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?


Alastair Borthwick: Thanks, Brian. And on Slide 10, we present the summary income statement. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here because Brian touched on this and the highlights that we show on Slide 3. For the quarter, we generated $7.8 billion in net income, resulting in $0.90 per diluted share. Both of those are up the double digits from the third quarter of last year. The year-over-year revenue growth of 3% was led by improvement in net interest income, coupled with a strong 8% increase in sales and trading results, and that excludes DVA, and a 4% increase in investment in brokerage revenue driven by our Wealth Management businesses. Expense for the quarter of $15.8 billion included good discipline from our team, which allowed us to reduce costs from the second quarter, even as we continue our planned investments for marketing, technology and physical presence build-outs, including financial center openings and renovations. Asset quality remains stellar, and provision expense for the quarter was $1.2 billion. That consisted of $931 million of net charge-offs and $303 million of reserve build. The provision expense reflects the continued trend in charge-offs toward pre-pandemic levels and remains below historical levels. Our charge-off rate was 35 basis points, that's 2 basis points higher than the second quarter, and still below the 39 basis points we saw in the fourth quarter of '19. And as a reminder, that 2019 was a multi-decade low. 30-day delinquencies also remained below their fourth quarter '19 level. Lastly, our tax rate this quarter was 4%, driven mostly by higher-than-expected volume of investment tax credit, or ITC deals for the rest of the year. And we can expect other income in Q4 will reflect seasonally higher renewables investment losses when these projects get placed into service. Okay. Let's turn to the balance sheet that's on Slide 11. And you can see it ended the quarter at $3.2 trillion, up $31 billion from the second quarter. So not a lot to note here. The driver of the increase was a $34 billion increase in available for sales securities. With cash levels so high, we chose to reduce the cash and just put some of the money into short-term T-bills this quarter, and those earn essentially the same rate as cash. Our cash remains high at $352 billion. In addition to the cash level change, we saw another $11 billion decline in hold to maturity securities as those securities matured and paid down. And as Brian noted, global excess liquidity sources remain strong at $859 billion, that's down very modestly from the second quarter, and still remains approximately $280 billion above our pre-pandemic fourth quarter '19 level. Shareholders' equity increased $4 billion from the second quarter as earnings were only partially offset by capital distributed to shareholders. During the quarter, we paid out $1.9 billion in common dividends and we bought back $1 billion in shares to offset our employee awards. AOCI was $1.1 billion lower, reflecting both a modest decline in the value of AFS securities, modestly impacting CET1 as well as a small change in cash flow hedges, which doesn't impact the regulatory capital. Tangible book value per share is up 12% year-over-year. Turning to regulatory capital. our CET1 level improved to $194 billion from June 30, and our CET1 ratio improved 30 basis points to 11.9%. It's now well above our current 9.5% requirement as Brian noted. Risk-weighted assets declined modestly as loans and Global Markets RWA both moved lower. Our supplemental leverage ratio was 62% versus a minimum requirement of 5%, which leaves capacity for balance sheet growth and our TLAC ratio remains well above our requirements. LCR ratios remain well above minimums for BAC metrics and stronger at the bank level. Let's now focus on loans by looking at average balances on Slide 12. And loan growth slowed this quarter as a decline in demand for commercial borrowing more than offset our credit card growth. So we saw that lower commercial demand in lower revolver utilization among higher funding costs. And commercial balances were also impacted by term loan repayments due to borrowers accessing other capital market solutions. Focusing for a moment on average deposits and using Slide 13. Given Brian's earlier comments, I'll just note the comparisons. Relative to pre-pandemic fourth quarter '19, average deposits are up 33%. Consumer is up 36%, with consumer checking up 45%. And you can see the other segment comparisons on the page. Turning to Slide 14. Let's extend the conversation we’ve been having over the course of the past couple of quarters around management of our excess liquidity. This slide serves as a reminder of the size of our high-quality deposit book, the magnitude of deposits we have in excess of those needed to fund loans and the way we've extracted the value of that excess to deliver value back to our shareholders. The excess of deposits needed to fund loans increased from $420 billion pre-pandemic to a peak of $1.1 trillion in the fall of 2021. And as you can see, it remains high at $835 billion today. That $1.1 trillion of excess liquidity has always included a balanced mix of cash, available for sale securities, and securities we hold to maturity. In late 2020 and into 2021, we concluded that additional stimulus was going to remain in client accounts for an extended period, and we increased the hold to maturity securities portion so we could lock in value from those deposits. And we made these investments given the core nature of our customers' deposits. Note, the split of the shorter-term investments in cash and available-for-sale securities, and then the term hold to maturity securities. And I just draw your attention to just how much cash we have above the actual level we need to run the company. On the available-for-sale, we would just note the duration is less than six months as it's mostly all short-term treasuries. And the combination of the cash and available-for-sale securities represents about 47% of the total noted on this page in the third quarter of '23 to give us the balance we're looking for. And if we look at the hold-to-maturity book, it had grown from $190 billion pre-pandemic, peaking two years ago, and now falling to just over $600 billion currently. That $600 billion consists of about $122 billion in treasuries. Those will mature in a little more than six years, and about $474 billion in mortgage-backed securities and a few billion other. Hold to maturity securities peaked at $683 billion, and we're now down $80 billion from the peak and $11 billion in last quarter. That $80 billion decline from peak was all driven by the reduction of mortgages from $555 billion to $474 billion. With less loan funding needs over the past several quarters, the proceeds from security paydowns have been deployed into higher-yielding cash, and this mix shift has been happening at about a 300 basis point spread benefit for these assets. Given the increased cash rates, the combined cash and security yield has risen now to more than 3%. It's up more than 200 basis points since the peak size of the portfolio in the third quarter of '21, and it's risen faster than the rate paid on deposits. In fact, today, it's 178 basis points above what we pay for deposits. And remember also, we have $1 trillion of loans that are largely in floating rate in addition. From a valuation perspective, we did experience a decline in the valuation of the hold-to-maturity book this quarter, and that's in the context of mortgage rates reaching a two-decade high. Comparing the valuation change to the year-ago period, it worsened $15 billion. And over that same time period, we grew regulatory capital by $19 billion and hold global liquidity sources in excess of $850 billion. And importantly, as we move to Slide 15, I'll make one final comment here, which is the improved NII over this investment period. The net interest income, excluding Global Markets, which we disclose each quarter, troughed in Q3 '20 at $9.1 billion, that compares to $13.9 billion in the third quarter of '23 or $4.7 billion higher every quarter on a quarterly basis, and that gives a sense of the entire balance sheet working together. Okay. Let's now turn our focus to NII performance over the past quarter, and we'll talk about the path forward, and I'm going to use Slide 15 for that. On last quarter's call, we guided to expect Q3 NII to be about $14.2 billion to $14.3 billion on an FTE basis. Our third quarter performance turned out to be better than our guidance. And on an FTE basis, NII was $14.5 billion this quarter. We expect Q4 will be around $14 billion fully taxable equivalent, and that increases our full year guidance for NII in 2023 versus 2022 to 9% growth per year. We believe NII will hover around this expected fourth quarter $14 billion level, plus or minus, in the first half of next year, and then we anticipate modest growth in the half of 2024. By the time we get to the fourth quarter of 2024, we believe we can see NII up low single digits compared to the fourth quarter of 2023. The good news is we believe NII will likely trough around the fourth quarter level of $14 billion and begin to grow again in the middle of next year. I'd note a few caveats around that forward view I just provided. It includes an assumption that interest rates in the forward curve materialize and it includes rate cuts for the second half of 2024. It also includes an expectation of modest loan and deposit growth as we move into the second half of 2024. Focusing again on this quarter, $14.5 billion NII was an increase of nearly $700 million from the third quarter of '22, or 4%, while our net interest yield improved 5 basis points to 2.11%. The year-over-year improvement was driven by higher interest rates and partially offset by lower deposit balances. On a linked-quarter comparison, NII improved $239 million from Q2, and that comes from the benefit of an extra day of interest, a rate hike and higher global markets NII, partially offset by increased deposit pricing. And the net interest yield improved 5 basis points. Turning to asset sensitivity and focused on a forward yield curve basis, the plus 100 basis point parallel shift at September 30 was $3.1 billion of expected NII benefit over the next 12 months from our banking book. And that expects -- or that assumes no expected change in balance sheet levels or mix relative to our baseline forecast, and 95% of the sensitivity is driven by short rates. The 100 basis point down rate scenario was $3.3 billion. Okay. Let's turn to expense, and we'll use Slide 16 for the discussion. Previously highlighted that we guided you to a trend of sequential declines in our expense each quarter this year, and we achieved that in Q3 with our expense down $200 million to $15.8 billion. Additionally, we expect the fourth quarter to go down another couple of hundred million to $15.6 billion, excluding any FDIC special assessment. That would mean our fourth quarter expense of $15.6 billion, compared to the fourth quarter of '22, would be up by only $100 million or less than 1%. And we're proud of that work by the team, especially considering our regular FDIC insurance expense alone increased by $125 million quarterly starting in the first quarter of this year. So without that, we would be flat year-over-year in Q4. The decline this quarter from the second was driven by the reduction in litigation expense and lower headcount, offset somewhat by investments in inflationary costs. Our headcount is down nearly 2,800 from the second quarter to 213,000. And that includes the addition of 2,500 or so full-time campus hires we brought into the company. So that's good work by the team after we peaked at 218,000 in January month-end. And you see the movement here across the past year at the bottom left of the slide. As we look forward to next quarter, we'd add $1.9 billion of expense for the proposed notice of special assessment from the FDIC as a possibility. Absent that, we'd expect our fourth quarter $15.6 billion expense target to more fully benefit from the third quarter headcount reductions, and that will allow expense to continue the decline experienced throughout the year so far. All of that is going to set us up well for next year. Let's now turn to credit, and we'll turn to Slide 17. Net charge-offs of $931 million increased $62 million from the second quarter. The increase is driven by credit card losses as higher late-stage delinquencies flow through to charge-offs. For context, the credit card net charge-off rate rose 12 basis points to 2.72% in Q3, and it remains below the 3.03% pre-pandemic rate in the fourth quarter of '19. Provision expense was $1.2 billion in Q3, and that included a $303 million reserve build. It reflects a macroeconomic outlook that on a weighted basis continues to include an unemployment rate that rises to north of 5% during 2024. On Slide 18, we highlight the credit quality metrics for both our Consumer and our Commercial portfolios. And on Consumer, we just note that we continue to see the asset quality metrics come off the bottom. And for the most part, they remain below historical averages. 30 and 90-day consumer delinquencies still remain below the fourth quarter of 2019 as an example. Commercial net charge-offs declined from the second quarter, driven mostly by a reduction in office write-downs. And as a reminder, our CRE credit exposure represents 7% of total loans, and that includes office exposure, which represents less than 2% of our loans. We've been very intentional around client selection and portfolio concentration and deal structure over many years, and that's helped us to mitigate risk in this portfolio. We continue to believe that the portfolio is well positioned and adequately reserved against the current conditions. And in the appendix, we've included a current view of our commercial real estate and office portfolio stats we provided last quarter. We've also included the historical perspective of our loan book de-risking and our net charge-offs, and you can see all of those on Slides 36, 37, 38 and 39. Okay. Let's move on to the various lines of business and their results. And I'm going to start on Slide 19 with Consumer Banking. For the quarter, Consumer earned $2.9 billion on good organic revenue growth and delivered its 10th consecutive quarter of operating leverage, while we continue to invest for the future. Note that the top-line revenue grew 6%, while expense rose 3%. Reported earnings declined 7% year-over-year given credit costs continue to return to pre-pandemic level. And we believe this understates the underlying success of the business in driving revenue and managing costs, because PPNR grew 9% year-over-year. Much of this success is driven by the pace of organic growth of checking and card accounts, as well as investment accounts and balances, as Brian noted earlier. And expense reflects the continued investments by the business for their future growth. Moving to Wealth Management on Slide 20. We produced good results, and we earned a little more than $1 billion. These results are down from last year, due to a decline in NII from higher deposit costs, which more than offset higher fees from asset management. While lower this quarter, NII of $1.8 billion derives from a world-class banking offering, and it provides good balance in our revenue stream and a competitive advantage in the business for us. As Brian noted, both Merrill and the Private Bank continued to see strong organic growth, and they produced solid assets under management flows of $44 billion since the third quarter of last year, reflecting good mix of new client money as well as our existing clients putting their money to work. Expense reflects continued investments in the business as we add financial advisers and capabilities from technology investments. On Slide 21, you see the Global Banking results. And this business produced very strong results with earnings of $2.6 billion, driven by 11% year-over-year growth in revenue to $6.2 billion. Coupled with good expense management, the business has produced solid operating leverage. Our GTS, or Global Treasury Services business has been robust. We've also seen a steady volume of solar and wind investment projects this quarter, and our investment banking business is performing well in a sluggish environment. Year-over-year revenue growth also benefited from the absence of marks taken on leverage loans in the prior year-ago period. The company's overall investment banking fees were $1.2 billion in Q3, growing modestly over the prior year, despite a pool that was down nearly 20%. And we held on to number three position given our performance. Provision expense reflected a reserve release of $139 million as certain troubled industries and credits outside of commercial real estate continue to have improved outlooks. Expense increased 6% year-over-year, reflecting our continued investments in this business. Switching to Global Markets on Slide 22. The team had another strong quarter, with earnings growing to $1.3 billion driven by revenue growth of 10%, and I'm referring to results excluding DVA as we normally do. The continued themes of inflation, geopolitical tensions and central banks changing monetary policies around the globe have continued to impact both bond and equity markets. And as a result, it was a quarter where we saw strong performance in our FICC businesses, as well as a record third quarter in equities. Focusing on sales and trading, ex DVA, revenue improved 8% year-over-year to $4.4 billion. FICC improved 6% and equities improved 10% compared to the third quarter of last year. And at $1.7 billion, that's a record third quarter for our equities teammates. Year-over-year, expense increased 7%, primarily driven by investments for people and technology. Finally, on Slide 13, all other shows a profit of $89 million. So revenue improved from the second quarter, driven by the absence of prior period debt security sale losses and available-for-sale securities, and partially offset by higher operating losses on tax credit investments in wind, solar and affordable housing. As I mentioned earlier, our effective tax rate in the quarter was 4%, and that reflects a higher-than-expected volume of investment tax credits in which the value of the deals are recognized upfront. We also had a small discrete benefit to tax expense from a state tax law change. Excluding renewable investments and any other discrete tax benefits, our tax rate would have been 25%. And as we wrap up 2023, we expect our full year tax rate, excluding discrete and special items, such as the FDIC special assessment, we expect that full year tax rate should end up in the 9% to 10% range. So to summarize, we grew our earnings double digit year-over-year. We reported NII that was above our expectations, and we increased our full year expectations. We've managed costs aligned with our guidance and brought expenses down in every quarter so far this year, and we expect to do that again in the fourth quarter. We earned more than 15% return on tangible common equity. We returned $2.9 billion in capital back to shareholders, including a 9% dividend increase. And we built 30 basis points of CET1, positioning us well for the proposed capital rules. So all in all, it was a strong quarter. It was one where our teams executed well against responsible growth. And with that, David, I think we'll open it up for the Q&A session.


Erika Najarian: Got it. And just to clarify how we should think about the full year, the $16.4 billion in 1Q '24 expenses and a quarterly decline from there, does that pretty much square with what you've said in the past for expenses of up 1% to 2% year-over-year? And would that number include an assumption that investment banking activity returns in force in 2024?


Alastair Borthwick: Well last year, remember Mike, we told you we thought we could drive expense down every quarter. We believe this year, the expense will trend down over the course of this year, and obviously Q1 is inflated a little bit with just payroll tax and some of the revenue seasonality, but underneath that there’s pretty significant revenue strength, so I think that probably cost us $100 million or so this quarter. I think we probably are looking--you know, if this environment continues, we’re looking at another $100 million per quarter going forward, but it’s--to Brian’s point, it’s the good expense that comes with revenue growth over time. That’s really the only change I’d say with respect to how we think about the expense picture.


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: [Technical Difficulty] will materialize. And this now includes three interest rate cuts, starting in September, another in November, and one more in December. And the waterfall shows an estimated impact of those rate cuts to our quarterly NII. The next couple of categories are a result of natural management of interest rate risk in a balance sheet mixed with fixed-rate assets and variable-rate assets. And our balance sheet is split roughly half and half. So we take in liquidity from customers that we use to fund our assets, and then we store excess liquidity in cash and securities. We have fixed assets that mature and pay down, and those supply cash that then gets put back to work on the balance sheet and reprices over time. And we have two basic categories of fixed assets that mature and pay off, and those are securities and loans. On securities, you can see we've got about $10 billion a quarter of cash coming off of our securities portfolio, and we gain roughly 300 basis points of improvement on those assets when we put that money back on the balance sheet. On loans, between resi, mortgage, and auto, we've got another roughly $10 billion, which reprices with a little less yield improvement than securities. And between the securities and loans, we expect a fixed-rate asset repricing adds about $300 million to our quarterly rate of NII as we get to the fourth quarter. On the variable rate asset side, and to protect from down moves in rates, we hedge some of that with cash flow swaps. And those typically roll off in any given quarter and get replaced over time. So included in the cash flow hedges is an impact of cessation of BSBY as an alternative rate. If you recall, we took a charge in the fourth quarter of ‘23. It was $1.6 billion, and we said that would come back to us through time. And beginning in November, we start to see the benefit coming back into NII. And in Q4, that's about $200 million. That Q4 partial quarter benefit will grow by a slightly smaller sequential NII benefit in Q1 ‘25. And then it begins to taper off heading into 2026. In addition, we've got about $150 billion of received fixed cash flow hedges, protecting us from short rate moves moving over. Most are hedging floating rate commercial loans. And the cost of those hedges is reported as contra revenue in commercial loan interest income. These hedges have a weighted average life of just over two years. And they've got an average fixed rate of approximately 250 basis points. So starting in the second-half of 2025, we begin to get some additional NII tailwind, because the cash flow hedges with lower fixed rate likes where we receive, those will begin to roll off, and will likely replace those at higher current market rates at the time. The actual size of the tailwind we'll get from the expiration of those swaps will obviously be highly dependent on the level and the shape of the yield curve at the time of those maturities. And that stretches out over the course of the next four years. Okay, a couple other points to make. You'll note we don't expect much movement around our modestly, liability sensitive global markets NII activity. And lastly, our forward view has an expectation of low-single-digit growth in loans, low-single-digit growth in deposits, with continued slowing of rate paid movement through the back half of 2024. And you can see our expectation of the combined impact here as well. This last element is the one that has the most potential variability. And obviously, it will depend upon actual deposit and loan growth, and pricing and rotation. Okay, let's turn to expense and we'll use slide 11 for the discussion. We reported $16.3 billion of expense this quarter. And that's more than $900 million lower than Q1, which included $700 million for the FDIC special assessment. Not including the FDIC assessment, expenses were lower than Q1 by $229 million, driven by seasonally lower payroll tax expense. Compared to Q2 ‘23, we're up less than 2%. And that increase is equal to the incentives paid for improved fee revenue. Incentives for our GWIN business alone are up $200 million year-over-year. And that's obviously an expense we're happy to pay when we have a 14% improvement in fees for assets under management. Our second quarter headcount number included welcoming a diverse class of nearly 2,000 summer interns we hope will join us over the course of the next year or two upon their graduation. And absent those interns, our headcount fell by nearly 2,000. In the third quarter, we expect to add approximately 2,500 college graduates for full time. More than -- and that's from more than 120,000 applications received, showing that we remain an employer of choice for talented young people. Expense levels for the rest of 2024 are expected to bounce around this second quarter level, given the higher fee revenue and investments made for growth. So let's now move to credit and we'll turn to slide 12. There was little change in our asset quality metrics this quarter. Provision expense was $1.5 billion. That was $189 million higher than Q1, driven by a smaller reserve release in Q2. Net charge offs of $1.5 billion were little changed, with a small increase in credit card, mostly offset by lower commercial real estate office charge offs. On a weighted basis, we remain reserved for an employment rate of nearly 5% by the end of 2025, compared to the most recent 4.1% rate reported. The net charge off ratio was 59 basis points, largely unchanged for Q1. On slide 13, we highlight more credit quality metrics for both our consumer and commercial portfolios. Consumer net charge-offs increased by a modest $31 million versus the first quarter from the flow-through of higher late-stage credit card delinquencies from Q1. Highlighting the change in direction of delinquencies, consumer 90-day-plus delinquencies declined in 2Q by $57 million. Commercial net charge-offs were relatively flat as lower commercial real estate losses were mostly offset by a small increase in other commercial loans. Our office losses went from $304 million in Q1 to $226 million in Q2. Other commercial real estate loan losses were simply one hotel. Okay, let's move to the various lines of business and some brief comments on their results, and I'll start on slide 14 with consumer banking. For the quarter, consumer earned $2.6 billion on continued strong organic growth, and reported earnings declined 9% year-over-year as revenue declined from lower deposit balances, compared to the second quarter of last year. Customer activity showed another strong quarter, net new checking growth, another strong period of card openings, and investment balances for consumer clients, which climbed 23% year-over-year to a new record $476 billion. That included 12 months of strong flows at $38 billion in addition to market appreciation over the time. As noted earlier, loans grew nicely year-over-year from credit card, as well as small business where we remained the industry leader. The team held expense flat year-over-year, reflecting good work with continued business investments for growth, offset by the operational excellence work to improve processes and move more of our transactions to digital. And as you can see on the appendix page 26, digital adoption and engagement continue to improve, and customer satisfaction scores remain near record levels, illustrating customer appreciation of our enhanced capabilities due to our continuous investment. Moving to wealth management on slide 15, we produced good results, and those included good organic client activity, market favorability, and strong AUM flows, and this quarter also saw good lending results. Our comprehensive suite of investment and advisory services, coupled with our commitment to personalized wealth management planning and solutions, has enabled us to meet the diverse needs and aspirations of our clients. Net income rose 5% from the second quarter of last year to a little more than $1 billion. In Q2, we reported revenue of $5.6 billion, growing 6% over the prior year. As Brian noted, a strong 14% growth in fee revenue from investment and brokerage services overcame the NII headwind. Expense growth reflects the fee growth and other investments for future. The business had a 25% margin, and it generated a strong return on capital of more than 22%. Average loans were up 2% year-over-year, driven by strong growth we're seeing in custom lending and a pickup in mortgage lending. Both Merrill and the Private Bank continue to see good organic growth, and they produced strong assets under management flows of $58 billion since last year's second quarter, which reflects a mix of new client money, as well as existing clients putting more of their money to work. I also want to highlight the continued digital momentum in this business, and you can find that on slide 28. On slide 16, we turn to Global Banking results. And here, the business produced earnings of $2.1 billion, down 20% 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 6%, driven by the impact of interest rates and deposit rotation. The diversified revenue across products and regions reflects the strength of our Global Banking franchise. In our GTS business, fees for managing the cash of clients offsets a lot of the NII pressure from higher rates, and clients are accessing the capital markets for their capital needs instead of borrowing. Investment banking had a strong quarter, growing fees 29% year-over-year to nearly $1.6 billion, led by debt capital markets fees, mostly in leveraged finance and investment grade. And we finished the quarter strong, maintaining our number three investment banking fee position globally. A solid start to 2024 has left us in a good position, with top three rankings now in North America, Latin America, and EMEA, and number six in APAC. And we're seeing strong performance in important industry groups as well. An increase in provision expense from last year was driven by the commercial real estate net charge-offs I discussed earlier, and expense increased 3% year-over-year, including continued investment in the business. Switching to Global Markets on Slide 17, I'll focus my comments on results, excluding DVA as I normally do. The team had another terrific quarter as we generated good revenue growth and achieved operating leverage and continued to deliver a solid return on capital. Earnings of $1.4 billion grew 19% year-over-year, and return on average allocated capital was 13%. Revenue, and again, this is ex-DVA, improved 10% from the second quarter of 2023. Focusing on sales and trading, ex-DVA, revenue improved 7% year-over-year to $4.7 billion, and that's the highest second quarter in over a decade. FICC was down 1%, while equities increased 20% compared to Q2 '23. FICC revenues remained strong, and versus Q2 '23, they were modestly lower, driven by a weaker macro trading quarter in FX and rates, and that was largely offset by better commodities and mortgage trading. Equities was driven by strong trading results in derivatives and cash equities. Year-over-year expenses were up 4% on revenue improvement and continued investment in the business. Finally, on Slide 18, all other shows a loss of $0.3 billion, and that was little changed year-over-year, as lower expense was offset by lower provision costs as a result of reserve changes. Our effective tax rate for the quarter was 9%, and excluding discrete items and the tax credits related to investments in renewable energy and affordable housing, the effective tax rate would have been 25%. And with that, I think we'll stop there, and we'll jump into questions.


Alastair Borthwick: Thank you, Brian, and I'm starting on Slide 5 of the earnings presentation. We'll touch on more highlights noted here as we work through the material, and I'd just add that we delivered solid returns with a return on average assets of 83 basis points and return on tangible common equity of 12.8%. So let's move to the balance sheet on Slide 6, where you can see that the balance sheet ended the quarter at $3.3 trillion of total assets, up $66 billion from the second quarter, as global markets client demands expanded and commercial loans grew $16 billion in the quarter. Otherwise in the quarter, the investments of our excess liquidity saw a $10 billion reduction in hold to maturity securities, and the combination of shorter-term liquidity investments of cash and available for sale securities were relatively flat for the second quarter. On the funding side, global markets grew to support balance sheet needs of our clients and total deposits grew $20 billion on an ending basis. It's noteworthy that our average deposits are now up for the fifth consecutive quarter. Liquidity remains strong with $947 billion of global liquidity sources, and that was up $38 billion compared to the second quarter. Shareholders' equity was up $2.6 billion, with common equity up $4.6 billion and a preferred redemption driving a $2 billion decline in preferred equity. The increase income and equity compared to Q2, included $5.6 billion in capital returned to shareholders, partially offsetting our earnings, and it included an improvement in AOCI driven by an improvement from cash flow hedges given the drop in long-term rates in the quarter. $5.6 billion in capital distributions includes $2 billion in common dividends and the repurchase of $3.5 billion in shares. Tangible book value per share of $26.25 rose 10% from the third quarter of '23. And turning to regulatory capital, our CET1 level improved to $200 billion and the CET1 ratio was 11.8%. And that remains well above our new 10.7% requirement as of October 1. Risk weighted assets increased modestly, driven by both lending activity and global markets needs to support clients and our supplemental leverage ratio was 5.9% compared to the minimum requirement of 5%, which leaves plenty of capacity for balance sheet growth. Our $463 billion of total loss-absorbing capital means our TLAC ratio remains comfortably above our requirements. So let's dig a little deeper on deposits and the growth from the second quarter using Slide 7. Here, we show you deposits and rates by line of business. Average deposits grew $45 billion, or 2% year-over-year, and they increased modestly linked-quarter. Notably, quarter-over-quarter increases in rates paid continue to slow again this quarter, rising 7 basis points to 210 basis points. Consumer Banking increased modestly, driven by product mix and higher rate product offerings. And Global Banking rate paid increased modestly driven by growth in interest bearing balances. It's worth noting that wealth management declined a basis point. We acted quickly following the September 50 basis point rate cut in our wealth business and our Global Banking business, and since late in the quarter, only a small portion of those cuts are reflected. Total rate paid for all deposits from these actions is expected to fall below 2% later in October, as the fuller effect of the pass-throughs occur. Let's turn to loans by looking at average balances on Slide 8. Loans in Q3 of $1.06 trillion improved 1% year-over-year driven by solid commercial loan growth as well as credit card and vehicle loans. Overall, commercial loans grew 2% year-over-year. And importantly, this included a drop in commercial real estate loans of 6%. Commercial loans, excluding commercial real estate, grew 3% year-over-year and were up 6% annualized from the Q2. Consumer banking loan growth was driven by credit card, small business and vehicle borrowing, and the overall consumer growth was muted by a decline in mortgage balances as pay downs exceeded originations in a higher rate environment. Let's turn our focus to NII performance and Slide 9. So note that our trended investment of excess deposit slide is in our appendix on Page 21. Deposit levels were $855 billion in excess of loans at the end of Q3 and continue to be a good source of value for shareholders. Nearly $625 billion or 52% of our excess liquidity is in short dated cash and AFS securities. The longer dated lower yielding hold to maturity book continues to roll-off, and we reinvest that in higher yielding assets. The blended yield of cash and securities on Page 21 remains well above our deposit rate paid. So going back to Slide 9, regarding NII on a GAAP, non-FTE basis, NII in Q3 was $14 billion and on a fully tax equivalent basis, NII was $14.1 billion. On our Q3 earnings call last year, we first provided our expectation that the Q2 would be the trough and then we would begin to grow in the Q3 of '24, marking an inflection point for NII. And that's what you see this quarter. NII increased by $252 million from the Q2 driven by a number of factors. Global Markets activity and pricing, fixed asset repricing and one extra day all benefited NII, while higher funding costs partially offset those benefits. A 50 basis point rate cut in September also negatively impacted NII. With regard to a forward view of NII, there are obviously several variables at play in the Q4, and we still expect Q4 NII to grow, and we expect it to be $14.3 billion or more on a fully tax equivalent basis. Now we note the following assumptions. First, we assume that the forward curve on October 10, is the one that materializes, so that includes a 25 basis point cut in November and another 25 basis points in December. We also assumed very modest balance increases in both loans and deposits in Q4, building off the activity seen in Q3. Last quarter, we told you we expect about $20 billion in the aggregate of fixed rate loans and securities to reprice on a quarterly basis, and those are expected to reprice into higher yielding assets and provide a benefit to NII for many periods ahead. And as described previously, we expect to see roughly $200 million benefit in Q4 from the BSBY alternative rate transition. So we think this sets us up well for 2025. With regard to interest rate sensitivity on a dynamic deposit basis, we provide a 12-month change in NII for an instantaneous shift above or below the forward curve. On that basis, a 100 basis point increase would benefit NII by $1.8 billion, while a decrease of 100 basis points would decrease NII over the next 12 months by $2.7 billion. Okay, let's now turn to expense and we'll use Slide 10 for the discussion. We reported $16.5 billion in expense this quarter, up 1% from the second quarter, driven by the revenue improvement in three primary areas that Brian noted earlier. Investment banking, investment broke - and brokerage fees and sales and trading revenue all have more activity and incentive variability than other revenues, and they were up 3% in aggregate versus the second quarter and up 13% year-over-year. In Q3, our headcount of 213,000 was up a little more than 1000, and this quarter we saw the departure of roughly 2,000 summer interns and we welcomed roughly 2500 college graduates from the nearly 120,000 applications received. Regarding a forward view in Q4, we don't expect much change in our headcount, and with continued investments we expect expense to be in line with Q3 at $16.5 billion. As we look into 2025, with an expected return of NII growth and through our expense discipline, we expect a return to operating leverage, an improvement in our efficiency ratio. Let's turn to credit on Slide 11. And the good news is there's not a lot to report here compared to the second quarter. Net charge-offs of $1.5 billion were flat compared to Q2. We've seen consumer losses in a pretty tight range for a few quarters now. Outside of that, we saw lower losses from office exposure and otherwise we had two somewhat unrelated commercial losses. The net charge off ratio was 58 basis points, down one basis point from Q2. Provision expense was unchanged from Q2 at $1.5 billion as reserve levels remain constant. And with regard to reserve levels on a weighted basis, we remain reserved for an unemployment rate of 5% by the end of 2025 compared to the most recent 4.1% rate reported. On Slide 12, we highlight the credit quality metrics for both our consumer and commercial portfolios, and there's nothing really noteworthy to highlight on this page. So let's move to the various lines of business and some brief comments on their results, starting on Slide 13 with consumer banking. Consumer banking continues to lead the company in organic growth, and this included another strong quarter of net new checking growth, another strong period of card openings and investment balances for consumer clients, which climbed 28% year-over-year to a record $497 billion. It also included 12-months of strong flows at $29 billion in addition to market appreciation. As noted earlier, loans grew nicely year-over-year from credit card and vehicle as well as small business, where we remain the industry leader. One highlight to note, our Practice Solutions Lending Group for doctors and dentists and related professionals saw loans grow 11% year-over-year. All of this organic growth helped to drive $2.7 billion in net income in Q3. So reported earnings remained strong, declining 6% year-over-year as revenue declined from lower NII, partially offset by higher card income. With the trajectory shifting in NII, we should see earnings in this business begin to shift as well. Expense rose 5% as we continued our business investments. And those investments included those in our people, including the announcement of moving our minimum wage to $24 per hour and that raises the minimum annualized salary for our associates to nearly $50,000. As you can see on the appendix Page 25, digital adoption and engagement continue to improve and customer satisfaction scores remain near record levels illustrating the appreciation of enhanced capabilities from our continuous investments. Bank of America's 23 million Zelle users are up 10% in the past 12-months and their volume usage is now up more than 20%. Customers are now using Zelle at nearly 3x the rate they're writing checks, and Zelle usage has meaningfully surpassed the combination of checks written and ATM withdrawals. Moving to Wealth Management on Slide 14. We produced good results, reflecting healthy organic growth and client activity with increased banking activities of our clients and the impacts of increased market levels together with strong assets under management flows. With a continued increase in banking product usage from our investing clients, the diversity of our revenue base continues to improve. More than 60% of our wealth clients now have banking products with us and 30% of our revenue is now in net interest income to complement the fees earned in our advice model. Net income rose from the third quarter '23 to $1.1 billion this year. In Q3, we reported revenue of nearly $5.8 billion growing 8% over the prior year, led by 14% growth in asset management fees that Brian highlighted earlier. Expenses growth reflects the fee growth and other investments for our future growth as we continue to grow our advisor force through hiring of both experienced advisors and graduates from our training program. We welcomed 5,500 Merrill and Private Bank net new households this quarter and more than 1/3 of those Merrill openings were driven by graduates from our training program. The business had a 25% margin and generated a strong return on capital of 23%. Average loans were up 3% year-over-year, driven by growth in custom lending and a pickup in mortgage lending. Both Merrill and the Private Bank continue to see healthy organic growth, producing strong assets under management flows of $65 billion year-over-year, which reflects a good mix of new client money as well as existing clients putting money to work. We should also highlight the continued digital momentum that you'll find on Slide 27. As an example, three quarters of Merrill Bank and Investment accounts were opened digitally this quarter. On Slide 15, you see Global Banking results. This business produced earnings of $1.9 billion down 26% 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 6%, driven by the impact of interest rates and deposit rotation. In our global treasury services business, fees for managing the cash of clients continue to offset some of the NII pressure from higher rates. Investment banking had a strong quarter, growing fees 18% year-over-year to $1.4 billion, led by debt capital markets fees, mostly in leveraged finance and investment grade. We finished the quarter strong, maintaining our number three investment banking fee position. What began as a slow quarter this summer gained some momentum through September and the pipeline looking forward looks solid. An increase in provision expense from last year was driven by the previously noted commercial and CRE losses. Expense increased 7% year-over-year, including continued investments in the business, particularly around technology. Switching to global markets on Slide 16. I’ll focus comments on results excluding DVA as we normally do and the team continued their impressive streak of strong revenue and earnings performance. They achieved operating leverage and continued to deliver good return on capital. Earnings of $1.6 billion grew 23% year-over-year and return on average allocated capital was 14%. Revenue again, ex-DVA improved 14% from the third quarter of last year as both sales and trading and investment banking fees for institutional clients improved nicely year-over-year. Focusing on sales & trading, ex-DVA revenue improved 12% year-over-year to $4.9 billion. FICC increased 8% while equities increased 18% compared to the third quarter of '23. FICC revenues remained strong growing over both the prior year and the second quarter, driven by momentum in currencies trading. Equities had a record third quarter driven by strong trading performance in derivatives and cash. Year-over-year expenses were up 6% on revenue improvement and our continued investment in the business. Finally, on Slide 17, all other shows a loss of $295 million. Revenue was lower and included a charge to other income of roughly 200 million related to Visa's increase in its litigation escrow account. The decline in expense was driven by reduced costs of a liquidating business and lower legal expense. Our effective tax rate for the quarter was 6% and excluding discrete items and the tax credits related to investments in renewable energy and affordable housing, the effective tax rate would have been approximately 24%. So that's where I'll stop, and with that we'll open it up for Q&A.

expense $16.5 billion up 1% from the second quarter


Steven Chubak: That's great, Alastair. And maybe a follow-up for Brian. Just at a recent conference, you spoke about the expectation of delivering 200 bps of sustainable operating leverage, laying out an algorithm where revenues grew 4% to 5%, expenses grow 2% to 3%. What gives you confidence in that ability to deliver that level of top line growth on a sustainable basis? Just want to unpack that a little bit further.