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.


Alastair Borthwick: Thank you, Brian. And I'm going to start on Slide 4 of the earnings presentation to provide just a little more context on the summary income statement and the highlights. For the fourth quarter, as Brian noted, we reported $3.1 billion in net income or $0.35 per diluted share. That GAAP net income number included two notable items. First, we recorded $2.1 billion of pretax expense, that's $0.20 after-tax earnings per share for the special assessment by the FDIC to recover losses from the failures of Silicon Valley and Signature Bank. Second, on November 15th 2023, Bloomberg announced that they would discontinue publishing the Bloomberg Short-Term Bank Yield Index rate after November 15th 2024 and many commercial loans in the industry had BSBY as a reference rate prior to SOFR becoming industry-standard. As noted in an 8-K we filed earlier this week, we came to conclusion in early January that BSBY cessation would not get the same accounting treatment allowed under LIBOR cessation. And therefore cash-flow hedges of BSBY indexed products related to BSBY cash flows, forecast to occur after November 15th 2024, we need to be moved out of OCI into earnings in the fourth quarter of '23 financials. So as a result of the accounting interpretation, we recorded a negative pretax impact to our market making revenue of approximately $1.6 billion. I just want to reinforce that's an accounting impact. It's not an economic change to the contracts and we'll see an offset to this over time through higher NII mostly occurring in 2025 and 2026 after BSBY ceases in November 2024. The accounting lowered CET1 by 8 basis points during the quarter and we will recapture that in the next two or three years. Adjusted for the FDIC assessment and the BSBY cessation related impact, Q4 net income was $5.9 billion, or $0.70 per share. On Slide 5, we show the highlights of the quarter and we reported revenue of $22.1 billion on an FTE basis. And excluding the BSBY cessation impact, adjusted revenue was $23.7 billion and declined 4%, driven by net interest income. Fourth quarter revenue is a tough year-over-year comparison as NII peaked in the fourth quarter of '22 at $14.8 billion, before slowly moving lower over 2023. Outside of NII, we saw good growth in treasury service fees and wealth management fees and those were offset by higher tax-advantaged investment deal activity, creating higher operating losses and the more tax credits associated with them and recognized across periods. Expense for the quarter of $17.7 billion included the $2.1 billion FDIC charge. So excluding that charge, adjusted expense was $15.6 billion and consistent with our prior guidance. That allowed us to invest for growth, as well as use good expense discipline to eliminate work and reduce headcount. And on an adjusted basis, this then is the third quarter of sequential expense decline this year. Provision expense for the quarter was $1.1 billion, that consisted of $1.2 billion in net charge-offs and a modest reserve release, reflecting the improved macroeconomic outlook. Net charge-offs reflect the continued trend in consumer and commercial charge-offs towards more normalized levels as well as higher commercial real-estate office losses. Lastly, our income tax expense this quarter was a modest benefit as credits from tax-advantaged investment deals offset the tax expense on the lower earnings in Q4 driven by the notable charges. So let's review the balance sheet on Slide 6, and you'll see we ended the quarter at $3.2 trillion of total assets, up $27 billion from the third quarter. I'd highlight here, both the $39 billion growth in deposits and a decline in cash on balance sheet of $19 billion. Overall, you'll note the debt securities increased $92 billion. And that included a $9 billion decline in hold-to-maturity securities, and $100 billion increase in available-for-sale securities reflecting short term investment of liquidity from all of these activities. We continue to put money into very short-term T-bills and hedged treasury notes this quarter and those are essentially earning the same rate as cash. And you can see our absolute cash levels remain quite high. As Brian noted, liquidity remained strong with $897 billion of global excess liquidity sources. That was up $38 billion from the third quarter of '23 and it remained $321 billion above our pre-pandemic level in the fourth quarter of '19. Shareholders' equity increased $5 billion from the third quarter as earnings and AOCI improvement were only partially offset by capital distributed to shareholders. The AOCI improved $4 billion, reflecting both the previously mentioned BSBY-related reclassification into fourth quarter earnings and other AOCI improvements. This included some improvements in other cash-flow hedges, which don't impact regulatory capital, driven by a decline in long-end rates. During the quarter, we paid out $1.9 billion in common dividends and we bought back $800 million in shares, which more than offset our employee awards. Tangible book value per share is up 3% linked-quarter and 12% year-over-year. Turning to the regulatory capital, our CET1 level improved to $195 billion from September 30th, while the CET1 ratio declined 9 basis points to 11.8% and remains well above our current 10% requirement as of January 1st '24. We also remained well-positioned against the proposed capital rules, as our current CET1 level matches our 10% minimum against anticipated RWA inflation from the proposed rules. Risk-weighted assets increased $19 billion on loan growth and growth in global markets, RWA, and our supplemental leverage ratio was 6.1% versus the minimum requirement of 5%, which leaves plenty of capacity for balance sheet growth and our TLAC ratio remains comfortably above requirements. So let's focus on loans by looking at the average balances on Slide 7. And you can see loan growth improved this quarter as we saw improvement in both credit card and commercial borrowing, offset by declines in commercial real estate and securities-based lending. The commercial growth reflects good demand overall and was muted only at quarter-end by companies paying down commercial balances as they finalized their year-end financial positions. Lastly, on a positive note, we've seen loan spreads continue to widen, given some of the capital pressures from proposed rules on the banking industry, and this combined with investments in relationship managers we've added over the past few years, has positioned us to take market-share and improved spreads. Moving to deposits, I'll stay focused on averages on Slide 8, and the trends of ending balances saw growth in Global Banking and wealth management and declines in consumer. Relative to the pre-pandemic fourth quarter '19 period, average deposits are still up 35%. Every line of business remains well above their pre-pandemic levels. Consumer is up 33%, with checking up 40% driven by the net-new checking accounts added that Brian noted earlier. On a more recent performance basis, deposits grew $29 billion or 6% from Q3 on an annualized basis. The only business that saw a decline in deposits linked-quarter was consumer. And here we saw a decline of $21 billion. This linked-quarter decline slowed from the third quarter change. And in total, we have $959 billion in high-quality consumer deposits, which remains $239 billion above pre-pandemic levels. The total rate paid on consumer deposits in the quarter was 47 basis points and this remains very low, driven by the high mix of quality transactional accounts. Most of this quarter's rate increase remains concentrated in CDs and consumer investment deposits, which together only represent 15% of the consumer deposits. Turning to wealth management, balances on an end-of-period basis improved modestly, and we continued to experience a slowing in the trend of clients moving money from lower-yielding sweep accounts into higher-yielding preferred deposits and off-balance sheet. Our sweep balances were down $4 billion and were replaced by new account generation and deepening. Global Banking deposits grew $23 billion, moving nicely above the $500 billion level that we've experienced over the course of the past six quarters. These deposits are generally transactional deposits of our commercial customers. They are the ones that used to manage their cash flows. And noninterest-bearing deposits were about 33% of deposits at the end of that quarter. So when we turn to excess deposit levels on Slide 9, you can see deposit growth exceeded loan growth this quarter. And that expanded our excess of deposits above loans, from Q3 to about $0.9 trillion, which is well above the $0.5 trillion we had pre-pandemic. You can see that in the upper-left of Slide 9, which is where we've used and shown you how we think about managing excess liquidity. We continue to have a balanced mix of cash available-for-sale securities and held-to-maturity securities. And this quarter, the combination of the cash and the AFS securities now represent 51% of the total $1.2 trillion noted on this page. You'll also notice the change in mix of the shorter-term portfolio as we began to lower cash and increase available-for-sale securities buying mostly short-dated T-Bills with similar yields. You can note also the hold-to-maturity book continued to decline from paydowns and maturities pulling to PAR. In total, the hold-to-maturity book moved below $600 billion this quarter. It's now down $89 billion from its peak and it consists of about $122 billion in treasuries and about $465 billion in mortgage-backed securities along with a few billion others. Also note that the blended cash and securities yield continued to rise and remained about 170 basis points above the rate we pay for deposits. The replacement of these lower earning assets into higher yielding assets continues to provide an ongoing benefit and support to NII. From a valuation perspective, given the reduced balance and the longer-term interest-rate reductions we've seen in the fourth quarter, we experienced an improvement of more than $30 billion in the valuation of the hold-to-maturity securities. So, let's turn our focus to NII performance using Slide 10. And a strong finish to the year helped us report $57.5 billion in NII on a fully tax-equivalent basis for the full year of 2023. That's up 9% compared to 2022. On an FTE basis, we reported $14.1 billion in NII, which was modestly better than we told you to expect last quarter driven by modestly better deposit growth. The $14.1 billion was a decline of $400 million from the third quarter, driven by the unfavorable impacts of deposits and related pricing and lower global markets NII, partially offset by higher rates benefiting asset yields. And as we look forward, given that we've got one less day of interest in the first quarter and that's worth about $125 million to $150 million, and given the rate curve shift, we believe the first quarter will be somewhere between $100 million and $200 million lower than the fourth quarter. It could move a touch lower in Q2 and then we believe it should begin to grow sequentially in the second half of 2024. So very consistent with our prior guidance. With regard to the forward view I just provided, let me note a few other caveats. It would include an assumption that interest rates in the forward curve materialize. And the forward curve today has six cuts compared to last quarter when we had three cuts in the 2024 curve. So it's bouncing around a little and shifted in the past quarter. Forward view also includes our expectation of low to mid-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. Before moving away, it's worth noting our net interest yield declined 14 basis points to 197 basis points. And that's driven by the decline in NII, as well as higher average earning assets, reflecting prior period builds of cash and cash-like securities. Turning to asset sensitivity and focusing on a forward yield curve basis, the plus 100 basis point parallel shift at December 31st was $3.5 billion of expected NII over the next 12 months, coming from our banking book. And that assumes no expected change in balance sheet levels or mix relative to our baseline forecast, and 93% of that sensitivity is driven by short rates. The 100 basis point down scenario is $3.1 billion. Let's turn to expense and we'll use Slide 11 for the discussion. And we reported $15.6 billion in adjusted expense this quarter, which excludes the FDIC assessment. This was in line with our projection from last quarter and down $199 million from the third quarter, driven by reductions in headcount earlier in the year and seasonally lower revenue-related expense. These reductions outpace the continued investments that we're making to drive growth. Our average headcount was down from the third quarter to 213,000 people, and that's good work after peaking at 218,000 last January. We lowered our headcount through the year by 5,000 and did so without taking an outsized severance charge as we used attrition to lower our headcount along the way. One more point to acknowledge the good work of our teams on expense, Q4 '23 adjusted expense of $15.6 billion is only $94 million higher than the fourth quarter of '22. And just remember, we began 2023 with a $125 million lift in quarterly FDIC expense. So through some good operational excellence work and otherwise, we've managed through all of the additional costs of investments in new tech initiatives and merit and financial center openings, as well as some stronger revenue and higher marketing costs. As we look forward to next quarter, we expect to see the more typical Q1 seasonal elevation in expense of $700 million to $800 million compared to Q4. So we believe expense will be around $16.4 billion in the first quarter. That includes elevated payroll tax expense and the expected costs of higher revenue in both sales and trading and wealth management, as well as merit cost increases. And as we move through 2024, we expect the quarterly expense to decline from Q1, reflecting a drop in the elevated payroll tax expense and revenue changes, as well as some additional operational excellence initiative work. Continued digital transformation and adoption is also going to help us as we go through the year. Now turn to credit, and I'll use Slide 12 for that. Provision expense was $1.1 billion in the fourth quarter and it included an $88 million reserve release due to a modestly improved macroeconomic environment. On a weighted basis, we're reserved for an unemployment rate of nearly 5% by the end of 2024 compared to the most recent 3.7% rate reported. Net charge-offs of $1.2 billion increased $261 million from the third quarter, and the net charge-off ratio was 45 basis points, a 10 basis point increase from the third quarter. On Slide 13, we highlight the credit quality metrics for both our consumer and commercial portfolios, and the overall increase in net charge-offs was driven by three things. First, $104 million of the increase was driven by credit card losses, which continued to normalize as higher late-stage delinquencies flowed through to charge-offs. Second, $65 million of the increase was driven by a broad range of smaller commercial and industrial losses, which were mostly previously reserved and monitored for the past couple of quarters. And lastly, $76 million of the increase was driven by commercial real estate losses, primarily due to office, also mostly reserved. In the appendix, we've included a current view of our commercial real estate and office portfolio stats provided last quarter, and we've also included the historical perspective of our loan book de-risking and long term trend of our consumer and commercial net charge-offs, and you can see those on slides 30 to 33. Let's move on to the various lines of business and their results and I'll start on Slide 14 with Consumer Banking. For the quarter, consumer earned $2.8 billion on continued good organic growth and despite their good client activity, it's difficult to outrun the earnings impact of higher rates on deposit costs while the credit is also normalizing. The reported earnings declined 23% year-over-year as top line revenue declined 4% while expense rose 3% and the credit costs rose. Customer activity showed another strong quarter of net new checking growth, another strong period of card opening and investment balances for consumer clients which climbed $105 billion over the past year to a record $424 billion. Our full year flows were $49 billion as accounts grew 10% in the past 12 months. Loan growth was led by credit card and that broke above $100 billion this quarter. Deposit decline slowed in the quarter with continued strong discipline around pricing. And our expense reflects continued business investments for growth. And as you can also see on the appendix page 21, digital engagement continued to improve and showed good year-over-year improvement as customers enjoy the continuation of enhanced capabilities. Moving to Wealth Management on Slide 15. We produced good results, earning a little more than $1 billion after adding 40,000 net new relationships in Merrill and the private bank this year. These results were down from last year as a decline in NII from higher deposit costs still catching up from the interest rate hikes, more than offset higher fees from asset management, driven by higher market levels and assets under management flows. As Brian noted earlier, both Merrill and the private bank continued to see strong organic growth and produced solid assets under management flows of $52 billion since the fourth quarter of '22, which reflects a good mix of new client money as well as existing clients putting their money to the work. Expenses reflect continued investments in the business and revenue related costs. On Slide 16, you see the global banking results. The business produced strong results with earnings of $2.5 billion as a decline from peak levels of NII was offset by lower provision expense, leaving earnings down 3% year-over-year. Revenue declined 8%, driven by the NII. Our global treasury services business remained robust with strong business from existing clients as well as good new client generation. In addition, we continued to see a steady volume of solar and wind investment projects this quarter and our investment banking business continued to perform well in a sluggish environment. Year-over-year revenue growth also benefited from lower marks on leveraged loan positions. The company's overall investment banking fees were $1.1 billion in Q4. That grew 7% over the prior year despite a fee pool that was down 8%. And for the year we held on to the number three position overall, given that performance. In the component parts, we ended the year number one in investment grade, number two in leverage finance, number four in equity capital markets, and number four in mergers and acquisition. The diversification of the revenue across products and regions reflects the growing strength of our platform, and a good example of that is our focus on the equity capital markets blocks business, where we finished number one in the United States for the first time since 1998. And in EMEA, we were also number one for blocks. Provision expense reflected a reserve release of $399 million and that comes from an improved macroeconomic outlook as well as realized charge-offs better, as noted before. Expense decreased 2% year-over-year as continued investments in the business were more than offset by reductions in other operating costs. Switching to Global Markets on Slide 17, the team had another strong quarter, with earnings growing 13% year-over-year to $736 million, driven by revenue growth of 4% and we refer to results excluding DVA as we normally do. Good results in sales and trading and comparatively low remarks on leverage loan positions drove the year-over-year performance and focusing on the sales and trading ex-DVA, revenue improved 1% year-over-year to $3.8 billion, which is a new fourth quarter record for the firm. FICC was down 6% from a record quarter, while equities increased 12% compared to the fourth quarter of '22. And the FICC revenues were down versus that record fourth quarter level with higher revenues in mortgages and municipal trading. Equities was driven by improved trading performance in derivatives. And our expense was up 3% on continued investment in the business. Finally, on Slide 18, all other shows a loss of $3.8 billion, as the two notable items highlighted earlier negatively impacted net income by $2.8 billion in that segment. Revenue adjusted for the $1.6 billion BSBY cessation was flat year-over-year, and expense adjusted for the $2.1 billion FDIC assessment was down a couple hundred million, driven by lower litigation and lower unemployment processing costs. I noted earlier we reported a modest tax benefit this quarter. The tax credits from tax advantaged investment deals throughout the year, including their benefits in the fourth quarter, exceeded taxes on reported earnings because we had the two notable items that lowered results this quarter. For the full year, our tax rate was a little more than 6%. And excluding the impacts of BSBY cessation and FDIC and the other discrete tax benefits, that rate was 10%. And further excluding our investment tax credits, our tax rate would have been 25%. So thank you. And with that, we'll launch into the Q&A, please.


Alastair Borthwick: Thank you, Brian. And I'm going to start on Slide 5 of the earnings presentation, because it will provide just a little more context on the quarter. For the fourth quarter, as Brian noted, we reported $6.7 billion in net income or $0.82 per share. And before we talk about comparisons between periods, I just need to remind you that our fourth quarter 2023 GAAP net income number included two notable items. In the fourth quarter of ‘23, first, we recorded $2.1 billion of pre-tax expense for the special assessment by the FDIC to the industry to recover losses from the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, and that reduced EPS last year by $0.20. Second, we recorded a negative pre-tax impact to our market-making revenue of approximately $1.6 billion related to the cessation of BSBY as an alternative rate, and that reduced earnings per share last year by $0.15. So when you adjust for the large FDIC assessment and the BSBY cessation charge, fourth quarter ‘23 net income was $5.9 billion or $0.70 per share. On Slide 6, we note some of the highlights of the quarter and we reported revenue of $25.5 billion on a fully taxable equivalent basis, up 15% from the fourth quarter of ‘23. And if you exclude the fourth quarter ‘23 BSBY cessation charge, our revenues grew 8% year-over-year. As Brian said, all the revenue items are showing improvement year-over-year. NII grew 3%. Investment banking grew 44%. This quarter, our $4 billion of sales and trading revenue marked a fourth quarter record, and it grew 10% from the year ago period. And investment brokerage fees rose 21%, with both assets under management flows and market levels contributing nicely to the growth. Our card income and service charges grew 7%. Non-interest expense was $16.8 billion and was up when adjusted for the FDIC special assessment driven by incentives paid for the strong revenue growth as Brian noted and the related activity costs that comes with that. Expense also included additional investments in people, technology, and brand with some major partnerships announced recently. And it included what we expect to be the peak in quarterly costs associated with enhancing our compliance costs and controls. The good news is we created operating leverage in the quarter. Provision expense for the quarter was $1.5 billion and was consistent with the previous two quarters. And lastly, returns in the fourth quarter were 80 basis points of ROA and 13% return on tangible common equity. Back to the balance sheet on Slide 7. We ended the quarter at $3.26 trillion of total assets, down $63 billion from the third quarter, driven by seasonally lower levels of client activity in global markets, while loans across the businesses grew $20 billion in the quarter. Otherwise in the quarter, the investments of our excess liquidity saw a $9 billion reduction in hold to maturity securities. And at the same time, the combination of shorter-term liquidity investments of cash and available for sale securities increased $28 billion. On the funding side, total deposits grew $35 billion on an ending basis as both interest bearing and non-interest bearing grew. Long-term debt fell $14 billion driven by net redemptions and valuations, and global markets funding declined in line with assets. Liquidity remains strong with $953 billion of global liquidity sources. That is up modestly compared to the third quarter, even as we paid down some debt and retired some preferreds. Shareholders' equity was flat at around $295 billion. And within all of that, we returned $5.5 billion of capital back to shareholders with $2 billion in common dividends paid and the repurchase of $3.5 billion in shares this quarter. Tangible book value per share of $26.58 rose 9% from the fourth quarter last year. Turning to regulatory capital, our CET1 level improved to $201 billion and the CET1 ratio rose to 11.9%, remaining well above our new 10.7% requirement. Risk-weighted assets increased modestly as increases in loans were mostly offset by lower RWA supporting our global markets client activity. Our supplementary leverage ratio was 5.9% versus a minimum requirement of 5%, which leaves some capacity for balance sheet growth, and our $460 billion of total loss absorbing capital means our TLAC ratio remains comfortably above our requirements. Let's turn to Slide 8. We can go a little deeper on loans by looking at average balances. And loans in the fourth quarter of $1.08 trillion improved 3% year-over-year, driven by solid commercial loan growth. Overall, commercial loans grew 5% year-over-year. And importantly, this included an 8% drop in commercial real estate loans. Commercial loans excluding commercial real estate grew 7% year-over-year, and the consumer loans grew modestly both linked quarter and year-over-year. As Brian said, on a linked quarter basis, every category of consumer lending grew, and you can see that at the bottom of Slide 8. If we turn our focus to NII performance and use Slide 9, regarding NII on a GAAP, non-fully taxable equivalent basis, NII in Q4 was $14.4 billion. And on a fully taxable equivalent basis, NII was $14.5 billion. Several quarters ago, we signaled our expectation that NII would trough in the second quarter of 2024 and begin to grow from there. And this represents now our second quarter of NII growth. And we expect that growth to continue in 2025. In fact, if you look at the two quarters after the inflection point, NII is already growing at a 5% rate. Fourth quarter NII on a fully taxable equivalent basis increased by $399 million from the third quarter, driven by a number of factors. First, it was led by improvement in deposits across the businesses. And even as deposit balances increased linked quarter, our interest expense on those deposits declined by $600 million. Loan growth and fixed rate asset repricing also benefited us again this quarter. With regard to a forward view, interest rate expectations continue to drive volatility and predictability, but we'll provide some thoughts for future NII. We expect to start the year in the first quarter with NII modestly higher than the fourth. Remember that the first quarter has two fewer days of interest and that's roughly the equivalent of about $250 million of NII equivalent. So even with that, we expect to grow modestly. Then we expect that growth to increase through the year to the point where it could be 6% to 7% higher in 2025 than 2024. We expect to exit the year at least $1 billion higher in the fourth quarter and that would put us in a range of $15.5 billion to $15.7 billion on a fully taxable equivalent basis, and that's obviously significantly higher than the Q2 '24 trough of $13.9 billion. I have to note the following assumptions. First, we assume that the current forward curve materializes. And while the interest rate curve has changed significantly over a fairly short period of time, as of the 10 of January, the curve was expecting only one rate cut in 2025 that may come in May or June. Based on our more recent growth experienced, we're assuming loan and deposit growth in 2025 that's higher than 2024, and more consistent with growth in a 2% to 3% GDP environment. The other elements of anticipated growth in NII expected are the benefits of asset repricing as fixed rate securities and loans and swaps roll off and those get repriced at higher rates. And those themes all remain consistent with our prior conversations with you in the last several earnings calls. With regard to interest rate sensitivity, on a dynamic deposit basis, we provide a 12-month change in NII for an instantaneous shift in the curve, above or below the forward curve. And on that basis, a 100 basis point increase would benefit NII by roughly $1 billion, while a decrease of 100 basis points would decrease NII over the next 12 months by $2.3 billion. Lastly, note that our slide showing the trended investment of excess deposits is in our appendix. It's on page 21. Deposit levels grew to $870 billion over loans at the end of Q4, and that's an incredible source of value for shareholders. And $649 billion, or 54% 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 continue to reinvest in higher-yielding assets. Okay. Let's now turn to expense, and we'll use Slide 10 for the discussion. We reported $16.8 billion in expense this quarter. And the fourth quarter of '23 included the large FDIC special assessment charge and excluding that, expense increased. The increased expense from prior periods was driven by a number of factors and was partially offset by a roughly $300 million release of prior period accruals for the FDIC special assessment. Let's talk about the drivers of the expense. First, in regard to revenue, our markets-related businesses of investment banking, investment in Brokerage and Sales & Trading, those were up 20% year-over-year. Incentives for the firm were up 15% versus the fourth quarter of '23 and were in large part related to these market-related revenue streams. On investments that we made, we added bankers and advisers across most of our businesses in 2024, and we also increased investments in our brand with significant sponsorships like the Masters in FIFA to name a few. And we increased our investments around technology as well as financial centers. This quarter alone, we added 17 financial centers with nine of those in our new expansion markets. We're a growth company, and we continue to invest in our future. As far as head count goes, we've managed our head count carefully, and we've held it fairly flat through the 4 quarters of 2024 at around 213,000 people. Lastly, we incurred additional costs to accelerate work on compliance and controls. As you likely saw in late December, the OCC issued a compliance consent order to Bank of America, and that's a result of exams done more than a year ago. This orders about correcting or enhancing certain deficiencies in some aspects of our processes that existed at the time. The order doesn't limit any of our growth plans and the order acknowledges we began taking corrective actions before the order was announced. And as a result of the work in process, we increased our resources substantially in the second-half of 2024 and those costs are already embedded in our quarterly run rate. Okay. Let's go back to expense and how to think about a forward view. First, most importantly, we remain focused on growing the company and driving operating leverage. Second, we expect the first quarter to include some normal seasonal elevation and we believe this amount will be roughly $600 million to $700 million, primarily for payroll tax expense. So we think $17.6 billion is a good number to expect for Q1 and before seasonally declining in Q2. And that's all part of our expectation that expense should be roughly 2% to 3% higher in 2025, compared to 2024. Let's now move to credit and turn to Slide 11, where you can see net charge-offs of a little less than $1.5 billion, improving modestly compared to Q3. That's the fourth quarter now that net charge-offs are around $1.5 billion. We've seen consumer losses in a pretty stable range of $1 billion to $1.1 billion over those past few quarters. And on the commercial side, we saw losses of $359 million, which is down from the third quarter, driven by the continued decline in commercial real estate office losses. Net charge-off ratio this quarter was 54 basis points, down 4 basis points from the third quarter. We don't see overall net charge-offs or the related ratio changing much in 2025, without much change in current GDP or the employment environment, we expect the net charge-off ratio to be in the range of 50 to 60 basis points of loans for 2025. Q4 provision expense was $90 million lower than Q3 at $1.5 billion as reserve levels remain constant. And as it relates to reserve levels on a weighted basis, where reserved for an unemployment rate a little below 5% by the end of 2025, and that compares to the most recent 4.1% rate reported. On Slide 12, we highlight the credit quality metrics for both consumer and commercial portfolios. And there's nothing really noteworthy here that I want to highlight on this page. So let's move to the various lines of business starting on Slide 13 with Consumer Banking. That business made nearly $11 billion or 40% of the company's earnings in 2024. In the fourth quarter, Consumer Banking generated $10.6 billion in revenue and $2.8 billion in net income. Both grew modestly from the fourth quarter of '23 as fee improvement for card and service charges is now being complemented by the growth in NII. Consumer Banking continued to deliver strong organic growth with high-quality accounts and engage clients and they achieved a new record of client experience scores in December. The organic growth activity noted on Slide 3 includes more than 200,000 net new checking accounts, which now takes us to six years' worth of quarter-after-quarter growth. And we show another strong period of card openings and investment account growth. Investment balances grew 22% to $518 billion with full year flows of $25 billion and market improvement throughout the year. Expense rose 8% as we continued investments in our business. The biggest story in consumer this quarter is deposits because these are the most valuable deposits in the franchise. And in the last six months, we believe we've seen the floor begin to form after several periods of slowing decline. Consumer Banking deposits appear to have bottomed in mid-August at around $928 billion and ended the year at $952 billion on an ending basis. Looking at averages, you can see then the deposits grew $4 billion from the third quarter to $942 billion, all while our rate paid declined to 64 basis points. Finally, as you can see in the appendix, page 26, digital adoption and engagement continue to improve and customer satisfaction scores rose to record levels, illustrating our client appreciation of enhanced capabilities from these investments. On Slide 14, we move to Wealth Management, where the business had a very profitable year, generating $4.2 billion in earnings from nearly $23 billion in revenue. In 2024, our Merrill Lynch and Private Bank advisers added another 24,000 net new relationships. And the professionalism of these teams earned them numerous best-in-class industry rankings as you can see on Slide 27 in the appendix. With a continued increase in banking product usage from our investing clients, the diversity of revenue in the wealth business continues to improve. The number of GWIM clients that now have banking products with us continues to grow. And at this point, it represents more than 60% of our clients. Importantly, about 30% of our revenue remains in net interest income, which complements the fees earned in our advice model and those have also grown. Net income rose 15% from the fourth quarter of '23 to nearly $1.2 billion. In the fourth quarter, we reported revenue of $6 billion, growing 15% over the prior year and led by 23% growth in asset management fees. While expenses were up year-over-year, they grew slower than revenue creating the operating leverage in the business. Business had a 26% pretax margin and generated a strong return on capital of 25%. Average loans were up 4%, driven by growth in custom lending, securities-based lending and a pickup in mortgage lending. Deposits grew 2% from the third quarter, and the teams were quite disciplined on pricing of those deposits. Both Merrill and the Private Bank continued to see strong organic growth. And that helped to produce excellent asset under management flows of $79 billion this year, reflecting a good mix of new client money, as well as existing clients putting money to work. We also want to draw your attention to the continued digital momentum that you'll find on Slide 28. Because, for example, three quarters of Merrill bank and brokerage accounts were opened digitally this quarter. Slide 15 shows the Global Banking results and this business generating $8.1 billion or 30% of the company's earnings in 2024, and it continues to be the most efficient business in the company at less than 50% efficiency ratio. The business saw a nice rebound in investment banking fees in 2024, which we expect to continue in 2025. In Q4, Global Banking produced earnings of $2.1 billion. Pretax pre-provision results were flat year-over-year as improved investment banking fees offset lower NII and higher expense. The total earnings were down 13% year-over-year, driven by higher provision expense that came as a result of prior period reserve release. Investment banking fees were $1.7 billion in Q4, growing 44% year-over-year. This was led by mergers and acquisitions. We also saw strength across debt capital markets fees mostly in leverage finance and in equity capital markets fees and we finished the year strong, maintaining our number three investment banking fee position. The fourth quarter saw a strong momentum as the election results provided a lift to sentiment for a more pro-business climate and expectations for more deals to be completed. Expense in this business increased 6% year-over-year, driven by the 13% growth in non-interest income and continued investments in people and technology. The balance sheet saw good client activity, and it was muted somewhat by the strength of the U.S. dollar. Year-over-year flatness in Global Banking loans includes this foreign exchange impact and a $6 billion decline in commercial real estate from paydowns. Otherwise, loans in Global Banking were up 2%. Deposits have been growing for many quarters now with our commercial and corporate clients. And total global banking deposits are now up 10% year-over-year, reaching a new record. So we're seeing strong growth across all the categories from our corporate and commercial clients all the way from the larger end the business banking on the lower end. And we also saw a 10% growth in our international deposits. Turning to Global Markets on Slide 16, I want to focus my comments on results excluding DVA as we normally do. Our team continued their impressive streak of strong revenue and earnings performance. They achieved operating leverage, and they continue to deliver a good return on capital. For the year, record sales and trading results of nearly $19 billion grew 7% from 2023 and they've been growing consistently now on a year-over-year basis for almost three years. This led to $5.7 billion in full-year profits and represents more than 20% of the company's full-year results. In the fourth quarter, earnings of $955 million grew 30% year-over-year. Revenue and again, this is ex DVA, improved 15% from the fourth quarter of '23, as both Sales & Trading and Investment Banking fees improved nicely year-over-year. Focusing on sales and trading ex DVA, revenue improved 10% year-over-year to $4.1 billion. This is the first time we've recorded more than $4 billion in our Q4 results and it included Q4 records for both FICC and Equities. FICC grew 13%, while equities improved 6%, compared to the fourth quarter '23. FICC benefited from tighter credit spreads as well as increased volatility in interest rates, while equities benefited from increased activity around the U.S. election. Year-over-year expenses were up 7% on revenue improvement and our continued investment in the business. And then on Slide 17, you can see all other with a loss of $407 million in the fourth quarter. We spoke earlier about the fourth quarter ‘23 charges for BSBY and the FDIC special assessment charge. Their reversal impacts the comparisons on revenue, expense and net income in this segment. Otherwise, there really isn't anything significant to report here. 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 26%. Looking forward, we expect the tax rate for 2025 to be in a range of 11% to 13%. And this just includes our expectation for higher expected earnings in 2025 and relatively stable tax credits. Finally, this quarter, on page 18, we thought it was important to summarize some of the guidance points we talked through this morning, and we hope you'll find this page helpful. So in summary, we're looking for a strong growth in NII, and we'll look to both continue important investments in the franchise and drive operating leverage as we grow throughout the year. We aren't expecting much movement around credit based on a pretty solid economic outlook. And we remain with a very strong balance sheet with excess capital that we can deploy to grow the business and deliver back to shareholders as appropriate. So with that, I'll stop there. I thank everybody, and we'll open it up for Q&A.


Brian Moynihan: Thank you, and Happy New Year to everyone. Good morning. Thank you for joining us. I'm starting on Slide 2 of the earnings presentation. Here at Bank of America, our teammates finished 2023 with a solid fourth quarter. Reported EPS was $0.35, but that included two notable items that Alastair will describe in more detail. Adjusted for those two items, net income was $5.9 billion after tax or $0.70 per share. Before Alastair covers quarter four results, I want to take a moment and briefly review the 2023 full year results. Our team at Bank of America delivered strong profits for shareholders across a challenging year, navigating a slowing economy, geopolitical tensions, bank failures, and the impact of a rate hike of historic speed. We began the year with a pretentious aura as economists predicted a mild recession within the year. Instead, 2023 showcased economic resilience led by US consumers despite higher interest rates. We ended 2023 with economists projecting the Fed has successfully steered the US economy to a soft landing. In regards to the economy, during 2023, we consistently made a few points regarding what we were seeing in our customer data here at Bank of America. First, the year-over-year growth rate in spending from the beginning of '23 started declining. And it went from, in the early part of '23 over the early part of '22 from a 9% to 10% growth rate to this quarter's 4% to 5% growth rate and that's where it stands here early in 2024. You can see that on Page -- Slide 29 in the appendix. That growth rate, 4% to 5%, is more consistent with a 2% GDP environment and a lower inflation environment. Second, the point we've made is that our consumer deposit balances at Bank of America remained 30% higher than pre-pandemic. We saw the deposit balance of consumer accounts move lower this quarter, but are now seeing more differentiation in behavior. In the lower average balance size accounts, the balances in there still remain at multiples of pre-pandemic levels, nearly three years past last stimulus. They are modestly declining. The deposit outflows you've seen in consumer have largely been driven by the higher-balance accounts who've moved their excess balances into the markets to seek higher yields. We capture those with our leading wealth platform. Third, the consumers of Bank of America have had access to credit and are borrowing responsibly. The balance sheets are generally in good shape. And while impacted by higher rates, remember, many of them have fixed-rate mortgages and remain employed. So they've shown great resilience. Let's move to discussion of full year 2023 earnings. We reported net income of $26.5 billion after tax, which includes $2.8 billion after tax for notable quarter four items. Adjusted for those items, adjusted net income was $29.3 billion after tax. Earnings per share were $3.42 and that grew 7% over 2022. On that adjusted basis, we generated a 90 basis point return on assets and a 15% return on tangible common equity. The year 2023 was characterized by a record organic customer activity, record digital customer engagement levels and satisfaction scores, strong but slowing NII during the course of the year, strong sales and trading up 7% year-over-year, operating leverage reflected good expense discipline, solid asset quality and a strong capital and liquidity position. All this was helped by the years of Bank of America's assiduous dedication to responsible growth. This helped us bring our headcount and expense down every quarter during 2023, in line with what we told you to expect early this year -- early last year. Adjusted full year revenue grew 5% on the back of 9% NII improvement and strong asset management fees and sales and trading results. We achieved 170 basis points of operating leverage in 2023 as heightened quarterly expense levels were driven lower throughout the year even as the investments in growth continued. Net charge-offs moved higher through the year off the historic lows, but they still compare very favorably against historic averages. One last point worth noting is the level of deposits. If you think back as we ended 2022 and entered 2023, the great debate was how much the pandemic surge in deposits would dissipate. But looking today, we ended 2023 with $1.924 trillion of deposits, only $7 billion less than we had at year-end '22 and 4% higher than the trough in May of this year. The total deposits -- the total average deposits in the fourth quarter remained 35% higher than they did in the quarter four of 2019. This has been tremendous works by our teams to drive our industry-leading market share, actually outperforming the industry across the four-year period, and again this year. While the economy appears to continue to normalize and rates continue to have some volatility, one thing that remains important is driving that organic growth. This client activity sticks to the ribs is what we want to spend a moment as I wrap up. On Slide 3, we highlight some of the successes in organic activity in our results for the year. Bank of America team is a powerful engine that's fueling results across all our businesses. I would note a couple of examples to try and connect the importance to our financials. It's easy to use the consumer business as an example. In consumer, we added 600,000 net new checking accounts during the year 2023. The fourth quarter of 2023 represents the 20th straight quarter of net addition of head -- of checking accounts. The quality is what drives the checking account balances. On average, 67% of the deposit balances have been with us for customers who have been with us for more than 10 years. 92% of the consumer checking accounts are primary, meaning they're the core client household account. 60% of our checking accounts use their debit card. They average 400 transactions per account each year, showing how engaged they are. They have traditionally opened savings accounts 20% to 25% of the time within a few months of opening their checking accounts. Thinking about those new accounts, at opening those new checking accounts opened last year, bring in about $4,000 of balances. Then they deepen over the next subsequent months to two times that amount. New saving accounts come with those accounts, starting with about $8,000 and doubling over time. From the total new checking accounts we opened just in 2023, those customers have opened nearly 0.5 million credit card accounts with us so far in 2023. Historically, we've seen on average these customers more than doubled those card balances within a year. Those card accounts on average have spent about $7,000 per year, of which a portion will carry a balance. Now, there's always additional opportunity to further serve our clients and to continue to meet them where they are. In addition to the industry-leading digital platforms that we have, we have opened 50 new financial centers in 2023. More than half of those were in our expansion markets. We've expanded our presence during 2023 to 10 markets, including our latest opening in Omaha. In our global wealth management team, we added more than 40,000 net new relationships across Merrill and the Private Bank. Our advisors opened 150,000 new banking accounts for wealth management clients, showing the completeness of the relationship approach. The average Merrill account is over $1 million at opening. The average private bank account is multiples of that. As you can see on the slide, we now manage $5.4 trillion of client balances across loans, deposits, investments of our consumer clients, both consumer and GWIM. We saw $84 billion of flows into those accounts last year. As we switch to Global Banking on the lower-left-hand side of the slide, we added clients to increase the number of products per relationship. Just like in consumer, we have seen good growth in customers seeking the benefits of our physical and digital capabilities, but most importantly, our talent relationship managers who provide financing solutions, treasury services, strategic advice for clients with local and global needs. We added roughly 2,500 new commercial and business banking clients this year. That is more than twice what we added in 2022. We look forward to continue to drive with those -- grow with those clients in '24 and add even more. This capitalized on a multi-year build of our relationship management team in the Global Banking businesses, especially in product expansion also, especially in the global transaction services area and mid-market investment bank. As we think about global markets, we continue to see strong performance from our team with 7% year-over-year revenue growth, the strongest we've had in many years. We see digital tools our customers have access to across the board, helping us enable this activity at lower costs. Our normal digital banking slides are once again included for your reference on Pages 21, 24 and 26. In summary, this was a good quarter. We delivered our third quarter of expense declines. We saw NII outperform what we expected when we talked to you on the last earnings call. We continue to manage well through the transition and the rate structure. We saw deposits grow this quarter. And we look forward with a strong capital base, strong liquidity and growing loans and deposits to a greet 2024. I want to thank my teammates for what they did for us in 2023, and we all know we're off to a nice start for '24. With that, I'll turn it over to Alastair.


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.


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.