounts, that's good. So we're just investing. But there's a thousand levers. None of them are simple. But even this year, when we said we got to get the headcount growth back in alliance after the great resignation in '22 and we had to hire fast, we went from 218,000 people in January down to 212,900 at the end of the year. And in that, we're rolling over teammates from one business to another business where we need help and retraining people and reskilling people. And as AI comes in and to the extent that we can deploy it, deploy it wisely, it'll allow us to redeploy people. And even with our very low turnover rate, which is 7% for year '23 and actually down from 12% in the year '22 and I think 6% in the fourth quarter, we still can manage headcount down just by not hiring people, because that gives us an opportunity. We hired 15,000 people this year. So we hire -- we can always hire a little less if we see the efficiencies coming through and redeploy the people we have.

net new checking account 20 straight quarters


Brian Moynihan: Thank you Lee, and good morning to all of you, and thank you for joining us. I am starting on Slide 2 of the earnings presentation. We once again delivered a strong set of results in quarter one. We reported net income of $6.7 billion after tax and EPS of $0.76. This included the additional expense accrual for the industry special assessment by the FDIC to recover losses from the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. This lowered our quarter one EPS by $0.07. Excluding that expense, net income was $7.2 billion and EPS was $0.83 per share in quarter one. Alastair is going to walk you through details of the quarter momentarily, but first let me give you a few thoughts on our performance. We delivered good improvement in our fee-based business, driven both by continued organic growth and good market conditions. Investment banking saw a nice rebound this quarter. We delivered nearly $1.6 billion in investment banking fees and grew 35% from the first quarter 2023. Matthew Koder and the team have done a great job delivering market share growth. In addition, our results reflect the benefits of investments made in our middle market investment banking teams and dual coverage teams. Matthew has utilized [indiscernible] power wisely to grow our middle market team from 15 bankers in 2018 across a dozen cities, to more than 200 bankers in twice as many cities today. Both groups work with our commercial bankers and wealth management advisors in those cities to deliver for our clients. Investment and brokerage services revenue across Merrill and the private bank grew 11% year-over-year in quarter one to nearly $3.6 billion. Continued investments in our advisor training programs and digital delivery for our clients as well as positive market helped us deliver strong revenue. Asset under management flows were $25 billion in the quarter. Sales and trading excluding DBA delivered its eighth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue improvement. At $5.2 billion, this is the highest first quarter result in over a decade. We have allocated more balance sheet invested in talent to build our [indiscernible] for the last five years in this business. Those investments plus the intensity of the teams under Jimmy DeMare’s leadership have resulted in good momentum and market share improvement. From a balance sheet perspective, we entered the quarter expecting modest moves in loan growth and a decline in deposits - those were our expectations. What we actually delivered was growth in ending deposits of more than $20 billion. Ending loans were down modestly due to the expected credit card seasonality, otherwise loans were pretty stable. This balance sheet performance along with our continued pricing discipline allowed us to deliver better than expected NII performance. We told you last quarter that we expected NII to decline from the fourth quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2024, a decline of about $100 million to $200 million. We actually reported today NII of $14.2 billion - that was $100 million higher than quarter four, exceeding our guidance. We continue to deliver strong expense management. Year-over-year expenses adjusted for the FDIC assessment was up a little less than 2% - that compares to the 4%-plus inflation rate. We also continued to invest in our company while managing those expenses. We had several categories with stronger fee-based revenue in the first quarter this year. This drove higher formulaic compensation and processing costs of the increased activity. Fees and commissions were up 10% year-over-year. We are happy to pay for that revenue and deliver more earnings to the bottom line because of it. How did we do all that and hold expenses under the inflation rate? Well, we remain focused on three primary drivers at Bank of America. First, our operational excellence platform continues to deliver and improve processes. These savings from that growth help fund the future growth in the company and lower the risk. Second, we managed headcount as we eliminated work. Recall, we noted an expectation in January of last year that our headcount would be down throughout the year. Our headcount at the end of first quarter 2024 was down by more than 4,700 people from the first quarter 2023. It declined 650 people just from the end of 2023. The digitization activity is also driving ongoing expense cost savings, customer retention and market share improvement, driving across all three factors. It also supports the ever-increasing volumes of client activity with little increased cost. I would highlight our continued capital strength with common equity Tier 1 capital of $197 billion. That amount of capital is $31 billion over the current regulatory minimums for our company. That capital has allowed us to both support our clients and return $4.4 billion to shareholders this quarter in share repurchases and dividends. Let me highlight a few points on our organic growth before I pass it over to Alastair. Now I’m turning to Slide 3. You can see on Slide 3 the highlights of quarter one successful organic activity across the businesses. We continue to invest and enhance our digital platforms. We provide our customers with convenient and secure banking experiences. By leveraging our technology and continuous investment in that technology and putting customers at the center of everything we do, we have successfully deepened our relationships and expanded our customer base across all our businesses. In consumer, we had added 245,000 net new checking accounts this quarter. This completes 21 straight quarters of net additions. Dean Athanasia, Aron Levine and Holly O’Neill helped drive that business for us and continue to perform well, driving strong performance across our consumer franchise. These checking balances continue to drive the performance of our consumer deposits. These checking additions are important for many other reasons. On average, 68% of our deposit balances have been with us for more than 10 years; 92% of the customer checking accounts are primary checking accounts in the household, meaning that they’re the core operating account for the household for their financial lives. When we on-board a client, we start a long-term valuable relationship. About 60% of our checking accounts customers use a debit card and on average they do about 400 transactions per year on that card. The new checking accounts have traditionally opened savings accounts, about 25% of the time within a few months of opening that checking account. Opening a new checking account on average brings about $4,000 in balances below our averages, but that continues to grow and within a year, it’s two times that amount. Likewise when we open a new savings account, it on average brings about $7,000 in balances. This also deepens by about two times during the year. Investment relationships and credit card account openings continued to be strong in the first quarter as well. While we believe some of these statistics are best in class, rest assured there are plenty opportunities for further growth in our franchise and our company. As we think about our global wealth team led by Eric Schimpf, Lindsay Hans and Katy Knox, that team added 7,300 net new wealth relationships with Merrill and the private bank. Our advisors opened 29,000 new bank accounts in the quarter with our customers, deepening their relationships. More than 60% are investing clients in Merrill and 90% of our private banking clients now have a core banking relationship with us. In addition, across our wealth spectrum we saw $60 billion in total flows over the last year. As you can see on this slide, we now manage more than $5.6 trillion in total client balances across loans, deposits and investments, and consumer and wealth management. When we move to global banking, we added more new relationships in this quarter than we did in last year’s first quarter. We also increased the number of solutions per relationship with preexisting clients. Just like in our consumer business, we have seen good growth in customers seeking the benefits of both our physical and our online capabilities and also the care of our talented relationship managers, who provide financing solutions and advice for our clients with global needs. A couple other points I’d make on our digital success. Erica, our virtual banking assistant, reached a key milestone of more than 2 billion interactions since its introduction about six years ago. It took four years to reach 1 billion interactions; it took just 18 months to reach the second billion. In August, we extended Erica’s reach and launched Erica in our global treasury services business and CashPro. Erica has resolved 43% of the CashPro chat inquiries automatedly, demonstrating more and more clients are able to self-solve. This is a great example of best practices being shared across the scale of our company. Second, as an example of our digital success, Zelle continues to grow. It wasn’t long ago that we noted that the number of Zelle transactions in a quarter had surpassed the number of checks written. Shortly after that, Zelle transactions reached two times the number of checks written. This quarter, Zelle transactions have now passed the combined number of checks written plus the amount of cash withdrawals from tellers and from ATMs. That is a rapid adoption and represents continued cost savings and convenience and security for the customers. These stats and others are included in our quarterly activity for our digital banking progress. That’s included in Slides 20, 22 and 24. I encourage you to read them. They show our market-leading efforts representing billions of dollars of our investment over the years, and we are continuing to drive growth with expense growth under control. The solid earnings results achieved this quarter are a testament to the dedication and talent of our 212,000 people who work here and deliver for our customers every day. I thank them for another great quarter. With that, I’ll turn it over to Alastair.

consumer net new checking accounts quarter one

consumer added 245,000 net new checking accounts


Brian Moynihan: Thank you, Lee, and good morning and thank all of you for joining us today. Before I begin today, I just want to reflect a second on the horrible events this weekend. We at Bank of America are clear that there's no place for political violence in our great country, and we continue to wish the former President Trump a speedy recovery. And our thoughts, of course, go out to the victims and their families and others impacted by this terrible event. With that, let's turn attention to the results for the second quarter of 2024 at Bank of America Corporation. This quarter, we achieved success in a number of areas, underscoring the benefits of our diversity and the dedication of our team to deliver responsible growth. Our organic growth engine continues to add customers and activity to all our businesses, even as we see the drop in net interest income this quarter. I'm starting on slide two. Our net income for the quarter was $6.9 billion after tax or $0.83 in diluted EPS. Attesting to the balance in our franchise, the earnings were split evenly, half in our consumer and GWIM businesses, which serve people, and the other half in our institutional-focused business global banking and markets. We grew revenue from the second quarter of 2023 as improvement in non-interest income overcame the decline in net interest income. Fees grew 6% year-over-year and represented 46% of total revenue in the quarter. Our strong fee performance was led by a 14% improvement in asset management fees in our wealth management businesses. We grew investment banking fees 29% year-over-year and saw sales and trading revenue increase 7%. Global Markets had its 9th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in sales and trading revenue, a good job by Jimmy DeMare and his team. Card and service charge revenue also grew by 6% year-over-year in our Consumer business. Much of this fee growth is a result of our intensity around organic growth, and is a testament to the diversity of our operating model. Now on to slide three. Organic growth has been driven by several key factors. First, we focus on our customers. We continue to place them at the center of everything we do. Consumer led the way in delivering solid organic growth with high-quality accounts and engaged clients. For the 22nd consecutive quarter, we had significant net new consumer checking accounts. We expanded our customer base and our market share. Specifically, we added 278,000 net new checking accounts this quarter, which brings our first six months of 2024 to more than 500,000. In wealth management, we added another 6,100 new relationships this quarter. In our commercial businesses, we added 1,000s of small businesses and 100s of commercial banking relationships. This has led to now managing $5.7 trillion in client balances, loans, deposits, and investments across the consumer and wealth management client segments. In those areas, we saw flows of $58 billion in the past four quarters. Our emphasis on personalized financial solutions and superior customer service has strengthened customer loyalty, attracted new clients across all our businesses. Our focus on providing liquidity and risk management solutions to our institutional clients positions to continue to gain more share of the wallet as well. Second, we continue to deliver innovative digital solutions. One of the primary contributors of both attracting and retaining customers to our platforms is our digital banking capabilities for our clients across all the businesses. Our fully integrated consumer banking investment app drives the utility for our customers across their investment and consumer accounts. Our use of stats are strong proof points. Our second language capabilities in our consumer businesses further enhance our customers' capabilities. You can see the continued digital growth in the slides on pages 26, 28, and 30 in the appendix. A couple highlights. Our consumer mobile banking app now serves more than 47 million active users. They logged in 3.5 billion times this quarter. We also continue to see more sales through the use of our digital properties. Digital sales represented 53% of our total sales in the past quarter in our consumer businesses. 23 million consumers are now using Zelle. They send money on Zelle at nearly 2.5 times the rate they write checks. And, in fact, more Zelle transactions -- send transactions take place than a combination of customer ATM transactions, cash withdrawals, and tellers. Simply put, Zelle has become a dominant way to move money. In our wealth management business, we are seeing more banking accounts being opened to complement the investment business those clients do with us. Importantly, these clients are also recognizing the ease of our digital banking capability. 75% of our new accounts and our Merrill teammates were open digitally. 87% of our global banking clients also are digitally active. We have innovated and significantly streamlined service requests by enabling clients to directly initiate and track transaction inquiries within our awarded CashPro platform, using AI to accomplish that. Third, we continue to make core strategic investments in our businesses. We're not complacent with the success you see on this page. We continue to strategically invest in our core businesses. A few examples, while we have the leading retail deposit share in America, we continue to invest and have opened 11 new financial centers this quarter -- in this first-half of the year and renovated another 243. This is an investment in both our expansion markets and our growth markets. In wealth management, we continue to invest in our advisor development program. It's grown to 2,300 teammates, allowing us to continuously add more than -- teammates to our 18,000 strong best-in-class financial advisory force across all our wealth management businesses. We're also adding teams of experienced advisors strategically in areas across the country. In our banking teams, we continue to add to our regional investment banking team. We now have more than 200 regional bankers across the country to better serve our commercial clients, and they complement our industry coverage to our corporate clients. In our global markets business, we continue to extend balance sheet to our clients in adding expertise and talent to continue to lead our market share improvements seen over the last several years. We also have increased our technology initiatives and expect to spend nearly $4 billion on technology initiatives this year. We have focused projects around artificial intelligence enhancements with both clients and our teammates. A recent example of our use of AI is our advisor and client insights tool. We've delivered more than 6 million insights here today to our financial advisors, providing them proactive reasons to engage our clients. AI has moved from cost savings ideas to enhancing the quality of our customer interactions. Fourth, organic growth is driving integrated flows across our business. We invest heavily in each line of business that compete in the markets based on their particular customer segment. But importantly, we also invest across our lines of business to knit them together and gain market share in the local markets. It's a differentiated advantage for us, our banking leadership position across our businesses and our nationwide franchise. For example, we leverage our franchise by connecting business customers with wealth management teams. Our teams across all our businesses have made 4 million referrals to other businesses in the first six months of this year. Next, we drive efficiency and effectiveness, and that's through our operational excellence platform. We continue to invest heavily in the future of our franchise and growth, while we also have to manage expenses day-to-day. Our focus on operational excellence has enabled us to hold our expense growth up to 2% year-over-year, well below the inflation rates. We continue to work to achieve operating leverages as NII stabilizes and begins to grow again. As you look at it now, Alistair will explain later, a fair portion of the year-over-year increase in expense is due to the formulaic incentives of wealth management due to the peak growth of that business. And last, our capital strength allows us to deliver for all our stakeholders. Our capital remains strong as we held our CET1 ratio at 11.9% this quarter. We grew loans, increased our share repurchases to $3.5 billion and paid $1.9 billion in dividends. Average diluted shares dropped below 8 billion shares outstanding. In addition, we also announced our intent to increase our quarterly dividend 8% upon board approval. Note that with 11.9% CET1 ratio, we remain in a solid excess capital position, both above the current regulatory requirements and the increased requirement to 10.7% beginning in October as a result of the recent CCAR exam. Let's turn to slide four. A couple things to note here. First, we've noted for several quarters that the second quarter NII would be the trough for this rate cycle. We expect NII to grow in the third quarter and fourth quarter of this year. Alistair is going to provide you some points in detail about the path forward. One of the important contributors to that change is deposit behaviors of our customers. On slide four, you'll note that average deposits grew 2% year-over-year and increased modestly linked quarter. The second quarter, in reality, is typically a heavy outflow quarter. We have a lot of customers who pay a lot of taxes in that quarter. Quarter-over-quarter increases in rates paid continue to slow again this quarter across all businesses except for wealth management. And we show you that on this page, slide four, by line of business. While wealth business deposit rates have moved higher with continued rotation, we expect those rates to begin to stabilize and the rate of quarterly change to decrease going forward. Turning to slide five, in previous calls, many of you asked questions or commented upon the question about consumer net charge-offs and when would they stabilize in the second-half of 2024. That expectation we have remains unchanged as well. This quarter's net charge-offs were 59 basis points. And for context, this is a stabilization of the rate. I would just remind you that prior to this quarter, I have to go all the way back to 2014 to see a charge-off rate of that high. And that's near when we were still emerging from the financial crisis. On slide four, we highlight the 30 and 90-day-plus credit card delinquency trends, which showed delinquencies have plateaued for the second consecutive quarter. This should lead to stabilized net credit losses in credit card in the second-half of the year. At the bottom of the page, note a couple of facts. First, on the payment rates. This is the rate of paydown on balances in a given month remain 20% above index to the pre-pandemic levels, even while our card customers have plenty of capacity to borrow. And importantly, because we're relation-based businesses, look at the right-hand slide at the bottom of page five. There you can see our deposit investment balances of our customers, who also have a card with us, remain 25% above their pre-pandemic levels, illustrating continued health of these customers. So if you think about consumer credit, the card charge-offs drive it, and they flattened out in terms of delinquencies, and we expect an improvement in the second-half. With regard to commercial real estate, our usual CRA credit exposure slide is included in our appendix. We continue to aggressively work through our loans in our modest CRA office portfolio. We saw a decrease in all the categories, a decrease in reservable criticized loans, a decrease in NPLs, and a decrease in net charge-offs. This supports our previous expectation that net charge-offs in the second-half of 2024 will be lower than the first-half of 2024. Our second quarter performance highlights Bank of America's ability to generate strong, sustainable growth through a combination of customer-centric strategies, innovation, strategic investments, and a commitment to a strong balance of risk and reward. We call that responsible growth. We're confident that focused approach will continue to drive long-term success and create value for you, our shareholders. Now I will turn it to Alistair for additional results.

net new consumer checking accounts second quarter of 2024


Brian Moynihan: Thank you, Lee, and good morning, and thank all of you for joining us for our discussion of our third quarter results. Bank of America continued to demonstrate strength this quarter in an economy that continued to be stable, albeit with slower growth and falling inflation. So many of you asked me from time-to-time what do we see in our own customer -- consumer customer base. As we talked about many times, our consumer payments is an indicator of activity. Those payments were up 4% to 5% year-over-year for the quarter in the total money those consumers moved in the economy. The pace of year-to-year money movement has been steady since late summer this year. After having fallen in the spring and early summer. This growth in consumer payments continues into October. This activity is consistent with how customers are spending money in the 2016 to 2019 timeframe. When the economy was growing, inflation was under control. This report is not meant to gainsay that consumers are worried of the cost of living, worried about higher rates and other matters. But overall activity is fine, unemployment is low and wage growth is steady, both of which bode well for the consumer overall and for consumer asset quality. With respect to what we see in our commercial businesses, it is consistent with a lower growth economy. Line of credit usage rates remain lower than pre-pandemic levels. This does not surprise us what with the dramatic increase in the cost of borrowing for small and medium-sized businesses. They aren't being indolent, they want to grow. They are simply being more careful and worry a final demand will hold. Therefore, they are being cost conscious across the board. So how did Bank of America do against this backdrop? At Bank of America, our commitment to responsible growth remains unwavering, and this quarter is another illustration of that. We grew, we did it the right way. In the third quarter, Bank of America generated $25.5 billion in revenue and earned $6.9 billion in net income after tax. Year-to-date, we've generated net income of just over $20 billion. Four quarters ago, we called that a bottom would occur in our net interest income in the second quarter of 2024. Even with a rate environment that has bounced around quite a bit since we said that we got it right. As we expected then, NII indeed troughed in the quarter two. NII grew 2% this quarter and Alastair will note later, we expect NII to grow again in quarter four, even as the market expects two more rate cuts in quarter four. This quarter, we saw a healthy revenue growth in our wealth and investment management business and in our global markets businesses. We returned 5.6 billion of capital to shareholders while also supporting the needs of our clients. So with that brief overview, let's dive into Slide 2. Earnings per share came in at $0.81 this quarter at $25.5 billion in revenue we grew modestly from the third quarter, '23 as improvement in noninterest income more than offset a year-over-year decline in net interest income. Fees grew 5% year-over-year and represented 45% of total revenue. The strong year-over-year fee performance was led by a 15% improvement in investment in brokerage services, mostly in our global wealth management business. We also grew investment banking fees 18% year-over-year sales and trading revenue increased 12% year-over-year and aggregate, these market related revenue streams rose an impressive 13% year-over-year. Our total expense in the company increased 4%. You can attribute most of the year-over-year expense growth to these market related areas. Overall, a good job by the team. On asset quality a few quarters ago we told you that consumer credit losses would go down this quarter, given delinquency trends we had seen at the time. We also told you that office losses would be lower. Both of these proved true again this quarter. Good asset quality resulted in net charge-off in provision expense for this quarter at $1.5 billion, which was unchanged from last quarter. Our performance is partly attributable to the diversity and balance of the company. A little more than half our earnings come from our consumer and GWIM businesses serving people and the other half come through from our Global Banking and Markets businesses serving companies and institutional investors. So let's turn to see how we grew organically this quarter. We are now on Slide 3. Our organic growth has been driven by a continued focus on customers and client experience throughout all our businesses. Consumer leads the way delivering solid organic growth with high quality accounts engaged clients. For the 23rd consecutive quarter, we added significant net new consumer checking accounts and expanded our customer base and market share. We added 360,000 net new checking accounts this quarter, which brings our first nine months of '24 to more than 880,000 net new checking accounts. In wealth management, we added another 5,500 net new relationships this quarter. In our commercial businesses, we added hundreds of small business and commercial banking relationships. Also note that we saw a strong organic growth of investment balances with banking customers and growth in banking products for our investment clients in our GWIM business. This has led us to now manage $5.9 trillion in client balances of loans, deposits and investments across the consumer and wealth management clients. We saw flows of $62 billion into those businesses in the past four quarters. In our Global Banking business, we saw loan demand start to pick up late in the quarter. We again ranked third in the logic IB fees we received and have a solid pipeline. Our global transaction services platform continues to grow around the world and showed strong deposit growth for our commercial businesses over the last year and a quarter. This quarter, global markets saw continued momentum. Global markets recorded the 10th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in sales and trading. Investments we've made in this business and the intensity of the teams has enabled a 35% improvement in sales and trading revenue in the past three years. Good work by Jimmy DeMare and the team. Our customers and clients continue to want more from us, especially when it comes to our digital capabilities. So let's discuss this on Slide 4. Slide 4 highlights this continued success across our digital platforms. As usual, we include our disclosures on digital stats across the business, which we believe lead the industry. I commend you the pages in the appendix, which give you more granular disclosure for each of the businesses' digital activities. Our fully integrated consumer banking investment application drives the utility for our customers across GWIM and consumer. The usage stats you see are strong proof points. Our second language capabilities also enhance the customer's experience. We have grown to more than 48 million active digital users and those digital users logged in more than 3.6 billion times this quarter. We also continue to see more sales through their digital properties. Digital sales represented 54% of our total consumer sales this quarter. Note that it simply takes both high-touch and high-tech to drive continued growth with individual clients across the wealth spectrum in America. Erica, our AI enabled virtual assistant reached 2.4 billion client interactions since its launch and Zelle showed continued user and usage increases. In our wealth management business, we continue to see full relationships increase with both investing and banking relationships being open. 75% of new accounts in Merrill were opened digitally whether they were banking accounts or investment accounts. This enables more efficient customer coverage for our advisory teams. Finally, 87% of our Global Banking relationship clients are digitally active. We have innovated and significantly streamlined service requests by enabling clients to directly initiate and track inquiries within our award winning cash flow platform. As a result, app sign-ins for these clients increased nearly 80% in just the last 24-months. In summary, the economic environment remains solid. Issues remain out there to external factors that could affect our business and the economy generally. We still see great opportunities for continued growth across all our businesses. We are focused on driving market share in all our businesses, investing in technology to further enhance the customer experience and continue to increase our efficiency. With NII now growing and complementing our fee growth along with our continued solid expense discipline, we expect to return to operating leverage as we move through the quarters in 2025. With that, I'll turn to Alastair for additional details.


Jim Mitchell: Hey, good afternoon. Maybe just dialing in on the deposit growth, you clearly have been outperforming the peer group. But maybe just want to focus on consumer for a second. You generated 1.1 million of net new checking accounts, which seems best among peers. I think that's showing up in better consumer deposit growth in 4Q. So, what do you think you're doing differently that's generating that kind of consistent success in adding new accounts?


Brian Moynihan: Look, at the end of the day, our brand is best received. You know, in terms of our scores, our customer service capabilities are scoring at the highest they've ever come. The fairness of our account structures, the transparency, the digital capabilities, it's just winning in the market. It's in a billion net new checking accounts and not -- you know, 92%, 90%, whatever they are, are primary. They start with an average balance of 2,000 to 3,000. They move to, you know, 6,000, 7,000 over the course of, you know, six months. This is just a great job done by Dean Athanasia and Aron Levine and Holly O'Neill that run this business for us, just continue to drive it. Then, on top of that, we've layered in ways with various business lines to help generate accounts. So, our work we do with companies to offer our best products and services as a benefit to their employees helps us generate some extra growth. Our ability to do business around college campuses, which is not huge for, you know, this quarter's growth. But because we're generating the amount of openings at twice the rate of young people exist in society for our customers five years ago, five years later the people are out working and they're great customers. So, it's a whole bunch of things. So, it's relentless and sustainable, you know, and yet, we still have lots of ways to grow. And we weren't in -- you know, we just entered a lot of markets over the last five years, you know, Denver, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Milwaukee now, Lexington, etc. That's one way. And then, if you think about in wealth management teammates -- and Katy Knox and Lindsay and Eric do a great job there, but we have a lot of room to go where we continue to outfit those clients with a full range of services at Bank of America. And even Merrill Edge has a lot going on there. So, there's a fair amount of deposits that come from our Merrill Edge originations, which are 300,000 accounts year over year. And, you know, those are all $100,000 starting accounts, not $3,000.


Alastair Borthwick: Yeah, okay. So, first of all, if I go back over the trajectory of deposits through the course of 2023, we troughed at [$1.845 trillion and we ended at $1.925 trillion] (ph). So underneath there, there's $80 billion of growth in deposits since May. So that obviously informs our perspective around how we think about deposit gathering at this stage. That feels to us like it's a supportive environment of our NII forecast. Second, obviously, over the course of this year, there's been a move towards more interest bearing. And that actually helps us in the event that we start seeing Fed cuts, because that's obviously going to allow us to take those rates down. So, look, we're going to see a little bit of rotation, I think, here in Q1 and Q2. I think we'll likely see a little bit of deposit pricing lag. But the last Fed hike at this point was July. So there's been an awful lot of time at this point for deposit pricing to shake out. We won't be immune from anything. We have to compete for deposits along with everyone else. But combine all of those things and that's where we get our confidence.


Brian Moynihan: Good morning, and thank you all of you for joining us. I'm starting on Slide 2 of the materials. Your company produced one of its highest core EPS, earnings numbers in a challenged operating environment in the first quarter. Simply put, we navigated that environment well. The preparedness and strength of Bank of America and the trust of our clients reflects a decade-long responsible growth model and relationship nature of our franchise. During quarter one, importantly, organic growth engine continued to perform. Let me first summarize some points, and I'll turn it over to Alastair to take you through the details of the quarter. If you go to Slide 2 of the materials, Bank of America delivered strong earnings, growing EPS 18% over first quarter '22. Every business segment performed well. We grew clients and accounts organically and at a strong pace. We delivered our seventh straight quarter of operating leverage, led by a 13% year-over-year revenue growth. We further strengthened our balance sheet, with our CET1 ratio increasing to 11.4%. Regulatory capital ended at the highest nominal level in our history at $184 billion. We maintained strong liquidity. We ended the quarter with more than $900 billion in Global Liquidity Sources. We are in good returns for you as our shareholders, with a return on tangible common equity of 17%, a 107 basis points return on average assets. Tangible book value per share grew 9% year-over-year. We did this as the economy slowed. And, remember, our research team continues to predict a shallow recession that will occur beginning in the quarter three of 2023. It's interesting, when we look at our consumer behavior, payments by consumer continued to drive the U.S. economy. We've seen debit and credit card spending at about 6% year-over-year growth pace, a little slower but still healthy. But, remember, card spending represents less than a quarter of how consumers pay for things out of their accounts at Bank of America. Overall payments from our customers' accounts across all sources were up 9% year-over-year for March as a month. Year-to-date, they were up about 8% for the quarter. After slowing in the back half of 2022 a bit, we saw the payments -- pace of payments picked back up in quarter one, especially in the latter parts of the quarter. Consumers' financial positions remains generally healthy. They're employed with generally higher wages, continue to have strong account balances, and have good access to credit. As you think through all the tightening actions of the Fed, the flows to alternative yielding assets, investments and the disruption the past quarter, our deposits continued to perform well, ending the quarter at $1.91 trillion. If you think about it, that's about the same balance that we had in mid-October of 2022. So, we've seen these balances stabilize and remain 34% above they were in prior to the pandemic. The team has managed well during these periods by remaining focused on the things we can control to drive value through our franchise. I thank them for a very strong quarter, near-record earnings with strong returns. Let me turn the call over to Alastair to walk through the details of the quarter.


Brian Moynihan: So a couple things. One, just broad base, we have a $1.9 trillion deposit, $1 trillion of loan. So we have a tremendously high deposit base. But also, if you think about, if you look at the Slide 5 or whatever, as we show the deposits by business, in the banking business, Global Banking, I think six quarters we've been relatively flat, so, and starting to grow off of that. That is fully priced at -- it's not like corporate treasurers wait around to talk to you about what you're paying and the noninterest-bearing percentage has drifted down. The amount they hold in excess of that, part of that to pay fees has been relatively stable. And so, we feel very good about that. Looking at Wealth Management, basically all the movement was made -- has been made pretty much to the higher rate environment, i.e. buying treasury securities directly. If you look in our Wealth Management business, the amount of short-term cash-oriented type investments, money market funds, et cetera, treasuries, et cetera, has gone from like $500 billion to $700 billion or $800 billion over the last several -- last couple of years. So that move has taken place. And so the rest of it is now in a relatively stable base. You can see those numbers flat. If you go to the consumer side, there's basically two or three things. One is, in the medium income households plus or minus, you're seeing the slow spend down even though they still have multiples of what they had pre-pandemic in their accounts. And even though that's a small part of the overall deposit base, there's still this low trend that where that's drifting down as all the things you read about go on. And the higher end part of that base, in a broad consumer base, they're actually below the pandemic by about 20%. And that's because they moved the money into the market. And you can see that in some of the preferred category of pricing. So where people think about checking and money markets and this, we think, I always have thought about it a little more straightforward, which is transactional cash and investment cash. The investment cash has largely been re-suited across the businesses. The transactional cash holds because it's money in motion moving every day. And for our Consumer business, that’s represented by the $0.5 trillion of checking account balance, as you can see on the page, with some modest amounts in money markets and stuff that are carried as the cushion people have. And if they've moved the money to market, they've moved it. And so we're watching Consumer because there's a little more drifting there, and it's up $250 billion since pre-pandemic. And you're saying you have the dynamics of loans, student loan repayment starting, that's a million of our customers pay student loans. You have the dynamics of interest rate impacts on cash carry of loan balance if that's higher. And that'll sort out, but just takes a lot longer. That's across 37 million people. So it’s a -- the impact takes a while to sort through. And so we feel good about it. But I think people look by category in this and that. You have to think about more how a customer, which a business or consumer, behaves. And what we've seen them is adjust their behavior based on their household circumstances, and largely through the system, and most of it coming a little bit slower in consumer, just because natural question is there, if there are a lot of stimulus went in those accounts, what do I do with it over time? And now they're doing something.


Alastair Borthwick: Yeah. Well, I think, Jim, going back to last quarter, I don't think our views have changed a great deal. So our guidance isn't changing much either in that regard, if anything, Q4 deposits were a little better than we expected. So I think, you see and -- we sort of thought this quarter might be around $14 billion. It was a little better than that. So that's obviously a good starting point. Now, when we look forward off of that slightly higher number, if you think about Q1, I'm thinking about it in terms of a date count, that might be $150 million, let's say. So from where we are, that's going to get us to somewhere between $13.9 billion and $14 billion. It's going to be in that kind of a range. Q2, we see going down just a little bit more. That's a little bit of deposit seasonality in Q1 and a little bit of just catch up on rate paid and some rotation. But at that point, we see growing in the back half of the year, and that's largely, yes, deposits growing, it's loans growing a little bit, it's some restriking of the securities that come off the balance sheet, and it's restriking some of the loans that come off the balance sheet. So it's all of those things. You're right. When we got together last quarter, we thought there might be three rate cuts. Now it's up to six. So that's obviously a -- that's a little harder but the deposit picture has been a little better. So no particular change at this point.


Glenn Schorr: Hello, there. Good morning. First question is on the deposits. And I like the path that we've seen in terms of all the stimulus comes, all the deposits come in, you get some spending, you get some migration, you get some rich people buying treasuries. It's great. To see the stability in the fourth quarter and hear your comments about 2024 for deposits is a little encouraging. We'd always want more, but it's a little encouraging. But my question is, to be 35% higher in 4Q '19 is what I would call a lot more growth than a normal period of time would be with the up and down. So is that a good thing or is that a risk? And maybe the answer lies within how much of those excess deposits are sitting in all these new accounts that you've opened versus just cash from sitting around in existing clients that's maybe waiting to be deployed. I hope that question is clear.


Alastair Borthwick: Thank you Brian. I’m going to start on Slide 4 of the earnings presentation. Brian covered much of the income statement highlights and he noted the difference in our reported results and the results adjusted for the FDIC assessment, so I’m not going to repeat that; I’d just add that we delivered strong returns. On a reported basis, our return on average assets was 83 basis points, and return on tangible common equity was 12.7%. When adjusted for the FDIC assessment, our efficiency ratio was 64%, ROA at 89 basis points, and ROTCE at 14%. Let’s move to the balance sheet on Slide 5, where we ended the quarter at $3.27 trillion of total assets, up $94 billion from the fourth quarter, and the bulk of that increase was in global markets to support seasonally elevated levels of client activity. Outside of the global markets activity, we’d highlight both the $23 billion growth in deposits and the $20 billion decline in cash levels. With that increase in liquidity, you’ll also note that debt securities increased $39 billion, which included an $8 billion decline in hold-to-maturity securities and a $47 billion increase in AFS securities. Those are mostly hedged U.S. treasuries added with yields effectively at cash rates. At $313 billion, our absolute cash levels remain higher than required. Liquidity remains strong with $909 billion of global liquidity sources, and that’s up $12 billion from the fourth quarter and remains $333 billion above our pre-pandemic fourth quarter ’19 level. Shareholder equity increased $1.9 billion [indiscernible] earnings, as they were only partially offset by capital distributed to shareholders, and AOCI was little changed in the quarter. During the quarter, we paid out $1.9 billion in common dividends and we bought back $2.5 billion in shares, which more than offset our employee awards. As part of those share awards in the first quarter, we announced our seventh consecutive year of share and success compensation awards, covering more than 95% of our associates and further aligning their interests with shareholders. Tangible book value per share of $24.79 is up 9% year-over-year. Looking at regulatory capital, our CET-1 level improved to $197 billion from December 31, and the CET-1 ratio was stable at 11.8% and remained well above our current 10% requirement. We also remain quite well positioned against the current proposed capital rules as our CET-1 level is also above the 10% requirement even when we include estimated RWA inflation from those new proposed rules. Risk-weighted assets increased modestly, driven by client activity in global markets, and our supplemental leverage ratio was 6% compared to a minimum requirement of 5%, which leaves capacity for balance sheet growth. At $475 billion of total loss absorbing capital, our TLAC ratio remains comfortably above our requirements. Let’s turn our balance sheet focus to loans by looking at the average balances in Slide 6. Average loans in the first quarter of $1.048 trillion were flat compared to the fourth quarter, and they improved 1% year-over-year as solid credit card growth was partially offset by declines in securities-based lending. Commercial loans grew modestly year-over-year. We experienced modest improvement in revolver utilization in commercial lending in the first quarter, and that’s being offset for the most part by pay downs as larger client financing solutions are being met through capital markets access. Lastly on a positive note, loan spreads continued to widen. Moving to deposits, we’ll stay focused on averages on Slide 7, and relative to pre-pandemic Q4 2019, average deposits are still up 35%. Every line of business remains well above their pre-pandemic levels and consumer is up 32%, with checking up 38% driven by net new checking accounts added, as Brian noted earlier. Linked quarter total average deposits remained steady at more than $1.9 trillion. The total rate paid on consumer deposits in the quarter was 55 basis points, and while the rate increased nine basis points from the fourth quarter, the pace of increases continues to slow. The mix of low rate and high quality transactional accounts keeps the rate paid low. Wealth management and global banking also saw a slowdown in the increases in their rate paid and slowdown in the rotation out of non-interest bearing accounts in the first quarter. Focusing for a moment on ending deposits and movement from the fourth quarter, this quarter we delivered good deposit growth. Total deposits grew $23 billion and are now $100 billion above their trough in mid-May of 2023. Consumer banking deposits saw growth in both consumer interest-bearing and non-interest bearing. Global banking continued their more normal pattern of deposits seen for the past five quarters and up more than $30 billion over the last year. Deposit growth exceeded loan growth for the third straight quarter and our excess of deposits over loans expanded to $897 billion, and that’s nearly two times the $450 billion we had pre-pandemic. You can see that on the upper left-hand side of Slide 8. We continue to have a mix of cash, available-for-sale securities and held-to-maturity securities, and this quarter our combination of cash and AFS is now 52% of the total $1.2 trillion noted on this page. You’ll also notice the continued change in mix of the shorter term portfolio as we again lower cash and increase AFS securities that are mostly hedged and at similar yields to the cash. Note also the hold-to-maturity book continues to decline from pay downs. In total, the hold-to-maturity book is now down $96 billion from its peak and consists of about $122 billion in treasuries and about $458 billion in mortgage-backed securities, along with $7 billion of other securities. Lastly, a blended cash and securities yield of 360 basis points continued to rise and remained about 168 basis points above the rate we paid for deposits. The replacement of lower earning assets into higher yielding assets continues to provide an ongoing benefit to NII. Let’s turn our focus to NII performance using Slide 9, where you can see on a fully tax-equivalent basis NII was $14.2 billion. Good deposit growth provided a strong start to the year for NII, and as Brian noted, NII of $14.2 billion increased by $100 million from the fourth quarter. That compares to our expectation and guidance of a decline of $100 million to $200 million, and that would have resulted in NII this quarter of $13.9 billion to $14 billion, so we did quite a bit better than we had originally expected. The improvement in quarterly NII in Q1 compared to Q4 included the benefits of higher yielding assets and improvement in global markets NII, partially offset by higher deposit cots and one less day in Q1 than 4Q23. Deposit balance activity more generally also aided in the beat versus our expectations. As we look forward for Q2, we expect some modest impact of lower deposits in wealth management as client make their seasonal income tax payments, and we expect global markets NII to decline mostly seasonally a little bit as well, so we expect second quarter NII could approach $14 billion on an FTE basis. Further, we continue to expect that Q2 will be the low point for NII and we expect the back half of 2024 to grow. Compared to our guidance last quarter, we’re obviously growing off a larger base of NII after having outperformed in the first quarter. With regard to that forward view, let me just note a few other caveats. It includes our assumption that interest rates in the forward curve at the end of the quarter materialize, and at the end of first quarter there were still three cuts expected this year, starting in June. Our forward view also includes an expectation of low single-digit loan growth and some moderate growth in deposits as we move into the back half of 2024. Given our recent deposit and loan performance, we continue to feel good about these assumptions. Turning to asset sensitivity and focused on a forward yield curve basis, our sensitivity to the plus and minus-100 basis points parallel shift in the forward curve at March 31 remains well balance. Let’s turn to expense, and we’ll use Slide 10 for that discussion, where we reported $17.2 billion expense this quarter including the FDIC assessment. Adjusted for the assessment, expenses were $16.5 billion and the increase over the fourth quarter included a little more than $400 million in seasonal payroll tax expense, as well as higher revenue-related costs and, to a lesser extent, annual merit increases and other annual awards, like sharing success awards provided this quarter. $16.5 billion was just a little above our forecast for Q1 which we made last quarter, and the increase is driven by better than expected fee revenue across wealth management, investment banking, and sales and trading, and as Brian said, that’s a trade-off we’re more than happy to make, bringing more earnings to the bottom line. While expense is up almost 2% from last year, we simply remind you inflation is up by more than 4% and we’ve increased our investment, and we’re paying for the revenue growth, so we think it represents good work by our teams. As we look forward in Q2, we expect a decline from the Q1 level as we typically see about two-thirds of the Q1 elevate payroll tax expense come back out, and the remainder of the year expense is expected to trend down. Continued digital engagement savings and operational excellent initiatives should help us offset other cost increases for people and technology through the back half of the year. Turning to credit on Slide 11, provision expense was $1.3 billion in the first quarter, and that included $179 million of reserve release due to a modestly improved macro environment outlook as the baseline consensus expectations improved from the fourth quarter. On a weighted basis, we remain reserved for an unemployment rate of nearly 5% by the end of 2025 compared to the most recent actual 3.8% rate. Net charge-offs of $1.5 billion increased $306 million from the fourth quarter, driven by continued credit card seasoning and commercial real estate office exposures as swift revaluations from current appraisals and resolutions drove higher charge-offs. The net charge-off ratio was 58 basis points, a 13 basis point increase from the fourth quarter. On Slide 12, we show you the credit quality metrics for both our consumer and commercial portfolios. Consumer net charge-offs increased $150 million versus the fourth quarter from the flow-through of higher late stage credit card delinquencies. We included a credit card delinquency slide, No. 28 in our appendix, and we’re encouraged by the trend of delinquencies because the late stage increases slowed and early stage delinquencies improved as well, and that leads us to believe we should begin to see consumer net charge-offs start to level out over the next quarter or so. All of this is still well within our risk appetite and our expectations, and it’s consistent with the normalization of credit we discussed with you in prior calls. Commercial net charge-offs increased $191 million versus the fourth quarter, driven by commercial real estate losses and office exposures. On office losses this quarter, we recorded charge-offs on 16 office loans. Four were a result of sales activity, i.e. final resolution, seven were from losses that we expect on exposures that are in the process of expected resolution in the course of the next 90 days, and the rest we took as a result of refreshed valuations. We use a continuous and thorough loan-by-loan analysis and we’re quick to recognize impacts in the commercial real estate office space through our risk ratings, and that’s resulted in several downgrades in the last few quarters. As a result of these quick actions and our downgrades in categorization, we’ve also refreshed the valuation of our reservable criticized properties, and we’ve taken appropriate reserves and charge-offs in the process. Roughly one-third of our office exposure is now categorized as reservable criticized, and importantly the pace of the increase in reservable criticized exposures has slowed each quarter since the second quarter of last year, so we believe the losses on these office properties have been front-loaded and largely reserved. We expect the losses to move lower in the second quarter and we expect a notable decline in the second half of the year when compared to the first half of this year, absent any material change in expected real estate prices. In the appendix on Slide 29, we’ve included a current view of our commercial real estate and office portfolio metrics, as we usually do. Let’s turn to the various lines of business and offer some brief comments on their results, starting on Slide 13 with consumer banking. For the quarter, consumer banking earned $2.7 billion on continued strong organic growth. The reported earnings declined 15% year-over-year as revenue declined from lower deposit balances compared to the first quarter of ’23. Credit card loss normalization also caused year-over-year provision expense to increase. As Brian noted, customer activity showed another strong quarter of net new checking growth, another strong period of card openings, and investment balances for consumer clients which climbed 29% year-over-year to a record $456 billion. That included market appreciation and also very strong full-year flows of $44 billion. As noted earlier, loans grew nicely year-over-year from credit card as well as small business, where we remain the industry leader. Expenses were flat year-over-year, fighting off inflation, merit increases, higher minimum wages, and new and renovated financial centers and technology investments, so holding expense flat reflected very good work by the consumer team. As you can see on the appendix, Page 20, digital adoption and engagement continued to improve, reaching a record of $3.4 billion digital log-ins in the quarter, and it showed good year-over-year improvement. Customer satisfaction scores at near record levels illustrate the continued appreciation of the enhanced capabilities we provide. Moving to wealth management on Slide 14, we produced good results, and that included good organic client activity, market favorability and strong flows. Our comprehensive suite of investment and advisory services coupled with a commitment to personalized wealth management planning and solutions has enabled us to meet the diverse needs and aspirations of our clients. In first quarter, we reported record revenue of $5.6 billion and a little more than $1 billion in net income. That net income was 10% from the first quarter of ’23. The business generated positive operating leverage and grew revenue faster than expense, while improving the pre-tax margin year-over-year. While overall average loans were down year-over-year, driven by the securities-based lending, it’s worth noting the strong growth we’re seeing in custom lending, and ending loans in the wealth management custom loan book are up 6% year-over-year. As Brian noted earlier, both Merrill and the private bank continued to see strong organic growth and produce good assets under management flows of more than $60 billion since the first quarter of ’23, which reflects a good mix of new client money, as well as existing clients putting money to work. Expense growth here matched the revenue growth, otherwise fighting off higher investment costs and inflation. Let me also highlight the continued digital momentum here. As an example, Merrill has 86% of its clients now engaging with us digitally and 80% utilizing e-delivery. 76% of their eligible accounts are now opened digitally, so the cost for us to open is half and the customer cycle times are improved greatly. On Slide 15, you’ll see our global banking results, and the business produced earnings of just less than $2 billion, down 22% year-over-year as improved investment banking fees and treasury services revenue were overcome by lower net interest income and higher provision expense. Revenue declined 4% driven by the impact of interest rates and deposit rotation to interest-bearing, and that impacted NII. The diversification of our revenue across products and regions continues to reflect the strength in this platform, and GTS and investment banking fees are good examples. In our global treasury services business, some of the NII pressure from higher rates on deposits is offset by the fees paid for moving and managing the cash of clients, and that continues to grow with existing clients as well as with new client generation. As Brian noted, investment banking had a strong quarter, and at $1.6 billion in investment banking fees, this quarter was the strongest quarter in seven years, absent the pandemic 2020 and 2021 periods. An increase in provision expense included the commercial real estate net charge-offs I discussed earlier, as well as a larger reserve release in the prior year period. Expense increased 2% year-over-year, including the 35% lift in investment banking fees from the first quarter of ’23. Switching to global markets on Slide 16, we’ll focus our comments on results excluding DVA, as we normally do. The team had another terrific quarter with $1.8 billion in earnings, growing 7% year-over-year. Revenue improved 6% from the first quarter of ’23 and return on average allocated capital was 16%. Focusing on sales and trading ex-DVA, revenue improved 2% year-over-year to $5.2 billion, which is the highest first quarter result in over a decade. FICC was down 4% while equities increased 15% compared to the first quarter of ’23. The decline in the FICC revenues versus the first quarter was driven by a weaker macro trading quarter that was partially offset by better mortgage trading results. Equities was driven by strong trading results in derivatives, and year-over-year expenses were up 4% from continued investment in the business. Finally on Slide 17, all other shows a loss of $700 million driven by the FDIC assessment. Revenue declined year-over-year, reflecting higher investment tax credit yields, and expense adjusted for the FDIC assessment was down $133 million, driven by lower unemployment processing costs. Our effective tax rate for the quarter was 8%, and excluding the FDIC assessment and other discrete items, it would have been 9%. Further excluding tax credits related to investments in renewable energy and affordable housing, our effective tax rate would have been 26%. Thank you, and with that, we’ll jump into Q&A.


Alastair Borthwick: Thank you, Brian, and I'm going to start on slide six of the earnings presentation. I'll touch on more highlights noted on slide six as we work through the material. I just want to say upfront that we delivered strong returns with return on average assets of 85 basis points and a return on tangible common equity of nearly 14%. So let's move to the balance sheet on slide seven, where you can see we ended the quarter at $3.26 trillion of total assets, relatively unchanged from the first quarter. And not much to note here apart from a mixed shift of lower securities balances, mostly offset by an increase in reverse repo and modest loan growth, as well as global markets client activity. On the funding side, deposits declined $36 billion on an ending basis, reflecting typical seasonal customer payments of income taxes. And as Brian noted, average deposits were still modestly higher. Liquidity remained strong with $909 billion of global liquidity sources that was flat compared to the first quarter. Shareholders' equity was also flat compared to Q1, as earnings were offset by $5.4 billion in capital distributed to shareholders and a $1.9 billion redemption of preferred stock in the quarter. The $5.4 billion of capital contributions included $1.9 billion in common dividends and the repurchase of $3.5 billion in shares. AOCI improved modestly in the quarter and tangible book value per share of $25.37 rose 9% from the second quarter of last year. In terms of regulatory capital, our CET1 level improved to $198 billion and the CET1 ratio was stable at 11.9%. This 11.9% ratio remained well above our current 10% requirement, as well as our new 10.7% requirement as of October 1, 2024. Risk-weighted assets increased modestly and that was driven by lending activity. Our supplemental leverage ratio was 6% versus our minimum requirement of 5% and that leaves plenty of capacity for balance sheet growth. And our $468 billion of TLAC means our total loss-absorbing capital ratio remains comfortably above our requirements. Brian already covered deposit trends, so let's turn the balance sheet focus to loans and we'll look at average balances on slide eight. You can see average loans in Q2 of $1.051 trillion. They improved 1% year-over-year, driven by 5% credit card growth and modest commercial growth. The modest improvement in overall commercial loans included a 2% increase in our domestic commercial loans and leases, partially offset by a 4% decline in commercial real estate. Middle market lending saw an uptick in the quarter, and we saw good demand in our wealth businesses from custom lending. These areas of growth were largely offset by continued paydowns from our larger corporate clients on interest rate sentiment. Consumer growth was driven by credit card borrowing, and while home lending balances were flattish, originations picked up a bit this quarter. Lastly, and on a positive note, loan spreads continued to widen. As we turn our focus then to NII performance and slide nine, note that we moved the slide we typically use to talk about excess deposits to the appendix on slide 22, so you can see that there. Our excess deposit levels above loans remained high at $850 billion and continue to be a good source of value for shareholders. 52% of our excess liquidity is now in short-dated cash and available for sale securities. The longer-dated, lower-yielding hold-to-maturity book continues to roll off, and we reinvested again this quarter in higher-yielding assets. The blended yield of cash and securities continued to improve in the quarter and is now 160 basis points above our deposit rate paid. Regarding NII, on a GAAP [Technical Difficulty]


Brian Moynihan: Yes. I think that's very business and more importantly, customer-specific views, Gerard. So we think of our deposit strategies in the context of how our customers utilize our services. And so, if you think about the parts that priced up in Global Banking or the investment-related cash in the Consumer business and Wealth Management, that will come back down as rates come, because the short-term equivalents come down, some is absolutely mechanical because it's actually priced to meet a money market fund equivalent that will happen. And so, yes, I think if you think about us being all in, if you look on that slide at 203 basis points, there'll be some pickup as rates come down in those higher things. The zero interest balance accounts are low-interest checking. You know, they don't really move because there's zero interest or low interest, so they'll be kind of static, but they're still extremely valuable in the current context. So when you think of all the consumer, I think 60 odd basis-points or something, that's driven by the fact that we have $40-odd million transactional primary checking accounts that is growing at $1 million a year, meant, multiple years in a row, $900,000 a million a year that are maturing from $3,000 up to $7,000 or $8,000 in balances as people mature the relationship with us, that's where the tremendous value in the deposit base this company goes. And so if you think about $1.91 trillion having grown $100 billion almost from the trough, you think about it growing linked-quarter, multiple quarters in a row, you think about even as we look now to buy the balances above that amount. Yes, that -- those are good dynamics. So we think about it, but it will move. But if you remember, part of our deposit pricing is never going to move to zero.


Erika Najarian: Hi, good morning. Alastair, just a clarification. You gave us the quarterly expected trajectory for expenses. Do you still expect to hit $62.5 billion or so of full year expenses in '23?


Glenn Schorr: Good morning. So, no one to take issue with 600 basis points of operating leverage. But I just always like doing a little gut check. Expenses are up 5%. I heard all the reasons why a lot of investment, FDIC charges coming, but I just wanted to make sure did anything change over the last like decade or so, you've been basically flat for life? Is expenses more of a relative game throughout the revenues or do you think you can keep expenses in and around the same area as we continue to invest. Thanks.