KeyCorp (KEY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So up next, we're once again excited to have KeyCorp joining us at the conference. Key's had another strong year, driving return improvement through significant margin expansion and fee growth, which has resulted in best-in-class operating leverage, more recently it began returning additional capital via share repurchase and should be another lever help it achieve its 15% ROTCE return by year-end '27. Here to tell us more about how they're going to achieve these goals is Chairman and CEO, Chris Gorman. Today's discussion will be a fireside chat. So welcome, Chris.

Well, thanks, Ryan, and it's great to be here. I always enjoy coming to your conference.

Absolutely. Appreciate having you here. So maybe just to start off, Chris, as we wrap up 2025 maybe talk a little bit about what are some of the big accomplishments you're most proud of as an organization. And conversely, any areas in retrospect that could have gone a little bit better? And what areas you focus on improving into 2026?

Sure. Let me start with 2025, and I'll just give you kind of a brief recap. It was a really important year for us. So in 2025, we celebrated our 200th birthday. And that in and of itself isn't of all that import. But what was important is I was out in the market, probably 50 separate sort of town hall meetings with 300 clients. And I couldn't help but really be energized by how our folks were focused on prospects, how they were focused on our customers, just the whole energy around it. One of the things I've been trying to do is to really pivot our -- we've always been a great service organization. I want us to be a great sales organization, and that's really manifesting itself that way. If you look at our backlogs, whether it's investment banking, whether it's our loan backlogs, significantly above today where they were 6 months ago, significantly above now where they were a year ago. So we're making significant progress there. I think one of the really important things is it teed us up for what I think will be a great run in both '26, '27 and beyond. So from a financial perspective, we made -- we continue to make a whole lot of investments. We've set a very aggressive goal early in the year that we were going to grow our sales forces, particularly our fee-based sales forces by 10% and we achieved that. So you've got wealth management, you've got payments in middle market and investment banking. We grew our frontline people by 10% in each of those areas. As it relates to technology, we invested an additional $100 million this year and successfully implemented that. So I think we made a ton of progress. As you think about from a financial perspective, this will be a record year from a revenue perspective. So I think that's really important. We closed the year with obviously high levels of capital, which gives us optionality. And so it just was just a very, very -- we're in good shape from a credit perspective. So as you pivot to what can we expect? I think what we're focused on is continuing the momentum that we have. So we have a ton of momentum in our business. We're going to continue to hire people. We think we have these under-leveraged platforms. As I mentioned, we have a lot of capital, and we're generating a lot of capital, and we'll focus -- it sets it up for both the return of and the return on capital.

Great. So Chris, I know you're out in the markets a lot talking to clients going out on pitches and stuff. Maybe just give us an update on your views on the economy and client sentiment as we head into 2016? And how do you think the bank is positioned for this environment?

So let me start with the last part of your question first. I think we're positioned extremely well. I'll get into my macro view, which I think is actually a little favorable to some that are out there. I think if you think about our credit book, if you think about the capital that we have that gives us optionality and if you think about our fee-based businesses and the momentum there, we've never had more bankers, we've never had more customers. And so I think we're really -- and I think the markets are going to be really, really good for middle market kind of transactions. So I think we're well positioned as we go forward. Now as it relates to -- let's start with the consumer. I happen to think that the consumer contrary to what you -- at least I'll speak to our consumer. Look, there's obviously consumers a very broad range. But as you think about our consumer, our consumer today has more money in their account than they did pre-COVID, like 20% more. They're spending more than they have in the past. They're spending 2% to 3% more this year versus last year. We have $68 billion of AUM, which is a lot -- I think the wealth effect is one thing that's throwing off a lot of the data. Here's an interesting stat. In the first 235 years of our country, household net worth was $60 trillion. In the last 15 years, it's increased by another $140 trillion. So I think as you think about kind of the impacts of that I think our consumer is healthy. Our charge-offs for consumers has been 27 bps over the last 10 years. All credit metrics are getting better. Let's switch over to commercial for a moment if we could. Our commercial clients are doing well. It was an interesting year because I think early in the year with the uncertainty around liberation day, everyone kind of took a pause I think with the tax bill that passed right around the fourth of July, I think there's a lot of momentum. 60% of our clients think that they will be beneficiaries of the tax bill as we sort of are out talking to our clients. The big thing there is accelerated depreciation. It doesn't mean a lot for huge companies. It means a lot for small companies. And so you can basically manage your earnings and manage your tax liability. So I feel good about kind of where our customers are and where we're positioned.

So Chris, on the back of that, let's talk a little bit about loan growth. You've seen strong commercial growth year-to-date. I think you were up 5% in total commercial, including 7% in C&I. Well, obviously, we're continuing to optimize the consumer. Maybe just talk about how loan growth is trending in the quarter? Have you seen any change in utilization rates? And do you think it can accelerate into next year?

Sure. So let me kind of give you the dynamics. It's kind of a -- sort of -- for us, it's a little bit of a tale of 2 cities. We are seeing significant growth in C&I. We'll end the year -- period over period from the last time we reported, we'll be up another $1 billion. Our C&I growth is about 9%. So we have really healthy C&I growth. On the other side of the equation, commercial real estate down a little bit. And then, of course, our consumer book, which you're well aware of, we have $19 billion of first mortgages, $14 billion of the $19 billion are at 4% or less. Those are running off to the tune of $0.5 billion to $600 million per quarter. So call it $2 billion a year. As I look forward, I see continued growth in terms of loans, Ryan. I think, one, the growth that we've had in C&I is going to continue. So call that kind of 9%. The M&A business has -- the middle market M&A business, and I'm sure we'll talk about this more, hasn't really kicked in. When that kicks in, for example, in the last 12 months, we raised $160 billion in capital. We only put 16% on our balance sheet because, frankly, there's a bunch of other people out there that in serving our clients, they're better served to have our -- to have us place the capital. The other thing that's going to kick in is you're going to start to see -- in commercial real estate, I think is one of our best business, you're going to see there's going to start to be transactional activity in commercial real estate. So far, it's all been refinancing. Everyone is sort of wondering where rates are going to be. People are going to start to transact, 4.1%, 4.2%, 10 year, you can do that all day. And then the last thing I'd say that will give us some growth next year on the consumer side, we're in the process. We have the customers for home equity, 50 of our customers that own homes, they have 50% equity in their houses, and we're just really investing right now in making sure that, that's an easy straight through digital process.

Super helpful. I guess, Chris, before we get into next year and your strategic priorities, any additional data points you'd like to get out there in terms of the fourth quarter, whether it's fees, deposit repricing, NII or credit?

Sure. I'd be happy to. So here's the fourth quarter update for the benefit of the group. We expect healthy fee growth north of $750 million in the fourth quarter. Our fourth quarter investment banking fees are expected to be better than last year by $10 million to $20 million. You'll recall in the third quarter, I said they'd be about the same, they're going to be more. We see high single-digit growth in our other priority businesses in terms of fees, wealth management, commercial payments. At this point, we expect full year fees to be comfortably north of 6.5%. That's up from prior guidance of 5% to 6%. Full year expense growth will be a little higher than 4%, but you would expect that when you have the kind of fee growth that we have given the comp structure. I am proud of the fact, however, that we'll get 250 basis points of fee-based operating leverage. Obviously, if you look at total operating leverage, it would be sort of off the chart based on our NII incredible trajectory that we've got there. On the point of NII, NII growth will be better than 22%. So that will beat the guide that we've given, and we upped our guide 2x this year as you're well aware. Credit, as I mentioned earlier, remains stable. Full year charge-offs well within our 40 to 45 bps guidance. And then importantly, on the buyback front. We had said that we were going to buy back $100 million worth of stock in the fourth quarter. We're going to buy back $200 million. And as of last night, we were at $175 million. So we are -- with our undervalued stock and significant capital position, we are stepping on the gas.

Seems like a pretty upbeat update there, Chris.

Well, thank you. We're really proud of -- we have a ton of momentum.

Awesome. No, I appreciate all that. I guess turning to 2026, fully understanding that you're probably still in the budgetary process. But high level, just how are you thinking about revenue growth, whether it's both NI or fees operating leverage, investment spend and other PPNR drivers? And then I guess related to that, are you still going to continue to use this fee-based operating leverage just maybe a highlight of how you're thinking about those different pieces.

Sure. That's a great question. So as we start to think about planning before we start to even get all the numbers pulled together, it's -- where do we want to invest? In business, it's a constant trade-off. How much do you want to invest right now? How much of the earnings do you want to realize? And one of the things I'm really proud of is in spite of some of the issues that we've had over the last few years, we've always continued to invest, but we're going to continue to invest in people. We're going to continue to invest in technology. We're going to continue to build the business. And I think that's really, really important. The other thing we always look at is we're very focused on who we want to do business with, what clients are we going after? And in order to go after those clients today and tomorrow, what do you have to be competitive, to be successful. Because we all know, while everyone is very focused on loans, on the commercial side, loans don't even return their cost of capital. So you've got to figure out what these clients want and how we do that. The next thing that we spend a lot of time thinking about is capital, right? And the question is how much capital do we need? Obviously, we have more than we need at this point. We're generating a lot of capital. And so those are kind of some of the big picture things that we look at. When you put all that into the equation, what does next year look like? One, we'll continue to have high single-digit revenue growth. I'm very pleased with the trajectory. You'll continue to see that. We'll continue to have very good credit quality, which obviously is really, really important. When you start focusing on return on tangible common equity, one of the things when we do our planning that I should mention is, right now, our return on tangible common equity is 12%. That's obviously not acceptable. It needs to be higher. And one of the things we're challenging our team to do right now is, yes, we want to continue to invest. But in the meantime, where do we take out expenses, where do we rethink how we do business? We have 420 people in AML BSA, for example. If you think about technology, if you think about AI, there are huge opportunities. We basically take $100 million out of our expense base every year to invest back in the business. So one of the things we think about in 2026 is making sure we're on that path to go from 12 to 15 to 16 to 19 that you referenced in one of your earlier questions. And then the last thing that we think about, and it's going to be really important is not only the trajectory of our return on tangible common equity, getting to that 15 by 12/31/27 but also that's just a mile marker we're going to get to 16 to 19. We're thinking about how to pull all those levers. Part of that will be, again, the management of capital, and we'll return a bunch of capital to our investors in 2026. Basically, where we are on the share repurchases is we said we were going to do $100 million, we're going to do $200 million, that leaves $800 million in our existing authorization. And I would anticipate, Ryan, that we'll be going back to our Board in 2026 to reload that.

Got you. That's super helpful. Maybe to dig in, you talked about high single-digit revenue growth next year. Obviously, capital markets will be a big contributor to that. Maybe just talking about how you're feeling about capital market activity into next year. And then related, I think you threw out achieving $1 billion in the business over time, how quick can you get there? And how much is secular help especially from things like M&A, what do you need to get there?

Yes. Well, let me just spend a couple of minutes talking about our capital markets business because I think it's one of the things that is misunderstood by investors and as a consequence, is one of the reasons I don't think we're valued where we should be valued. It's an incredible business. It's a business that is unique, there are not many people that have the capabilities we do. There are certainly people that have an M&A shop, et cetera. But for someone to compete with us, they have to, one, have the capabilities that we have to be focused on the middle market and be able to -- and have a balance sheet. And if you think about all the players, there's very, very few players that have all that. The other thing that I think is missed by the market a lot is the amount of repeat business that we get. We get a whole lot of repeat business. And if you think about $0.75 billion or our aspirational goal of $1 billion of fee income, that's pretty remarkable. If you had a high-end consulting firm and you were generating those kind of revenues, you'd get an incredible valuation on that. So I just think -- I think it's -- and what's unique about us, by the way, is a lot of banks our size have some of these capabilities, but they don't go to market based on industry verticals, which I think is the secret sauce. As a consumer of the investment banking product, I wouldn't want a banker calling on me that one day was calling on a software company and one day was calling on a distribution company, just for me, that doesn't work. And so I just think this is a really important business I feel great about this business. One of the -- not only are we going to have the second best year we've ever had, but we're not even hitting on all cylinders yet. And what I mean by that is M&A, there's been a lot of big-ticket M&A announced. M&A has been very muted for the past 3 years. If you look at, for example, the private equity world, that has been very muted, like 50% of what it typically is. We're going to have our second best year, Ryan, and we're going to be 20% below where we are -- where we typically are in the M&A side. And the reason I say that is M&A pulls through a lot of things. If you're advising someone and helping them buy a company, you get the financing, you get the hedging, you get the payments, et cetera. So I feel great about the business. There's no question that the $1 billion is aspirational because I want to challenge the team, but we've never had more bankers. We've never had more customers. If you go back to 2021, which was an outlier year, I think that year, we had like $930 million or $40 million in revenue. So we know that the platform can generate it. We know we can process that level of business, and we are a much stronger platform today than we were then.

So Chris, let's -- I want to spend a little bit of time on capital and deployment priorities. I see here in the slide it says not pursuing depository institutions. I'm sure you noticed the market's reaction to report a few weeks back that claim you were potentially interested in opportunities in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe first, anything you want to clarify when it came to that report?

Well, let me start by being very specific. We are not interested in any depositories. We are looking at 0 depositories. So I'll repeat that. We have no interest in purchasing a depository. So I just want to be crystal clear on that. I'll tell you what we are interested in is we're interested in growing organically. And we think we have a great trajectory to grow organically. The comments that I made about the Pacific Northwest, we're actually about growing organically. We grew about 5% in the Pacific Northwest in terms of households and retail. We grow 2% or 3% nationwide. So you can imagine, there's a bunch of areas where we're not growing that fast. And if you think about markets like Denver, like Seattle, like Portland, like Boise, like Salt Lake City, those are great markets. They're also great markets for our business. We got a market, as I said, on verticals. Some of our strongest verticals are like power. We've been in the power vertical forever. And as everyone knows, it's all about power right now. We've been in technology forever. When you think about Bellevue, Washington, that's sort of the cloud computing capital of the world, just to mention one spot that happens to be out West. So that was the genesis of my discussion. The other thing that I said, and I think this is really important, and I think it's important that everyone understands this. The other thing that I was that I commented on is I don't have some huge sense of urgency that there's this narrow window that's going to absolutely close at the midterms. You got to think about how we got here. We got here by layer and layer and layer of additional regulation that basically squashed consolidation in our industry over 15 years. That is not going to change no matter who controls the house, no matter who controls the Senate or ultimately in 3 years or whatever it is, who controls the White House. So I don't have any sense of urgency that -- I do think there'll be consolidation. I think there'll be consolidation in our industry for a long time. We are not participating. So I just want you to know that. What else would you like to know?

So I guess, just a sort of a quick follow-up, you're not pursuing this. Is there any time around this? Is it until you reach your [indiscernible] goals, any sort of parameters to think about investor investments?

No, I'm not focused on any hypotheticals. We are shut down, locked down we are focused on generating organic growth. We have an incredible path ahead of us. And we're going to basically spend our time on a couple of things. One, taking advantage of the disruption that's out there in the marketplace. When there is an acquisition, basically all customers are up for grabs, and that's free. And so we're going to spend time focused on disruption. And the other thing that we're going to spend time buying is KeyCorp stock. We are an undervalued stock. We believe that strongly, and we're going to spend our capital buying our stock.

I guess, Chris, you're obviously not pursuing depository. Is there anything on the fill inside non-bank that you could look at, if at all?

Yes, that's an area where we would have an interest. And keep in mind, these are not large deals. But we think we have these unique and underleveraged platforms. And as a consequence, whether it's hiring individual bankers or lifting teams out where we frankly have had a lot of success or buying boutiques. We're going to continue to do that because what we find is when we get great professionals and we plug them into our platform, they can be more meaningful to their clients than they were wherever they used to be. And so we're going to continue to do that. And we are, in fact, looking at some of those on the margin. It's not like they consume a lot of capital, but it certainly can help us sort of continue to turbocharge our business. One of the areas I'm kind of interested in now there's -- I talked about this wealth effect. One of the secondary impacts of that are all the family offices. And obviously, we, like many of you have done businesses with family offices forever, what's unique now about family offices is in many respects, they're looking a lot like private equity looked 10 years ago. They're buying a lot of private businesses. And -- we -- obviously, if we have $68 billion of AUM and you can provide a lot of M&A advice, that's a little bit -- that's interesting to me.

So Chris, let's talk about a little bit more about capital and capital targets. You said your -- you did $200 million in buyback this quarter. We talked about going back to the Board. So I assume that means you're going to use the additional $800 million next year, which is good to hear. You still have 10.3% CET1 and we think about the path on your ROTC, I think it assumes capital staying at elevated levels. So how do you think about the potential to bring down capital levels on an adjusted basis? And then what does that mean for your ability to return capital over the medium term?

Sure. So your assumptions are right. When we talked about having multiple paths to get to 15% return on tangible common equity, by 12/31/27, that assumed that we just keep our market and we always talk about marked CET1, our Mark CET1 at 10.3. Obviously, to the -- and by the way, the path to get there, I just -- I think it's important that people understand, half of that is purely mechanical. That's why we're so confident. We have $35 billion of assets and swap that just the pull to par in the ordinary course. The other thing, as I mentioned, we have tremendous momentum, organic momentum in our fee-based businesses. we're obviously going to pay attention to expenses. The other thing that we're going to do is make sure we don't stub our toe from a credit perspective. I've said many times to this group, on a stand-alone basis, these loans don't return their cost of capital, so you better not stretch for them. That's the other thing that can destroy return on tangible common equity. So getting to the milepost of 15% by 12/31/27. That's an easy one. And the assumption there that we're going to stay at 10.3 is extremely conservative. Our target is 9.5 to 10. And I'll give you just an example. If we decided to go -- and this is an if, if we decided to burn down our capital from 10.3 marked CET1 to 9.3 marked CET1. That adds another 200 basis points to return on tangible common equity by 12/31/27. So 15 becomes 17 with just that move. I'm not saying that we're going to do that. But I will say that we have a target for a reason, and you'll probably see us move into our target over time. Having said all that, I think running with bare bones capital is not a prudent thing to do. You think about Ryan, what we've all lived through in the last 5 years, we had COVID. We had all the stimulus. We had all the inflation related to the stimulus, we had the biggest hiking cycle in 60 years related to the hiking cycle is related to stimulus. And then as a result of that, we had what went on in 2023 in the banks. I'm not interested in burning it down to nothing, but we certainly don't need to run with 10.3.

So I guess just one last quick follow-up on capital. Obviously, your stated and marked are 150 basis points apart, [indiscernible] you're in a good capital position. How do you think about the trade-off of accelerating/improving returns by doing further restructurings versus just letting the capital accrete over time.

Yes, I think at this point, what I'd like to do is really focus not on restructuring our balance sheet, but taking that capital and buying back shares. I just feel -- I mean, by definition, those deals are NPV 0. And so then the question is, do those really pay off? And where our stock is valued right now. I want to take our dry powder and focus it on buying back our stock as opposed to repositioning the balance sheet. The pull to par is real. It's $35 billion, and it happens in the not-too-distant future, and we'll sort of let it come to us and I -- one caveat, if there was some huge dislocation in the market. I mean, it's our job to pay attention to what's going on in the market, and we would take advantage of a dislocation. But absent that, no.

So we spent a good amount of time covering capital allocation and deployment. Obviously, there was a presentation out last week about KeyCorp or for any broader changes. Maybe just any reaction or comments you have to that deck that came out regarding Key this past week.

Sure. So we're still digesting it. We're looking at all the content in there. I will tell you this, I think we and that particular investor are pretty closely aligned on the most important themes. Most important theme is a moratorium on doing bank deals. I've sort of been pretty clear on that today. I think we're perfectly aligned on that. The second thing is return of capital. And we had -- this has been the path that we've been on, that we've laid out. And we're buying back our shares in a certain way. We absolutely agree with that investor that our shares are undervalued and that we have excess capital, and we're going to buy it back. The other thing that I would -- I think is important just to mention is we have made a lot of changes over the last 2 or 3 years in terms of really making sure that we're buttoned down and tight, particularly from a finance perspective. And I would just add that to the discussion.

Got you. That's super helpful. So a couple of other areas that I wanted to touch upon. Talk a little bit about retail scale. I know in the past, you've talked about what has really mattered has been targeted scale. I see I would apply to commercial banking. But maybe just talk a little bit about retail. You have 950 branches across 15 states. You need more branches, marketing, sales presence in order to be able to win in consumer over the longer term?

Yes. So there's no question that in retail scale is helpful. So I mean that goes without saying. But the question is, how do you get that scale? Because you have to have -- it's not just a matter of having branches. You have to have branches in the right place. I feel like we are getting that, we have ours in the right place since the financial crisis, we've grown our consumer deposits by 7%. We continue to grow households by 2% and 3%. What we're really focused on is making sure we can do more within our branches. I've talked a lot about mass affluent, Ryan. And we have a lot of those people in our branches. We hired 100 people in our mass affluent area this year. So the question is, what can you do? The other thing I will share with you is, there's a lot of discussion about people building x number of branches, de novo which is interesting. But if you really look under the covers, in most cases, net-net, the number of branches are actually down because there's a bunch of consolidations, a bunch of closures and a bunch of openings. And so, I like where we're positioned from a retail perspective, and we're going to continue to lean in, particularly with having these professionals in the branches and that's small business and mass affluent because that's where you can connect with those customers.

So we've got a couple of minutes to go here, Chris. Just a couple of more topics that I wanted to get through. So first, maybe just on credit, you touched upon it before, when you talked about the fourth quarter. So maybe just how are you thinking about credit into '26? Are there any areas that you're watching more closely? Maybe just spend a minute on your NDFI portfolio and some stats about why you feel good about the credit performance in this book. Sure.

So I feel very good about our credit posture. I mean, just stepping back for a second, and I mentioned this earlier, if you think about the fact that of all the capital we raised, we only put 15% or 16% on our balance sheet. We don't -- we serve our clients without having massive tail risk. . If you think about our consumer, our consumer, as I mentioned earlier, is a super prime consumer. Now having said that, there's always things to worry about in terms of areas. The areas that I'm kind of focused, I always focus any place there's leverage. Anytime you have leverage, it turbocharges your returns, and it also -- it requires a really clear look at that. Everyone should know, we have less leveraged loans today than we did when we were like half as big as we are. That's not a big area for us because there's a bunch of people that want that paper, and we're happy to distribute it to them for a fee. So the area that I'm paying close attention to right now, and I think everybody should just because it's in such a state of flux is health care. I mean obviously, the way we fund health care in this country. The government is about 2/3 of all health care. And so obviously, to the extent that the government makes significant changes in how health care is reimbursed, it impacts the entire industry. We are very, very strong in health care. We advise on many, many things, Cain Brothers is a market-leading company. And as a result, we're involved in all aspects. We don't have a lot of exposure in our balance sheet but we're paying close attention. You asked about NDFI. NDFI of course, is a very broad category that by the way, the way it's categorized has changed. But making a long story short, I am not worried about anything that we have in NDFI. Our biggest piece of that is SFL, our structured finance business. When you think about verticalization when you think about targeted scale, we've been in that business for 20 years, and we've had but 90% of it is investment grade. We've had one charge-off in 20 years. We feel like we kind of know what we're doing there. The next area where we have exposure or REITs. And with respect to REITs, these are investment-grade credits in REITs, and probably everyone in this room knows that, instead of lending on a project basis, you lend to an investment-grade company that then has projects. I feel good about that. And then the third bucket that we have, we have our own unitranche deals, by the way, that have been very successful. We have 2 of them. We're going to launch a third one for real estate because right now, I think they're going to start -- there's going to be a bunch of real estate transactions. And we have -- and the other thing that's in there is insurance companies. And as everyone knows, insurance companies are regulated state by state, and they can't really run thin on capital by definition.

So I hear the applause in the other rooms, that means we got time for one. I think you're going to get an applause after this. But maybe just to wrap up. So the stock is trading a little above 1.3x price to tangible, which means investors think low teens returns into perpetuity, obviously different from what you put up on the slides. What do you think is still misunderstood at Key?

I think there's a few things that's understood. I think, one, just the trajectory of the business. Our trajectory right now is better than it's ever been. So I think people misunderstand the trajectory. I think people probably misunderstand the credit exposure that we had. It was interesting that when there were a few things that tipped over, all the banks got hit, and that's just not really. Not all banks are the same. I think people don't understand that. So it's our unique business model, the trajectory, our credit. And I mean, those are the biggest things, Ryan. If you think about those 3 things, unique business model, trajectory of the business and credit and our ability -- I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this lastly. The fact that we have an abundance of capital, our ability to not only serve our clients but return capital to our investors. And so what you'll see is you'll see elevated return on and return of capital elevated growth of tangible book value, elevated growth of earnings kind of across the board.

Great. Please join me in thanking Chris .

Thank you.