Synovus Financial Corp. (SYU1.DU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Please welcome Senior Director, Investor Relations and Market Intelligence, Cal Evans.

Good morning. Welcome to Synovus Investor Day 2022. I'm Cal Evans, and I'm thrilled to be here with you this morning. For those of you who traveled to Atlanta today, thank you for making the effort. We certainly know that the past few weeks haven't been very conducive to travel. For those of you who are from Atlanta that drove in today, we appreciate you braving the gridlock outside. And for those of you who are online with us virtually, Good morning. We're happy to have you, and we look forward to hearing from you during the Q&A sessions further into the program. In just a moment, we're going to hear from Kevin Blair, our President and CEO, as well as representatives from our human resources team, our commercial lending team to include our Community Bank, our Wholesale Bank, our newly created Corporate and Investment bank as well as Treasury Payment & Solutions and credit. After that, we'll have our first of 2 Q&A sessions, and we'll field questions from the people in the room as well as those online. [Operator Instructions] After that, we'll have a short break, and then we'll reconvene to hear from leadership, from our Community Bank and also tech and operations. Following that, Jamie Gregory, our CFO, will show you our path towards top quartile performance. We will have a second Q&A session after that, and then Kevin Blair will give us some final words and send us home. But before we start, let me cover a few disclaimers. Our comments include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and the actual results could vary materially. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements because of new information, early developments or otherwise, except as may be required by law. During this presentation, we will reference non-GAAP financial measures related to the company's performance. You may see the reconciliation of these measures in the appendix to our presentation. The presentation slides can be found on the website for those of you on the webcast. Regarding the slides, we will be releasing Jamie Gregory's deck just before he speaks. So without further ado, thank you for coming and let me welcome our President and CEO, Kevin Blair.

[Audio Gap] forward-looking statements and legal lead concepts because it makes me look good. So thank you, Cal. Look, let me echo Car's comments. It's wonderful to be with you today. It's great to see so many familiar faces here in the room. And for those of you that are joining us virtually, this is a monumentous day for Synovus. I think back to the last time we did an Investor Day over 15 years ago, it was a different time. As we sit here today as the largest bank headquartered in the state of Georgia, I welcome you to Atlanta. Whether you call it the big peach or the ATL or the gate city, this represents our largest market as well as our fastest-growing market. So we wanted to share that with you here today in person. But let's get back to over 15 years ago, we held our last Investor Day. As we sit here today, many of you may wonder why are we holding an Investor Day today. Is it the end of the pandemic? Is it a time to have this discussion? I would submit to you that today is the time to tell a story, and we believe our story is changing the narrative on Synovus. Now we have a long and proud history, one of 130 years, but I would submit to you that we're the youngest 130-year financial institution in the United States. And that has nothing to do with my age or any of the executives down the side here. It has to do with the transformation that we've made over the last 12 years and that we're going to accelerate as we move into the next couple of years. Now that long proud history has served as a strong foundation, but we believe we have an even brighter future. As we think about our new brand of banking, which you'll hear today, inspired banking, and that's building on our client-centric platform developing new sources of revenue that will allow us to accelerate our growth profile and ultimately deliver sustainable top quartile performance. So thank you. Let's start with the investment thesis. Why Synovus? It's not lost to me that there are 4,000-plus other banks that we're competing with on a daily basis for our clients and ultimately for our investors. And so our story has to be different. It has to be special. It has to offer value. And I would suggest to you that we have several tenants here that bring our story to life, and it starts with a strong foundation. When you look at our talent, we're superior. I'll tell you why later. When you look at our 5-state footprint, we're superior. We'll talk about that later. And when you look at our client experience and the client base that we have, we believe that we're superior based on the Net Promoter Scores that we continue to receive. Now when you add the strong foundation that we already have created and you build on that with the momentum we've been seeing recently from our performance, it becomes exponential. If you look at 2021 and you look at the loan growth of 8%, 4x our peers' average. You look at our fee income growth in several key categories, like core banking fees, wealth management, treasury and payment solutions, 20-plus percent growth last year. And then you look at relationship. Relationship is a word that many banks throw around. We have a relationship-based approach. But I would submit to you that to truly be a relationship, you have to deliver seamlessly across your businesses and put the interest of the customer first and foremost. And we do that, and it's evidenced, by our ability to generate a higher Pre-Provision Net Revenue to asset ratio than our peers, 30% higher than the peer median. And we've done a lot of that on the back of our new strategic initiative that we rolled out in the fourth quarter of 2019 called Synovus Forward. It was important to us prior to the pandemic to ensure that we had a plan in place that continue to push that differentiated approach to banking, and it would ultimately deliver incremental value to our shareholders. We initially committed to a $100 million pretax run rate benefit by the end of 2021. Then we have the pandemic. We saw new headwinds, interest rates declined, economic uncertainty. And the leadership team came together again, and we increased our target to $175 million by the end of 2022. And we did that under the guise of we must continue to improve our performance in order to generate sustainable top quartile performance. I was pleased at the end of last year as we closed out 2021 to present to you that we have achieved a run rate benefit of $110 million and that we were on track to deliver the final $65 million this year with $20 million coming from additional efficiencies and a roughly $45 million to $50 in revenue. So that plan is still in place, but we're rolling it into our normal strategic plan and embedding it more as a mindset of continuous transformation versus having it be just a project on the side. And this is where the story gets fun because now we have momentum and we're rolling out our new strategic plan, where we're investing in our core businesses to ensure that we provide the better client experience and higher productivity that will drive those businesses. You're going to hear a lot of that today from Wayne and Katherine and others who are investing in the core franchise. But we also are making strategic investments in our businesses to create new sources of growth that complement our core businesses, whether it's in the wholesale bank, where we're adding specialty or creating a completely new segment in corporate and investment bank. It's exciting because it's providing us with an additional set of growth initiatives that will push us from a good growth bank to an elevated growth bank. And we're doing all of this and leaning in with a progressive mindset. When you look at our MAAST product, and you're going to hear a lot today about MAAST, Wayne is going to share that product with you in detail, you're going to see a video, we believe we're going to be one of the first banks that offers a Banking-as-a-Service, one-stop shop for these independent software vendors. That's going to create a tremendous amount of value for the software vendor, their end users and us and our shareholders. We also have been progressive in thinking about crypto and blockchain. You may have seen a recent article where we've entered into a consortium with the USDF to ensure that we're in a place where we can ensure that as we're evaluating new solutions for money movement on the blockchain, we're there and that we can monetize that by providing our customers with a more cost-efficient and effective way to move money. We also will have Zack Bishop today talk a lot about the core modernization. It's in the news. Everyone saw the acquisition that happened this week. Banks are going to move to a modern core. We're doing it in a very structured and gated way to ensure as we move to a more agile, cloud-based platform that it doesn't cost us an inordinate amount of money, but we're still moving forward to allow us to provide the same scalable, agile platform that many of our competitors are trying to build. And we also have embraced ESG. It's more than 3 letters to us. I'll start with the G. We have diversified our Board greatly over the last several years. Back in 2020, our Board proposed and our shareholders unanimously approved an amendment to our articles and bylaws to remove tenured-based voting provisions because we thought that was good corporate governance. On the social side, we've donated additional funding to help minority students go to college. We've established internal DE&I goals that we've largely met. And now as we look at our next 3-year plan, we're increasing those targets to continue to push us to focus on those core elements of the workforce. And then lastly, with E, it's probably one of the more difficult areas, but we've just completed our Scope 1 and 2 baselines, and we're now setting plans that will enable us to, over time, reduce our carbon emissions. But before I delve more deeply into the future, I feel like I need to just hit home on some of these core levers and foundational elements that give us the right to win with this strategic plan. Let's start with our people. Everything we do is built around our people, how we enable and empower them to serve our clients. And I would suggest that when you look at the scores on this chart that it shows that we are creating an environment where people can excel and do what they love doing, serving clients. Engagement. It's an internal survey that we do, the voice of the team member. At 84% engagement. we're in the top quartile in the financial services industry. The top quartile, which means we have more dedication and pride in our company than our peers. And that translates into better service quality, better advice. You then look at our turnover percentages, 25% below the industry averages. Why is that? People enjoy working here. And then hence, they're leaving less. And we all know in the Great Resignation, it's important to have stability. Clients want to build trusting relationships with people they know, not a new face every time they come in the bank. And you look at our leadership team. There's accolades on here. We have many successful leaders. But in total, we have 17 executive leaders on the ELT with a combined average experience of 30 years in banking. But what's really exciting when you look at those 17 people, 12 of the 17 have been in their roles for less than 5 years, which means we're taking industry veterans and putting them in positions to help us change and deliver on our broader transformation. We talk about our footprint. I mentioned it earlier. We believe we're in the best footprint in banking. Our 5-state footprint has a 5-year population growth rate that is 50% higher than the national average. It has a household income growth percentage that is 20% higher than the national average. So look, it's a great place to do business. But it's not lost on me we're not the only ones that know that. Rising tides don't lift all boats. And so for us to be successful, we have to deliver a differentiated client experience. Now I remember when I started in banking 27 years ago, the number 1 reason that a client was loyal to a bank was because they were friendly and courteous. And I remember those days that we have to train people to smile more, be nice, and I thought how hard that was. Now fast forward to today, the number 1 reason a client is loyal and satisfied is because the bank puts their interest at the center of the relationship and they deliver financial advice and consultation to help them achieve their financial goals. That's a much higher order deliverable. But we're up for the task. We believe that with our tenured bankers, with our approach to relationship, that we are delivering a better experience, and you'll see that. Top quartile Net Promoter Scores amongst the top 50 banks. When you look at Greenwich awards, which represents service excellence in the small- and medium-sized businesses, we're in the top 5% in the awards we received. And what's most telling for me is our scores have gone up during the pandemic. As we've closed lobbies and had staffing shortages, our clients are telling us we're doing a better job, and that shows that our team members are rising to the occasion. When you have a great team member base, a great loyal client base and you have great solutions, you have the perfect equation, the service profit chain that allows you to grow. When I think about our size and our value proposition, we are large enough to compete day in and day out with the largest institutions with capabilities and functionalities. But we're more nimble, and we're more local and personable. When you compare it to the small banks, I think we can out-function and out-capability while still providing the same level of service and local delivery. So that translates into growth because we're building client relationships that allow us to strengthen the relationship. Through what? Share of wallet. So when you look at the loan growth that we had in 2021, you look at the fee income growth that we've had, all of that translates into growth in our core operating metrics. And so when you look at ROAA or ROATCE or efficiency ratio at the end of 2021, over the last 5 years, we've moved from the middle of the pack of our peer set into the top quartile with all 3 of those metrics. And we've done it not by shrinking but by growing. When I look at the revenue per FTE at Synovus, over the last 5 years, it's increased at a CAGR of 8% up to $400,000 per FTE. So we've grown our way and created a client experience that today is allowing us to be a top quartile performer, and this gives us an opportunity as we build out our strategic plan to make that sustainable. But before I go into the strategic plan, I would be remiss if I didn't mention our credit profile. Bob Derrick is going to go into a great deal of detail here shortly, but we've completely transformed our risk management organization. We've diversified the balance sheet. We've created a balance sheet that is lower risk and more resilient than it was prior to the recession, the global financial crisis. And you'll see some data here. If we took the same loss rates that we incurred during the global financial crisis and we apply them to today's portfolio, our losses would be 40% lower on an annualized basis. When you look at our stress test, even under a severely adverse scenario today, we have more than sufficient capital to weather that storm with a buffer. So let's talk about our strategic plan forward. It's built around these 4 key transformational pillars. Each one, very important, but collectively, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and we'll talk about them individually. Reposition for Advantage is, how we think about our businesses. How we go to market with our client segments. Where do we have the right to win? Where do we have the opportunity to win? And ensuring that we put our investments in a prioritized fashion to make sure that we're getting the highest return on investment. You'll hear a lot today, we're doubling down on commercial. It's a place that we've been winning that we'll continue to win. We'll enhance our core businesses through productivity gains. We'll extend and expand our business with new talent and new technology and new customer segments. And we'll win not only through the talent, but also adding technology and solutions through our Treasury and payment solutions team that continues to add new services that our clients need. You'll also hear about efficiency. We cannot be everything to all, but we will be everything to some. So we're going to continue to optimize our branch network and deploy some of the capital that we're saving there into our digital world to ensure that we're continuing to improve our online account origination, but we'll also partner with fintechs to be able to very scalably offer new white-labeled solutions to our clients without a long lead time. So repositioning for advantage, the bottom of the slide, you'll see a lot of targets that our leaders will go through today. And so it's more than rhetoric. It's about applying a plan in place that has financial objectives that we'll deliver that will allow us to elevate our growth profile from a business standpoint. Simplify and streamline. This one is -- sounds very simple by the name, but it's complex. Our clients tell us that they want us to be even easier to do business with. Our team members want to do business more easily. So as I think about this pillar, it's about removing friction points from every part of our process, how clients interact with us. They want to interact with us on their time and at their place where they want to transact, and so we've started with a client journey around the commercial credit process. We're completely reengineering it. We're adding technology. We're putting empowered team members here to reduce the cycle time of the credit process, to improve the client experience, and ultimately, to create capacity for our relationship managers to go out and do things that are more fruitful. We're also radically automating. Zack will talk about this today. We had to wait until we had many of our new technologies in place to start automating. But now that they're in place, we'll automate. And it may not result in a bunch of efficiencies upfront, but it's also going to create capacity for our future growth, and it's going to remove errors and improve our service quality with our clients. The third is High-Tech meets High-Touch. I think it's not lost on any of us, if you have a digital-only relationship, your satisfaction and loyalty to your bank is far lower than if you have that personal relationship. We believe that the right approach is to continue to bring modern technology but to match that with high talent where we have team members that are providing advice. Remember that comment, clients want advice and solutions that help them achieve their financial goals, and I don't know that your monitor on your computer can provide that. So we're investing in analytics to provide insights to our bankers to allow them to better serve the needs of our clients, and you'll hear again from Wayne on MAAST where we're providing embedded financial products through a software vendor because our clients, our small- and medium-sized businesses have told us they want to interact through their software provider because that's where they're operating their business every day. So it's about matching that high-tech approach with continuing to provide touch points from our very experienced bankers to create a unique client experience that creates what we call moments of truth. And lastly, that gets to our talent. We have to retain the talent we have. You heard that our turnover is lower, and that's important for us to maintain that. But we also have to develop our talent. We've rolled out new development plans, new development curriculum to help professionally grow our team members, but we also have to attract talent. We have been a platform with our culture that has been very attractive for people to join, and we want that to continue because it brings fresh ideas to our bank and ultimately allows us to expand our bank even faster. So the path forward, when you put it all together, is pretty simple. It's hard to do, but the visual is pretty simple. We have to execute on our plan. We have a solid plan, and it all comes down to execution. We're going to improve our core productivity in our businesses. We're going to ensure that the investments that we're making with a keen eye on positive operating leverage. We're not going to overspend. We're going to make sure those deliver. And when you add all of those factors together with a better client experience, new technology, new products, we're going to develop and generate an elevated growth profile, not just in 2022, but you'll see, when Jamie presents later today, in '23 and '24 when you start to see the growth really increase. And as a result, you'll see that we are confident that we will deliver sustainable top quartile performance. Now I'm not going to go through these 3 today because I'll steal most of Jamie's thunder, and I know you guys will ask me all the questions during Q&A instead of waiting for Jamie at the end. But we believe these 3 metrics prove out with our peer set that will be in the top quartile. And very confidently, we will be able to deliver. There's lots of assumptions that go into this around rates and the like, and Jamie will go through those, but we feel very confident. So as I close out my time with you this morning, I thought it would be helpful to share with you my thoughts on what you're going to hear today. So the key deliverables that I hope you'll get from each of the speakers. After me, we felt it was important to bring up our new Chief HR Officer, who joined us recently to talk about our talent strategy. Sharon is going to share how our engagement and our culture is so important for us to be able to deliver on our goals and that it attracts talent from around the industry. And our focus on DE&I is not just for the metrics, it's about bringing the diversity of mindset. You're then going to hear from Wayne who's going to talk about our many years of serving the 55 markets that we're in and the exceptional leadership that we have in those markets. But we're also enabling and empowering our team members to deliver more in the markets, but at the same time, Wayne and his team are developing a completely new solution and channel through MAAST that will create new sources of revenue. Kevin Howard from The Wholesale Bank will talk to you about his proven growth model. He'll also talk to you about his business development opportunities that will continue that growth this year and years to come on his quest of $30 billion, but he'll also talk about where he's been successful in specialties and how we'll continue to leverage that as a key lever for growth. We'll introduce you to Tom Dierdorff, our newest member of the executive leadership team, who will talk about his plan for corporate and investment banking, how it's accretive to the company and it's multidimensional, and it's nothing more than an extension of the Commercial Business that we run today. And Katherine Weislogel, you'll see from her a lot of energy. She'll talk about how she's been able to bring the best-in-class talent to Synovus to build out treasury. She'll also talk about her proven sales model that's consultative, not just sales-oriented, and she'll conclude her presentation by talking about the innovation and the product sets that she'll continue to bring to market to serve the customers. We'll then go to Bob Derrick, who I feel like I've stolen your thunder, Bob, a little bit, to talk about the transformation we made in credit and how we're well positioned for the elevated growth profile that we have going forward. Liz, our newest -- or maybe new role, our Head of Consumer Banking, will join us to talk about how she's making our bricks-and-mortar more efficient, redeploying a lot of those resources into digital, making sure that we sell deeply into the wallet of our consumer clients, but ultimately taking advantage of 2 high-profile, high-profit segments in small business in the MAAST-affluent market. Zack is going to talk to you about his transformation and modernization of technology and the fact that he's building his platforms to support the growth of all of our lines of business, and then he'll talk about re-scaling and upscaling his talent to make sure that we deliver on those goals. And then the moment you all have come for, Jamie, he'll join us to talk about shareholder outperformance and how we'll do that with an elevated growth profile with sustainable profitability that's going to lead to top quartile operating metrics. So hopefully, I've set the day up for you well. And without further ado, I'd like to welcome our Chief Human Resource Officer, Sharon Goodwine, to the stage.

Good morning. I'm really excited to be here and as Kevin mentioned I just recently joined the organization and bring 27 years of experience within Banking. This is really an unprecedented time, as I think about what is happening in the talent and labor market, can't say enough. But also as I think about what Kevin laid out for us as a company, it's really exciting to be here and as he talked about, talent runs through everything that we do. Without really great people the success that we had in the past and the success that we will have in the future would not be possible so my job is really exciting. As mentioned, people have been and continue to drive our success. Bankers want to join us each and every day because of these things that we have listed here. People do feel empowered. They are able to make decisions, which means that we are able to go to market and serve our customers even more seamlessly. Our brand makes a difference. It's a solid reputation in the market. People want to work with people that they know and trust. And so it makes our jobs really great is that people are attracted to the people that we have on the platform. And it's because of the success that we've had, but also thinking about the strategy and the growth that we will have in the future. Let me tell a very quick story. I was talking with Bart, our President of Financial Management Services the other day, and he was telling me about a success story around talent. And we hired a mortgage loan originator in November. And 2 months later, he closed his first loan. Why is that really important? It's because we and he had the belief in what he could do, we saw the opportunity. But even more importantly, we surrounded him with people that would help him be successful. I think that speaks a lot to our culture. As Kevin mentioned, DE&I matters. It has to be foundational as we think about where our company is going, but also about the customers that we serve. Change is happening everywhere. And so as we think about DE&I, it is really important to make sure that we have the representation. But as Kevin mentioned, it goes beyond the representation. It's around the thoughts and what it is that we're embedding in our culture. And also one of the great things that I would say, too, is that we really have a company where people want to be here. How great is that? One of the strategic pillars is around enhancing talent and culture. We recognize the importance of people. And so one of the things that my team and I always talk about is how it's really a great time to be in HR. When we're working for a company that places as much value on our people and also having the opportunity to really make a difference, it makes our jobs that much more fun. And as I think about the unprecedented time that we're in, where the term of Great Resignation has been coined, there's a lot of work that we have to do, but it's also great when you can do that with great leaders that believe that at the core, it's around the people that have driven our success. Last year, we had an engagement survey. And here, you will see our results they're very strong. They place us in the top quartile amongst our peers, and it's where we want to stay. There's energy and excitement about what we have been able to achieve, but also what it is that we're going to do in the future. There's interest in new capabilities, whether it be in Banking-as-a-Service, the specialty markets, thinking about what Katherine and her team are doing within Treasury or what Zack is doing within Technology or the verticals that are building out within wholesale and also in CIB, all of which you all will hear from our leaders today and get a lot more detail. Focusing on DE&I is a business imperative. And truly, it's what makes us better. As you will see, over the last 5 years, we have had continued success as we think about representation of women and of people of color. But we're not going to rest on our laurels and think that we're done. We are going to continue to strive for more. And why is that important? It is important because our customer base is continuing to change. We have our generational mix here, too, of our senior leadership team, and that's super important as well because as we think about the customers that we serve, their companies are continuing to change. We are seeing companies grow from one leader to the next leader, meaning generational change still staying within the family, but we're also seeing some of our fintech leaders bring new ideas to market even faster than ever. So representation matters as we think about our client base, and so the pace that we have to work at is even that much more imperative. As Kevin mentioned, one of the areas is around leadership. We have to make sure that we have the very best leaders on our platform. Because as we think about our team members, people actually relate to the people that are closest to them. So last year, really over the last couple of years, we've had 700 managers and supervisors go through one of our company programs with Ignite. And we have CATALYST, which is going to allow 200 senior leaders to focus on behaviors for themselves and their teams to make sure that we are continuing to build a better mindset. What I would say is that we have company programs, but even more important, it is about the experiences that people have each and every day on the job and making sure that we have the opportunity for them to do so. A couple of other things that I wanted to mention in this space, and you will hear from Zack and he'll share a lot more detail, but in technology, as we think about the competitive landscape, it's not just banks that we're competing with. It's really a lot of other industries. So as I was talking to Zack, I was super impressed around what he has already put in place and what he's continuing to grow as we think about development in the technology space. And you'll hear from Katherine talking about how development of our team linked to the business strategy has driven the success that we've had over the last few years. So I talked about the Great Resignation. I also talked and think about what is happening within our workspace and in our environment. Cost of inflation is happening. People are finding that they have greater choices. But what is it about us that makes us special? We are really the employer of choice, and it's about listening to our team members, listening to what is happening in the market and being able to adapt. So when I think about this, we can't do this without losing the focus that at the core, it's about serving our customers. And so we need to make sure that changes that we are making are ones that are going to be aligned with what makes us great and what will continue to drive our success. We also have to make sure that we are focused, and this is part of my responsibility as well, that we are focused on making sure that we have compensation plans that are aligned to meet and to attract and retain our top performers and also paying attention to what is happening in the market because we do want to make sure that we maintain lower turnover than our peers because continuity is really important, and that's what our customers are looking for. So in closing, what I would say is that focusing on talent is what positions us for success. It has resulted in our team members being really excited about being here, excited about what's to come. It is a difference in joining our company when we think about some of the revenue roles that we've been able to hire for as well as within our enterprise functions. People truly have an interest in coming here, and I really believe it's because of the great team that we have on Board. There's opportunities to learn and grow. Kevin talked about there being 12 people that are sitting in different jobs today, not all new to the company, but rotating. And we see that amongst our talent going through the organization, and I truly think that that's important. And we have an ability to retain team members, which leads to the better experience and continuity for our customers, which at the core is why we're here. So while I just gave a brief overview, what I will say is that over the course of the day, you will hear from our leaders. And I promise that in every section, everyone is going to be talking about the talent. And so that is really what is driving our success, along with our new capabilities, our interactions and how we go to market. So before we move to our commercial segment, we will have a video. So if we could roll our video. And followed by that, Wayne Akins, Chief Community Banking Officer will join us on stage. Thank you. [Presentation]

Please welcome Chief Community Banking Officer, Wayne Akins.

Well, Good morning, everyone. And it is certainly my honor to represent my Community Bank teammates this morning to tell our story, and the story of the Community Bank is really just a product of Synovus' modern history, which, as many of you know, included acquiring community banks; retaining the local leadership teams, including the Board of Directors; and then enabling those teams to grow and win market share in their respective communities. Now I had the privilege of spending the first half of my tenure with Synovus in my hometown bank that was acquired by Synovus in the 1990s. And what I think is a story that can be told dozens of time across our footprint, we've been serving our community for over 100 years. In fact, what I believe is a symbol of our connections to the community, our office has always been on the corner of Main and Main. When I was asked to lead off the Commercial Banking discussion today because, similarly, many of our commercial clients begin their Synovus relationship through the Community Bank. The Community Bank is charged with banking our small- and medium-sized businesses that are family-owned, family-operated and headquartered in our local communities. But as you can imagine, there's quite a diversity of these businesses. They range in size from a handful of team members to over several hundred, and they include a diversity of industries from everything to the local automobile dealer to the regional medical practice, to retailers, distributors, agriculture and timber producers, residential and commercial contractors, and the list goes on and on. But at the heart of every business is a family member who is managing and living in our local community. Now as our clients' business grow, we're able to partner with our colleagues from the Wholesale Bank, Treasury and now CIB to help their customers with their growing needs. And just to give you a recent example, Tom Dierdorff and I, when he recently joined our team, we traveled to Charleston. To meet with a customer who first became a client to finance their very first project in sustainable energy, and now because of the success of that first project, they're looking to rapidly expand. So we sat down, Tom and I, along with our middle market team in South Carolina to map out a strategy to fund the future growth. I can tell you the client was super satisfied, and Synovus came away with a big win. As you think about the takeaways I'd like to leave you with this morning and as I go through my presentation to touch these points, I'd really rephrase it as this. What is our opportunity to win? What is our right to win? And what is the work we're doing to sustain that winning advantage? Now first, let me start with our opportunity to win, which Kevin already touched on this morning, which is our great Southeastern footprint. Now when you think about the Southeast, you naturally think about Atlanta and Tampa, Orlando and Miami, Florida. But many of our secondary and tertiary markets are also greatly outpacing the national averages for growth and with great reason why. You have places like Charleston, Savannah, Brunswick and Jacksonville that are home to some of the fastest-growing ports in the nation. You have Augusta and Birmingham that are home to medical innovation and education. You have Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Athens, Georgia and Columbia, South Carolina that are home to their respective flagship universities for their respective states. Then you have Columbus and the Panhandle in Florida that are home to 2 of the nation's largest and most vital defense spaces. And the real unique opportunity for Synovus is that we didn't just show up there yesterday, we've been in these markets for decades. But our opportunity to win is just the first step. What gives us the right to win in the states is our unique combination of talent and the capabilities we bring to our clients. Instead of the either/or propositions that many of our peers approach the market, Synovus provides the family owners of these businesses, not only with a local trusted adviser, but with also leading digital capabilities. And for our teams, they're led by tenured market leaders. Right now, our market leaders average over 20 years of experience in their markets. We then enable these team leaders to recruit and retain the very best talent in the market, and we also empower these teams to make sure they're able to give quick client decisions in a timely and thoughtful manner. And as you know, one of the best channels of advertising in this space is word of mouth, and that's where our 350 Advisory Board members across our footprint serve as Synovus' advocates and also as a feedback loop to our local leadership teams to making sure we serve the communities well. But as I mentioned, to truly exceed in this space, you have to provide the digital capabilities so that the family owners who wear multiple hats can efficiently and effectively operate their business. So last year, we launched Synovus Gateway, which you'll hear more about. And we saw our enrollment rapidly increase, which I think speaks both to the need of the clients and the success of the new tool. It provides us leading -- class-leading capabilities, not only in the desktop, but then also in the mobile platform, and you'll hear more about this from Katherine and Zack. But while we have the opportunity to win and the right win, we know we can't sit still. So in 2021, we launched 3 new initiatives to not only enable our bankers, but to help our clients with new solutions. So first, to help our bankers, we rolled out our SMART tool, which stands for sales management and risk tool. Our bankers now have real-time, client-specific insights built on advanced analytics to uncover solutions our clients need and to also alert us if there is information that tell us a customer may be close to [ attriting ]. Second, we launched our Analytical Risk Monitoring tool, our ARM tool. This has allowed us to look at our credit portfolio more efficiently, is to reduce our cycle times to deliver credit to our customers, and this will reduce the time our bankers are spending on administrative tasks. And finally, from the perspectives we gained through our successful P3 lending program, we saw an opportunity to take a look at our previous end-to-end credit process and roll out 2 new initiatives to make it better. First, we rolled out our Community Relationship Center. Our Community Relationship Center is a team of experienced bankers working in a virtual environment to deliver our small business customers with answers to their credit request and at a very efficient fashion. And as Phase 2 of that, we're working on the rollout of a new lending platform. This new lending platform will increase our client -- our RMs' capacity, improve the client experience and streamline the work in the back room. So how can we measure if we're actually winning with this strategy? Well, we track fundamental performance measurements. And as a mature business, it's important that we are making sure that we are optimizing every resource dollar. And as you can see from the slide, we think that we have a track record of winning. We're reducing costs in the back room. We're expanding the capacity of our bankers, and we're growing revenue for each RM. And the performance improvements had led to material financial outcomes. We've achieved a 7% growth rate in our fee income year-over-year, and that's even in spite of the headwinds that we see from the loss of NSF and overdraft income. This fee income increase is coming from Treasury, merchant and SBA fees as our bankers learn to use the SMART tool to lead to those opportunities with our clients. And also, our individual RMs are seeing outsized loan production. Going back to pre-COVID, we're up over 20%. And you also see the strength of our franchise as we've been able to achieve 20% growth rate in our deposit franchise with more than half of that coming from DDA accounts. Now the story of our commercial banking efforts would not be complete without talking about our private wealth team. As our Community Wholesale and CIB bankers build relationships with the owners and the executives of the commercial clients that we bank, we have a unique opportunity to serve the wealth needs of the families' represented there. So we have developed a team of license and experienced private wealth advisers to quarterback the distribution of our wealth services. So whether it's advising a family-owned business on the transfer of generational wealth or helping the CFO of a corporate client to map out a financial plan and investment strategy, our PWA stand ready to serve. And as you can see on the slide, we've only -- as you can see on the slide, we've only scratched the surface with only 10% of the opportunity served. So we have a large greenfield opportunity. And we've also enabled our private wealth bankers as we've been enabling our commercial bankers. One of the most recent successes was rolling out our Synovus Asset Navigator, which is an asset aggregation tool. It allows our clients to aggregate a digital view of all their investment holdings so they can sit down with their private wealth adviser and map out a more detailed investment solution. This tool, along with our project elevate strategy, has allowed us to see big dividends across our private wealth team as you can see the revenue growth for each RM. Before I move to the very final section of my presentation, let me summarize how we believe these efforts will impact our financial performance over the next few years. We believe our unique offering in the SMB space, coupled with RM expansion in our highest growth markets, we expect to generate loan growth that will outpace the general market. And given the enablement of our new banker tools and our client digital capabilities, we expect to generate mid- to high-single-digit fee income growth from Treasury, Merchant and SBA fees. Now I'd like to pivot to the last point in the presentation, and that is how we're going to serve the next generation of SMB needs, and we'll be leveraging a unique opportunity. Kevin's touched on it in his presentation, and it's to talk about MAAST. But just to give you a little bit of background, since our creation of TSYS, Synovus has always been a leader in the payment space. And with that, we have a sponsorship business. And from the front row seat that our sponsorship business gives us, we've been able to see the innovation of the ISVs to serve the small- and medium-sized businesses. In a recent study, Boston Consulting Group estimated that over 40% of all SMBs are now using some sort of vertical software to manage their business, whether it's to track their client activity, manage payroll, order inventory or just look at new payment channels for their customers to interact with them, ISVs are having a growing spot in the small business space. So naturally, these ISVs see an opportunity to deliver embedded financial services to their clients as well. Hence, we are launching MAAST, which, as Kevin introduced in December, is our entry into the Banking-as-a-Service segment. We have branded it at MAAST as Money-as-a-Service-Technology. And our value proposition in this space is really based on 3 things. First is there'll be one relationship. Today, if an ISV is playing in the space, they're having to go through multiple fintech vendors to cobble together a suite of solutions for the customers. One contract, we'll offer one contract for the sponsorship, which is needed, and also for the embedded financial solutions. And the most important part is this one implementation. Instead of multiple integrations with a lot of fintechs, they'll be able to come to us with one integration that will open the door to both Payment-as-a-Service and Banking-as-a-Service solutions. At the end of last year, we had the opportunity to test this concept with about a dozen ISVs, and we heard 2 comments consistently: where have you been? And how do we get started? Well, we're ready to get started. Today, we've launched our MAAST website. You can go to maast.com, and you can see a video that's playing on maast.com, and I want to play it for you now. [Presentation]

Well, thank you for your time this morning. And now I'll call on Kevin Howard, our Chief Wholesale Banking Officer.

Good morning. I'm Kevin Howard, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer for Synovus. I've been with the bank a little over -- right at 35 years -- excuse me, I've been in banking 35 years. I've been with Synovus a little over 25 years. Served in various lending capacities in the line of leadership, in the line of business. In 2007, I was asked to go to corporate credit. Later became Chief Credit Officer in September 2008. Served in that capacity for 10 years. I know September 2008, probably not the best time to take on the Chief Credit Officer role. But I met several of you then. I remember -- I saw Kevin in the audience, I think it was 2007, took my first investor trip with you. So it's quite a few years. But I actually loved that job. It was an opportunity to play a part in navigating us -- helping navigate through the crisis as well as helping rebuild our balance sheet in a more stronger and diversified way than ever. So really excited. In late 2018, Kessel and Kevin asked me to lead the newly formed wholesale bank designed to be a primary growth engine of the bank. I was -- that's probably my dream job, to be honest with you. I served on the line of business for many years, went to credit, helped rebuild the balance sheet, and to be able to lead this growth engine has been really exciting. One of the key objectives we had was to expand our middle-market banking capabilities by better leveraging, as Wayne talked about, our community bank success and meaningful presence that we had in the markets. Our FCB acquisition, which took place about the same time in late 2018, not only gave us more lucrative markets like Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Naples, Orlando, a bigger presence in Tampa, but also gave us more size and scale to move up market and compete for larger businesses across all of our lines of business within our attractive footprint. At the same time, we unified all of our existing specialty commercial lines to the newly formed wholesale bank for better delivery and support consistency. This also created a platform to incubate and onboard more specialty lines, as you can see based on the time line there on this slide. Today, we are almost $22 billion of loans. We target in the wholesale bank to be self-funded by core deposits of 50%. We've grown about $6 billion since late 2018. We strive to grow about 50% with our dedicated specialty lines and 50% with our middle market and commercial real estate core banking lines. Our high-level ambition is to have accelerated loan growth, a high credit standard and also grow our customer base with strong cross-selling. We are targeting $30 billion in the wholesale bank. We call it for us as the road to $30 billion. And you'll see throughout this presentation, while we have a lot of confidence, we will get there. We are confident there, and we are, and it is in line with our go-forward expected loan growth. We think it is essential to be a complete commercial bank. It is mission critical that we meet the needs of commercial clients from small business, regional and national corporations. For us, the contribution of the wholesale bank is middle market, commercial real estate and our specialty lines. We've been winning in this space for several years and for many reasons. I would tell you probably the 3 leading contributors there is size. We think we're the perfect size. We have the capabilities of a larger bank and compete in the middle market space. It's an advantage for us. Strong partnerships. And quite frankly, bank disruptions that have taken place, and you know which ones those are in a lot of our markets that we're in. And we have good footings there, and I think we've been able to take advantage of some of those opportunities as well. Again, I mentioned size. We have the size and scale to offer holistic solutions, to meet the needs of middle market clients in all of our businesses. We feel we have target specifically in the C&I space. Probably that $25 million to $30 million revenue space up to $250 million is a sweet spot for us in the C&I middle market. And then the commercial real estate, probably more $10 million to $50 million in real estate transactions. Again, we think the solutions are often sometimes too complex, may not have the capabilities as we compete against the smaller community banks. Sometimes not grab the full attention of the money center banks, where speed and customization is most important to the client. Our partnerships across business line are also key to us winning, whether it's me and Wayne referring back and forth with the Community Bank and Wholesale Bank; whether it's Katherine's Treasury team, which you'll hear a lot about that later today, figuring out complex treasury solutions; or even our Credit team who stands with us side-by-side. We deliver credit local. We have credit officers in all of our key metro markets, and they call alongside with us. So we think a team and strong partners are another key to winning. And as I also mentioned, the bank disruptions that have taken place. If you're in that space I mentioned, that 25, 30, 200 middle market-type client, you're probably in a growth mode. You probably are, and we are calling consistently in this market. When there's been bank disruptions, if you think about the last thing a middle market company needs is a change in process, a change in products, capabilities, credit philosophy, sometimes the RM. And we've been steady and consistent throughout -- for many, many years, calling on clients. And those are some of the opportunities that open up when that does take place, and we've had relatively a good bit of success there calling there. It's created a lot of opportunities. Probably more than any strategic initiative I will discuss today, none or more near and dear to my heart than the customer experience. As you can see, as I previously mentioned, we're very well aligned with our partners, and we have the same tools and processes, as Wayne mentioned in his presentation on prospecting and cross-selling. Our approach is pretty simple. We put the proverbial customer in the middle of the room, assess needs and desires, build the teams and deliver on those needs. Our relationship manager is the key who is the closest to the customer and accesses these opportunities. Working like this as a team builds a rhythm. It also ensures clear communication on what you can and can't get done. It creates confidence with the client. And in turn, deepens relationships through key partnerships in credit, treasury, our capital markets. By doing this over and over again, pretty simple, but with those same teams, I think is, number one, you can win with speed, you can win with reliability and creativity. We often show this model to RMs that we're recruiting primarily from larger banks, and they love it. They love the team approach that we have. They love the -- our credit officers call in market with us. We actually have our partners participate when we're bringing RMs into the bank participating in the interview process to make sure it's a fit for both sides of the equation. And it seems to be working for us, and we've had a lot of success banking and taking care of our client needs. These strategic things I've mentioned have paid dividends. The wholesale bank is a proven and sustainable growth engine. You look at loan production. It's solid increases there. I think it reflects investments we've made over the last several years, whether it's investments we made in middle market over the last 4 or 5 years. We've averaged adding 4 or 5 RMs in our key markets every year. Our commercial real estate team, which we've brought in a lot of new bankers there in the last 5 years, more in our -- we're calling more in our metro markets, targeting more regional and institutional clients. And then you can see also this reflects our investments in the specialty lines over the last several years. Strong production translated into strong growth. We strive to be a consistent, solid, sustainable, double-digit loan growth engine for the company. It's our aspiration. It's what sustainable growth is. We'll be adding more complementary business lines. Probably what gives me the most comfort is we've had this growth there and really there's been a couple of major headwinds. We've all battled and no different from any other bank. Working capital line utilizations are at historical lows for us with all the liquidity in the market. And also with all the liquidity in the market, we've had record CRE payoffs. Both of those things, while production has been steady, that has worked against loan growth. So I'm thinking any kind of normalization there in line utilization, maybe normal CRE payoffs, I think we can even get on even more improved loan growth if just -- as long as we keep our production steady and we're very confident there. Loan production per RM, that's important to us. It reflects, number one, a better sales organization. And also, we're growing efficiently. And also, we're playing up market, having success. And again, that reflects continually adding specialty lines. Our noninterest revenue growth, we're targeting upper single digits, really shooting a little higher than that. We've had some success there. And also deposit growth, as I mentioned previously, which we target growing, for every dollar of loan growth, we want to grow $0.50 of core deposits. Diversification is and will be the key to consistent growth in the wholesale bank. We are a balanced franchise. The primary driver and component of growth over the past few years has been our ability to specialize. We call that our secret sauce. Whether it's within the dedicated specialty lines or within C&I and CRE, it's been a true investment for us and had a lot -- and paid a lot of dividends. In our C&I, we have specialization capabilities, manufacturing, health care, ESOPs, service industry, transportation. Middle market is our most profitable line of business. It's our highest cross-sell percentage, and it's where we always or almost always have full banking relationships. Commercial real estate, we target the multifamily warehouse in Medical Office segment. The CRE is made up around 95% within the wholesale bank, of income producing, 60-40 term is what we target to construction and pretty low to mid-level leverage. We average 50% to 60% loan-to-cost, loan-to-value. Also, we have -- as I mentioned, we have 9 specialty verticals now in various stages, 7 C&I centric, 2 commercial real estate. One of the things we're always looking at when we're looking at potential new specialty lines are, is it a market need? Do we have a core competency? And is it complementary to what we're already doing? And then speaking of specialty lines, we've had very exciting and high performance there. We're proud of the development and success our specialty businesses are having with strong quality growth, and I want to take a minute and highlight a few of them in various stages. Senior Housing. You've heard us talk about that for years. That's our longest standing vertical. We've been in that business now around 11 years. We bank primarily 60 to 70 clients around the country and primarily with a focus on the Southeast. Our structured lending group, which started in 2019. Very accomplished team came from larger banks, headquartered in Atlanta. With a team in New York, we finance a broad range of assets there. It really also presents very good treasury management opportunities as Katherine will mention later. Premium Insurance business, you remember that. That was a Global One acquisition. It's been a little over 5 years since we made that acquisition. Finance premium insurance policy secured with cash value of life insurance, it's been our most steady C&I vertical over the last 5 years and consistent, and we feel like that will be sustainable and continue to move forward as we build out that business. Last, I'll highlight one of the newer verticals we put in our community investment capital. Really, it's an affordable housing, multifamily division, strong core deposits there in footprint and important to us is it has a very big CRE impact. And you can see in this slide, it demonstrates the tax benefits delivered at project completion investments that we've already made. So great trajectory there and opportunities and tax credits. Well, I spent a lot of my time highlighting go-to-market initiatives already in play. I want to preview more opportunities and investments we are making that are in flight, whether it's expansion of existing businesses, new verticals that we're putting in and more complementary capabilities. This assures us as long as -- this is a sustainable model to grow the bank the right way and to be a complete commercial bank. Middle market bank and speaking of adding teams to our existing core business as middle market banking is our most profitable business, as I've mentioned, is also -- continues to be our largest and will continue to be our largest investment in the wholesale bank. A big focus and opportunity for us will be Florida over the next 3 years. We recently hired and announced 2 very prominent experienced leaders, over 20 years experience, came from money center banks, one that will lead our strategies and building out middle market in Tampa down to Fort Myers. Also brought in an industry Florida veteran. I think he was in the video, Tom Sawyer, who will be located in Jacksonville, will lead building out our Jacksonville middle market over to Orlando and down to Daytona. Really excited about having them come in and help build out what is the -- what are those key lucrative markets for us. We expect to hire 6 to 10 middle market bankers in those markets in the first 12 months, and quite frankly, another 6 to 10 in the next 12 months. So big investment we'll have there, wonderful opportunity for us. A lot of industries in those key markets that we're familiar with, and we felt like with our footing is already there, it's a fantastic middle market opportunity. And we'll continue to also add teams also in the second half of 2021. We were fortunate to bring over a strong team to start our restaurant services vertical. I think it's a great time to enter. It's coming out of the pandemic. It does give us -- I may have not said it was the best time, and if we got in 2 or 3 years ago before challenges in that industry. But for us, we're getting in, and it's a look back. We're looking at the management teams that have navigated through the pandemic. We also get a look back who came out well capitalized. I mean so it's a good look back to kind of see how those teams, and that's important to our credit philosophy, how is management teams and how they respond in crisis. We'll focus early in the QSR space. In most cases, that part of the space has strengthened during the pandemic, and we believe will be -- continue to be a strong asset class. You can see already by the time line, while we've only been in for just 3 months, already over $100 million in loans and $0.5 million in swap and lead arranger fees. Again, just in the first 3 months. A good example of a complementary vertical to our core competencies. Capabilities. I'm not -- Zach and Liz are going to come up with a lot of exciting new capabilities. We have to do our fair share in the wholesale to keep up as well. But we'll continue to enhance our product set efficiently and effectively. We believe partnerships with a best-in-class fintech providers to offer a white label solution is an optimal go-to-market strategy. For us, we're going to start off rolling out a white label equipment leasing product pursuant to this strategy that will go live in the second quarter. So you'll hear a lot about that. We think that's a really good opportunity to expand our leasing product set. Adding capabilities probably long overdue for us is building out better capabilities to lead syndicated transactions. We probably in years past, we may have done 1 or 2 a year, maybe a middle market company that grew into a syndicated opportunity. But for us, bringing in a dedicated team from a larger bank that had a lot of experience leading those transactions. To me, it enables us to stay in the key relationship spot, which, in turn, optimizes cross-sell and creates lucrative agent fees. We already did. Just in the few months, they've been here in the second half of 2021, 4 transactions, and we have a healthy pipeline. Again, a lot of this is capturing our middle market clients that have grown, and we have not always had those capabilities to take it from there and lead a transaction. We've had some, but not with the dedicated team. So we're excited about that opportunity. Because as much depth in customers that we're building in the middle market space, we had to have that leg of the stool to complete that transaction. Our typical transaction there will be $75 million to $200 million. Again, that will not be our hold limit level. Jennifer, I read your write up lately about hold limits and banks. Actually, it's a better chance to really -- risk management to be able to hold less on larger credits and participate and, again, be in that key relationship spot. So it's a key capability that we needed. It also creates a platform for Tom Dierdorff, as he will talk just after me, to leverage as he builds out our CIB and potentially larger transactions. Rounding out those capabilities, I want to briefly touch on the major product enhancement and successes we had in the treasury management space. Katherine Weislogel will again go in depth about the treasury platform later. But for us, state-of-the-art treasury management capabilities ranging from AR to AP solutions are vital to win and build out middle market. We often go to market together with those treasury solutions, credit solutions together and win business that expands into a larger product offering from the bank. We're up 40% in the wholesale bank and treasury management fees in 2021. A lot of that new client acquisition. We're excited about the look forward there. Finally, back to where we started, the road to $30 billion. This excites our team. We are now at $22 billion. We think we'll get there over the next 3 years, assuming the economy stays relatively stable. We just need to stay the course and execute on all 3 phases within the wholesale bank. You can see our strategic initiatives on the slide and how we get there. If you do the math, it's about $2.7 billion, $2.8 billion a year. That's where we were in 2021. So again, it's keeping production levels steady. It's making sure our new businesses are successful and just continuing to do what we do. Again, just any kind of lift in the headwinds that we faced, the lower utilization, the higher CRE payoffs turn into tailwinds, I think we actually can accelerate and be ahead of that number at the end of 3 years. Again, my confidence is executing here is with talented bankers, great partners and strong diversification of lending capabilities. Thank you for your time. I'd like to turn it over now to the new Head of Corporate Investment Banking, Tom Dierdorff.

Thank you, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. My name is Tom Dierdorff. And as Kevin said, I'm our new Head of Corporate and Investment Banking. I've worked in banking for 28 years, the last 25 of those as a senior banker and leader on 3 successful CIB platforms in Atlanta and in Charlotte. Let me start by describing how CIB expands our right to win in the commercial and corporate banking arena. First, our practices will be national in scope. We're going to build around highly experienced industry-focused bankers. We want these bankers to be idea-driven and to be very skilled in corporate finance, capital markets and M&A. Many of our clients will skew larger. These could include public companies, private equity sponsor-backed businesses and emerging growth companies. And a recurring theme of these businesses will be nonbank institutional capital in the capital structure. They may already have institutional debt or equity or they could reasonably be expected to grow beyond the bank market through recapitalizations, refinancings or acquisition-driven growth. But essentially, they will be dynamic capital structures, they will be active client relationships and we, Synovus, will help them get there. So why CIB at Synovus? Well, first, we start with our strong core foundational business in commercial banking. We know how to bank businesses and business owners, but I think our ability to reposition for advantage really comes in the following areas: First, our emerging capabilities. Synovus today already has successful and growing businesses in syndicated and leveraged finance, fixed income, sales and trading, rates, treasury and payment solutions. All of these product capabilities are very relevant to CIB clients. We think we will be a catalyst for future growth in all of these businesses. We also think there are many other opportunities to collaborate with our teammates across the enterprise. Culture. Our entrepreneurial culture is very appealing to growth-minded bankers like me. It's a tremendous platform. And we think our nearly $60 billion balance sheet allows us to compete very effectively for lead opportunities in the middle market, mid-market corporate arena. And a clear path for growth. Our bankers have the opportunity to pursue opportunities nationally and with capital and room to grow in new businesses and sectors for Synovus. So with focus and coordinated investment around coverage, credit and products, we're going to build a high-performing, long-term growth business for Synovus, 1 banker and 1 client at a time, empowered and enabled to deliver for their clients. Our initial focus will be on 3 industry sectors: financial institutions; technology, media and communications; and health care. We like these industries because of their superior credit performance through cycles, first and foremost, but we also know these companies and these sectors to be active users of the capital markets and the other banking services about which we're speaking. We're not going to try to be all things to all people, but we believe we can be highly relevant to great middle market companies in these sectors. To reiterate, this is a steady accelerating multiyear build for Synovus. By the end of 2024, we forecast funded loans of $1.5 billion, pre-provision net revenue of $15 million, a fee income contribution of 20% and an efficiency ratio approaching 50%. But the real power and scalability of this model is demonstrated, in my opinion, in years 4, 5 and beyond. This is a very scalable building business. By year-end 2026, we forecast funded loan balances of $3.5 billion, a PPNR of $60 million, fee income contribution growing to 25% and efficiency ratios below 40%. So key takeaways. First and foremost, we're very excited about the opportunity that we see in corporate and investment banking. We believe it broadens our right to win through industry -- deeper industry expertise. We're going to, first and foremost, add a number of new profitable, substantial relationships to the bank. But moreover, we do think we will help our teammates expand existing relationships through credit expertise, market insights and creative ideas for our clients. We're going to drive multidimensional growth, both through our lending activities and also our fee-based services. And we are going to build a highly productive and scalable business that will be accretive to our core corporate financial targets over time. I've seen and done this multiple times on different banking institutions over the last 25 years. I know how to do this, and I'm very confident that we can do it here at Synovus as well. Our team is going to have a lot of fun as we build this out. We'll celebrate our successes, and we're going to help Synovus build the bank of the future. So thank you. Now I'm going to turn the presentation over to my colleague, Katherine Weislogel, Head of Treasury and Payment Solutions.

No, I laughed because Kevin said I was going to bring the energy and on my walk up here in my Apple Watch, which knows me so well says breathe for 1 minute. So I did that. So we're good. All right. So I'm super excited that I get to have the pleasure to talk about how Treasury and Payment Solutions team gets to support as a value-add partner to my partners in Wayne, Kevin, Tom and Liz. We bring what I like to call the stickiness to the business. I joined what I affectionately called the treasury wild ride in March of 2019 after spending time at BMO Harris, building and executing on a sales strategy and talent buildout for treasury management for their expansion markets across their U.S. footprint. It also entailed turning around their underperforming markets in under 9 months. I then transitioned to a broader role at Synovus, and was charged with rebuilding the treasury line of business for growth for the next 5 years and beyond. Got it. Okay. So who are we and what do we do? The treasury team has been transforming through a phased strategy, delivering upon treasury services, commercial card and international services. We do this today through a highly diverse team of industry-leading talent, delivering 20 product sets that include 61 solutions to our 13,000 clients and new prospects. In alignment with our line of business partners, we consult with our clients and prospects to understand and manage their cash flow, including streamlining payments and collections, delivery of financial information reporting and to fraud mitigation awareness. We help move technology advancements into treasury solutions, providing strategic consultative guidance to help our clients and prospects stay ahead and deliver solutions that make doing business with us easier and more secure. So bringing a winning sales strategy playbook, we executed very quickly on our transformational journey. As you can see from the slide, the numbers do tell it all. As you can see, we're up 80% production CAGR from 2018 through 2021. We're on a trajectory for 2022 to be at about a 70% CAGR, 1/3 to half of our fees year-over-year have come from new customer acquisition. And we're not even at the tip of the iceberg in penetration of our current portfolio. We continue to drive our average revenue units up, and we have grown 42% since 2018. The addition of industry-leading team members, the continual building of confidence in our approach and knowledge in our solutions and delivery of innovative solutions has led and will continue to fuel these strong production and growth metrics. As you can see from a year-over-year production increase, the strategy has been playing out as designed. In fact, in a recent peer report given to us by Boston Consulting Group, we are outperforming the top 25 banks, excluding the big 3, at a rate of 28% to 6% in year-over-year growth metrics. So how did we do it? We implemented a 3-part strategy that focused on scaling for growth in an agile and modular way. The strategy in a nutshell was pretty simple. It was to retain and hire the right industry-leading talent, train them on the new approach and solutions and put the right solutions in their hands. So starting at the bottom of the iceberg, the organizational structure, which is very dear to my heart. We establish an agreed upon with our line of business partners and agreed upon what would be our new organizational structure. And then I had to go out and go find the people. And I was reflecting on a lot of the recruiting encounters of key recruits over the course of the last 3 years. And they all ended with 1 question, and I left every interviewing encounter with this 1 question. And then I didn't say anything. I just went quiet and some of them responded right away, some of them called me in a couple of days. But it went like this. I said, do you want to go into the closet and pull out a beautiful package with a big red bow on it? Or do you want to go into the closet and pull out all the different pieces and put it together because that's what I'm offering you. And this really resonated with top talent. We found that they were unchallenged in their current roles. They weren't giving stretch assignments or stretch roles. And they were really not empowered to have a voice in what they were doing today in helping to build. So we have kept these promises, and it's a key reason why we continue to attract talent to our treasury and payment solutions wild ride, and I like to say strong talent does attract strong talent. So we have the talent. We had a core treasury team, and we had to train them. We had to train them on the solutions. We had to train them on the approach we wanted them to take. So which would allow us, once we had all of this in place, it allowed us to move to building on to a consultative approach to drive what was a transformational relationship mindset to a value-add advisory approach. And then the third part of it, the consultative solutions. We knew that this was critical in pulling all the other components together. You have the talent, you train them, now you got to give them the tools to go out and sell. And that's exactly what we did. So we identified an early opportunity to expand our foundational base of solutions by introducing new competitive offerings, many of which I'm going to discuss here shortly. So let's dive deeper into this path, this transformational journey has been taking. It's important for me to take you back to where we are, to where we're going. It's been a transformational relationship shift for sure to a value-add advisory approach. And you can see that in the journey that's listed on the screen. The new structure strategies were launched, as I mentioned. And just to get a little specific about some of the things that we did. We took a retail coverage model and we've made it into a virtual sales desk. So Jeff Mason, who was an amazing talent that came over with Florida Community Bank, was doing this for Florida Community Bank. We took that concept. We expanded it into the whole 5-state footprint. It brought our gearing ratios down and allowed our current treasury reps to be able to go more upstream into more complicated solutions. We also built out an RFP Desk, which was critical in our growing niche in government. And it has worked so well. We have now been able to go 100% year-over-year in bids won. We also redid our entire alignment to align with all of my partners. So we did a new C&I alignment that aligned up with the community and wholesale bank. And we also built out a new specialty niche coverage team, as you saw Kevin Howard show on his screen today of all of his specialty niches. It took a very unique skill set to align, so we built out a team to align for Kevin's growth. And then we also did many other realignments and build-outs over the course of the last few years that have all been critical to our success. But when we did this restructure, it gave us an opportunity to look at how we incented our employees. And so we built out an incentive program that rewarded the drive of sales through a production-based model and the sales behaviors as we had a big opportunity to deepen wallet share in our current portfolio. It was a complete untouched opportunity for us. Next, we built on this opportunity to redefine the training and sales approach process. We had the structure for growth. Now we need to train on the approach for growth. We had a spectrum and a wide spectrum of sales skill sets and experience on the team. We had to bridge that gap. It was a big challenge for us. So we built out a program called DRIVE. Had 5 learning journeys. So we took our teams and they each fell into a learning journey. And the reason this was important that they can learn the refined sales process and solutions at a controlled pace for them of where they fell in the spectrum. And it has worked wildly successfully. We set out to fund our journey through a sales process, which would take that transactional mindset to a value-add advisory approach, and this was truly the turning point for our collective team. Lastly, centers around our advancements and product solutions. It really centered around our commercial platform at the hub of it all. In April of 2021 was a pivotal time to moving faster on our solution roadmap to close outstanding gaps in our offerings. After the Florida Community Bank migration, the 2 commercial online platforms had reached their end of life. This gave us the opportunity to look at building out a state-of-the-art, single sign-on digital platform and bring those 2 platforms to 1, which we do call Gateway today. In April, we onboarded our first new treasury clients to Gateway, allowing us to move faster on expanding our foundational base of straight-through processing solutions. To create additional internal efficiencies for onboarding of new customers to accelerate our revenue realization, we built out an online enrollment tool, which will be live by the end of first quarter, and will facilitate process automation. Through 2021, we have migrated 90% of our Legacy platform clients onto the new Gateway platform and anticipate everyone to be migrated by the end of April. This slide provides a visual perspective of our consultative approach and how we use this process in all levels of engagement with our prospects and our clients today. We work strategically with our line of business partners, and we work in pods within our team to assure communication and execution for our clients and our prospects is happening. We built a robust -- we built a robust working capital model as you see at the base of this process to deliver more meaningful cash conversion discussions. Using the working capital output as a guide, the team worked out how to conduct business process reviews for -- to look at a client or a prospect's back-office operations and to provide client efficiency -- to provide client efficiencies. Lastly, we pulled the pieces together into a why evolve. Why do these companies need to evolve into our solutions? And why us messaging into a collective data points? Pointing the customer to a yes answer. We use smart analytics to confirm and identify opportunities within portfolio, and we pull these into consultative discussions. These data points and marketing materials are delivered seamlessly through a sales enablement tool and used to create rebranded collateral in support of the consultative story. We saw a 100% year-over-year increase in our sales consultative tools and process. Our enhanced process is taking hold with the team. This model is the foundation and discussion in all client possibilities, how we discuss new solutions, how we build a consultative review or even how we use sales enablement tools for delivery. Our collateral rebrand for our payment solution offerings went live in mid-2021. We often hear from clients and prospects that they are surprised by a meeting, or I didn't see this coming today. And I've sat in a lot of these meetings with C-suites. And I always ask the question, why? Why did this surprise you today? So it's a learning opportunity for all of us. Well, they'll tell you that many of our peer competition continue to lead with a transactional product-first approach, not a consultative approach. That feedback is confirmation that we are moving from a transactional approach to that value-added approach. These sample screens provide a glimpse into our Why Evolve message. We left no stone unturned in our solution road map build-out. A few highlights include the launch of our accounts receivable solution, Accelerate AR. We brought it to market in 167 days from contract to pilot live. So let me repeat that. We brought it to market in 167 days from contract to pilot live. Unprecedented in the industry. It was really a remarkable work of about 100 team members between us and Deluxe to bring this live. It was one of the most incredible times of my career watching the team work happen here. We expanded on a very trusted 20-year relationship with Deluxe to bring this suite of account receivable solutions to market. It includes machine learning with artificial intelligence to facilitate a seamless account reconcilement of AR. It allows us also to gain efficiencies by outsourcing our Lockbox operations, which will be migrated to Deluxe in 2022. We grew a pilot of $3 million in opportunities for 2021 into 2022, and we expect this to be the run rate by the end of 2022. This will be all incremental new revenue to the bank. To put some other numbers around the opportunity, Lockbox is just 1 of the suite of solutions within Accelerate AR. Going into the pilot, we had 300 Lockboxes total. In 7 months since the pilot launch, we have closed 26 net new Lockboxes to the bank and have another 63 net new customers in pipeline or a 30% increase. By making this move, it has allowed us to drive upstream into bigger opportunities. To round out our continued focus on leveraging technology to differentiate the client experience, in partnership with Visa, we announced a new mobile virtual wallet at the beginning of this year. We are one of the first banks to bring this mobile technology to market with Visa, and will be a bolt-on solution that can be cross-sold to our current card portfolio or as a part of a suite of solutions with new programs. As you can see, this was a key year for solution expansion for the TPS team. Our expansion was felt across all product sets and reinforces the deeper expansion from our foundational solutions that have fueled our pipeline and production growth and helps move our product capabilities to the next level. Notably, this was an active year, but we're not done yet. As mentioned, we're building an innovative solution road map for today and for the bank of tomorrow. Later this year, probably late fourth quarter, we will be piloting an integrated payments hub. We're about 60 days from announcing who that partner will be on that journey. This will be a critical piece of our foundational path to an agile and modular growth model. It allows us to build onto the straight-through framework in a more agile fashion. So if you think about it, you have AR, we have the hub in Gateway, now we're going to close it out with Accelerate AP. In addition, we'll be upgrading to a new FX platform that will offer foreign currency accounts and additional hedging solutions with a payback of under 12 months, which will allow us to move on the road to doubling our business in international. Lastly, as our line of business strategies continue to evolve, like you saw Kevin talked about today, it is important that we are evolving with them. I think you probably heard from everyone, treasury and payment solutions, in every part of their presentations because we have to evolve with them. For example -- I'll use the restaurant vertical as an example. For example, having virtual accounts and robust cash handling, you have to have that in the restaurant industry. It is a must. Those are things that we need to firm up and get done this year and things that you see on our road map. We continue to stay in front of these emerging technologies and partnership with our own internal innovation partners, but also fintechs and expansions with our current partners such as Deluxe. It has been an impressive journey, and we are forecasted to more than double our growth business by 2024. This will be accomplished with our industry-leading talent bench, a focus on operational and efficiency excellence and technology-led approach as we walk hand-in-hand with our line of business partners, which will fuel the overall business growth. The path to doubling our business by 2024 is right in front of us, and steps to accomplish this are already underway. We will continue to drive enhancements to maximize our incremental revenue growth potential. So you can see why I described this journey as a wild ride. It's been change, it's been transformation, it's been rewarding, and most of all, it's been a ton of fun. Thank you. Now I'm going to introduce Bob Derrick from Credit.

Well, thank you, Katherine. That was -- I always enjoy Katherine's excitement and enthusiasm. I'm just not sure wild ride would be an appropriate tagline for credit. My name is Bob Derrick. I've been the Chief Credit Officer here for about 3 years now. Prior to that, I worked with Kevin Howard when he was in his role as the Chief Community Banking Credit Officer for that division. I've been in banking a long time, but about half of it, of those 35 years have been here at Synovus. I'm really excited about being here. I'm going to talk a little bit about the credit history. You've heard bits and pieces of it with other speakers, and maybe a little bit more about our credit infrastructure and how we look at credit risk today. And then just touch on a little bit, a few points about how good I feel about the position we're in to support the growth of the company. Before the financial crisis, as we've mentioned earlier, we had multiple separate chartered banks across the Southeast. We had multiple loan policies. All of that served us well and was a good model at the time. But the overall corporate total of those equal to pretty high concentration in commercial real estate, specifically land and residential development, which was not a really good place to be headed into a mortgage and housing crisis. After the crisis, though, we set about rebuilding credit into a single 1 unit-focused organization. Credit administration functions were centralized, things like override and exception management, construction monitoring, appraisal reviews, et cetera, were all brought to a central function. But let me say this. While we did centralize some administrative functions, we remained committed to our market-based approach. We remain committed to that market leadership approach today. We also established a management-led Credit Risk Committee that is comprised of executives from both credit and risk as well as line of business executives. This Credit Risk Committee serves as our management-led organization to support our credit risk profile and our credit risk metrics, but reports directly to our Risk Committee of the Board. It is also responsible for monitoring and measuring and adjusting as needed our various concentration policies, which started 10 or 12 years ago, but today measure over 130 different concentration metrics. This committee also reports on our key risk frameworks to include key performance indicators and key risk indicators, and also makes recommendations for those levels and has those approved at our Board Risk Committee. This has been spoken about earlier, but I'll touch on it. The result of a lot of these changes was a remixed portfolio. And as Kevin Blair mentioned earlier, a much more balanced portfolio. Our commercial real estate was reduced from 44% to 28%. Our residential land and development exposure that I mentioned dropped from 61% of our real estate portfolio to just around 10%. Income-producing properties now make up over -- around 90% of our entire CRE book. Commercial and industrial lending makes up around 50% of our loan account, and it too is diversified across approximately 20 industries and multiple specialty lines of business. These actions also greatly improved our credit quality measures, which we've sustained over the last several years. 10 years ago, nonperforming assets were 5.5%, nonperforming loans were almost 4.5%. Today, those numbers are 40 and 33 basis points, respectively. Past dues were almost 0.75%, and today, are 15 basis points in net charge-offs, and 2011 were 5%, not 5 basis points, but 5%. That's 20 basis points today, and that number has been fairly consistent the last few years. Recently, in 2020, the COVID pandemic accelerated further improvements in our credit capabilities. We did a sweeping review of our portfolio to identify areas sensitive to the pandemic, such as hotels, restaurants and recreational venues. We've created a hospitality vertical lending unit within our wholesale bank. This hospitality hotel group is made up of some of our most experienced commercial real estate bankers and credit risk managers. We enhanced our market intelligence capabilities. And today, we measure and monitor supply and demand characteristics of various commercial real estate asset classes across 30 markets within our footprint to include submarkets within those metropolitan areas. We strengthened our commercial and industrial focus on analytics. Many of you saw during the pandemic, we reported on our cash inflow model. Well, today, we use that model to help us gauge better where we think forward revenue trends are going on an industry basis. We deployed more of our credit resources into our lines of business. This allows us to better monitor credit exposures at the point of origination and serves to strengthen our first line of defense. So here's a picture where we are today. We have a well-balanced, highly diversified, high-quality $39 billion loan portfolio. As I mentioned earlier, our commercial real estate is well diversified now across the larger property types. But it also has strong sponsorship, low loan to cost, low loan to values, good underwriting economics and is managed well within our concentration limits. Nonperforming loans in commercial real estate are just 11 basis points, past dues are very low and charge-offs were 8 basis points in 2021. And in fact, third and fourth quarter of 2021, our commercial real estate division was in a net recovery position. Commercial and industrial loans make up half the book, as I mentioned and as Kevin Howard talked about, about half of that is in our middle market and commercial direct lending businesses, some of our most profitable accounts. And the other half is in our specialty businesses where we have a great deal of expertise and deep credit risk management resources embedded there. The consumer portfolio makes up about 22%, and it's principally mortgages and home equity lines of credit with good credit scores and good loan to values. Our mortgage book focuses predominantly on our private wealth clients and our physicians program. Our home equity line of credit utilization rate is just under 40%. We also have our third-party consumer loan purchases here, which serve as a good diversification tool to our overall consumer exposure. Specialty lending, as Kevin Howard mentioned, just a couple of points here since it's been covered. But I do want to reiterate this. Not one of these specialty lines of business, not one has experienced a credit loss since their inception. From our longest senior tenured housing division to our recently added business lines, all of these units, are led by bankers with significant experience in managing their teams and portfolios through the economic cycle. They also maintain excellent credit metrics, have experienced credit people embedded with them. They are excellent addition to our portfolio. Third-party lending, as I mentioned earlier, does give our consumer accounts a little bit of diversification in addition to serving as somewhat of a surrogate to Jamie's investment portfolio. We've been doing this for several years now. It's been a good addition for us. Currently, our third-party portfolio is about 50% secured and 50% unsecured, and those secured assets are automobiles, boats and RVs, primarily. And that collateral is actually going up in value these days. The other half is spread out among student loans and home improvement loans and various personal unsecured loans. But my point is our historical losses in this portfolio, have remained well within our expectations. And even with incremental credit risk, the overall economics and the short duration of these assets make them a good accretive investment for us. So we built a platform that I believe is prepared for good, high-quality growth. As Kevin Blair mentioned, the remixing of the portfolio alone with the same historical loss rates, reduces our loss rate from 5.6% to 3.4%. Bar chart also gives you the stress testing results compared to our DFAST counterparts, and we not only compare well to the medium, but also to the top quartile. So when you think about this remixed portfolio that we have today and what I believe is a much more stronger and strengthened credit infrastructure, our continued focus on prudent underwriting, analytics-based monitoring capabilities, and I think our credit organization is well positioned to support our strategic growth plan. Look, it's not lost on me that my job as the Chief Credit Officer is to worry a little bit, and I do. But I'll also tell you this, this company takes credit risk very seriously. We should. But we are committed to maintaining a credit-centric focus in each of our market-based banks in each of our lines of business. That's critical to us. My first CEO many years ago, I'm dating myself, was the late John Medlin, and he would always say that the key to a successful bank is soundness, profitability and growth in that order. I think that still has relevance today. But I would say it this way for Synovus from a credit perspective. For us, it's about 3 key credit tenets that I like to talk about: Disciplined underwriting that's built around sound loan policies; number two, strong and broad-based portfolio management, because I do believe that bad loans aren't made, usually bad things happen post closing; and finally, and probably most importantly, that we're committed to maintaining a diversified portfolio, adhering to our concentration policies and limits and making sure we have good sound governance across all of those tenets from the banker to the boardroom. If we can do -- or we will do those 3 things to ensure that Synovus will continue to grow in a sound and profitable manner. I think that's it for me. I'm going to turn it back over to Kevin Blair. Thank you.

I know it's been a long 2 hours, so I appreciate you guys persevering. We're going to go through a 30-minute Q&A. Let me remind those that are viewing us through the webcast, please submit your questions online. We want to make sure that we capture those as well. The other name that Atlanta is known by is the gateway city to the south. Now I don't hear that a lot today. But if you just allow me to do this analogy, I hope you just heard from all of our presenters that we have a highly collaborative leadership team focused on the commercial segment. But we don't have a single silver bullet. What we actually have are silver buckshot, a lot of little things that make a difference. And if you allow me to take this analogy a little further, closely knit all together working for 1 same objective, which is to improve the client experience and to grow the bank. And so with that, why don't we open up to -- we'll start in the audience here. Any questions you may have for our presenters from this morning? Jennifer? Well, let's get a microphone, Jennifer, so people can hear you.

Okay. I think it's great you said there is no one single bullet. You did mention a lot of strategies this morning so far. In your mind, Kevin, of all those strategies you're talking about, what is the most differentiated versus your competitors? And also most differentiated versus the peer group that you compare yourselves to when you're looking at your financial performance at the end of the year?

Yes. Look, I think whether you're in a core business that every other bank, there are 81 other banks here in Atlanta, and most banks have most of the same offerings we have. And so you've heard today, a lot of the differentiation comes from the talent that we have, but also the way in which we execute. So I would tell you, you can differentiate in everyone. But if you ask me the one that I'm most excited about, it is mass. Wayne did a great job of teeing it up. And because when you think about our delivery, and Wayne said in the second quarter, when we deliver one contract, one relationship, we believe we're going to be ahead of the curve. That's because we have a strong sponsorship-based model today to be able to provide payment facilitation to these ISVs that will provide merchant-acquiring-type products to their customers. But when you think about it holistically, what we're doing is we're opening up a new channel to banking. And if you just think about this from a lens of consumer lending, those of us who have been in the industry for a long time, when you used to want a consumer loan, you would go into the branch. And then that transitioned to going to a website. And if you look at where the channels are today for consumer lending, it's almost predominantly point of sale. The customers want immediate gratification. And they don't want to leave their contractor or move away from the item they're trying to buy to go log on to a separate website to apply for a loan. And so I think the future of small business banking will follow in similar suit. These small business that Wayne mentioned, 40% of them today are using an ISV to conduct their business every day. So they don't want to leave that software to go to their banking software to apply for a loan or to move money around. So if we can provide that embedded finance in that operating environment that they're working every day, it provides us with an opportunity to better serve those needs and to create a channel for future growth that we haven't had. Follow-up? You have a follow-up.

So if you're most excited about mass, how -- I think you mentioned that's coming out in the second half of this year...

Well, second quarter we'll have our pilot.

Second quarter pilot. And so where are you versus your competitors in terms of providing those services? And that's it.

Yes. We think we're early to the market. And you heard Wayne talk, Jennifer, about when we went to Money20/20, when we talk to 20 software vendors. They said, where have you been and where can we sign up? And the difference is being able to embed this solution in 1 implementation, as Wayne mentioned. It's the ease of access so that they can plug it in through an API solution into their software to very quickly provide it to their clients. Now I don't know every software vendor that will sign up today, but I do know that once you get our software, our embedded finance, banking-as-a-service platform embedded, it's pretty sticky. It's like Katherine's business. You create a sticky service. So if we can be an early enabler of the service, there'll be other competitors. Look, this marketplace is going to continue to grow. Others see the same trend. But we'll have adopted it and established relationships early in the process. And what Wayne and his team are doing are creating a team of individuals that aren't just going to put out a product, but over time, will continue to improve, embellish and add new functionalities to our banking-as-a-service platform. EB?

I guess a question for Wayne and Kevin. As we talk about your growth outlook ex-mass in terms of -- you mentioned 81 banks in Atlanta and just across the Southeast, you're dealing with the big banks, community banks, large regional banks who are growing here. What's driving client acquisition? Is it moving clients from the larger banks to Synovus? How much of that is driving client acquisition versus just new business formation within your markets? You talked about 50% better -- population growth, right?

Growth, yes.

Yes. So just break down what's market share movement from competitors versus just the market dynamics of people moving in, business moving in.

Let me -- I'll call on Kevin first. Kevin has an impressive stat that with his growth in 2021, they brought in 100 new relationships to the bank. And Wayne probably has similar stats back from PPP and so on. But Kevin, talk a little bit about where your growth is coming from?

Yes. I mean it has been coming. As I mentioned, we've been moving more up market in metro markets, offering a good team approach to the middle market. So we're winning there. A lot of the key things are, again, our partnership approach, our ability to offer services across the board in lending has been key for us. I'd say this. As we continue to move more upmarket and have more products and solutions in the metro markets, I mean, that's where we've been winning. It's been a little bit. I mentioned our partnerships. I mentioned our size capabilities but also the bank disruption that has happened in some of these key markets. But I'm not saying in every market, but in a lot of the markets. That has provided opportunities, as I mentioned in my presentation. We've been steady. We've been consistent over several years. We've been calling hard in the markets. We've been adding in these metro markets. And when there has been that opportunity, again, I'm focused a lot on the middle market where there is so much growth, where those companies are growing. And the disruption of the reliability of the capital that they need to grow has been helpful for us to get in the door and have opportunities there. And then bring in these treasury products, our capital market products as well that we now have that we didn't have 5, 10 years ago, at least at this level. So that team approach and those opportunities have been great opportunities for us to grow in the middle market space.

Wayne, what would you add from a community bank perspective?

I think it's really -- and we didn't talk about it a lot today, but empowering our bankers, we spent time this past year really looking at processes that were burdening our bankers with administrative tasks when what they want to do is be out calling on their customers. So when you look at bankers that we brought on from outside firms that probably came to us because of the disruption in their own institutions and they look at our process and what we're enabling them to do and empowering them to do, they get excited. And I look at the last 4 bankers we brought on board from -- in our Tampa market, and they outperformed 2x to what the expectations we had set for them were. And it was -- to them, it seemed a no-brainer given what we were allowing them to do. So that's what I would probably leave you with the most.

And I'll just add, EB. It used to be that you had to lead with credit. Today, we're also leading with treasury and payment solutions. And so having a broader set of products and solutions and a level of expertise, whether it's specialty or whether it's product specialization, it's allowing us to attract new clients to the bank that in the past would have been more difficult to move. Okay. Steven?

So first on MAAST, I don't think there's a bank out there that's not looking at Banking as a Service, right? And if you guys are successful, you'll have a lot more coming in terms of the one-stop-shop approach. Is there a moat in that business for you?

You always ask the really tough questions, Steven. Is there a moat? To me, the challenge is providing the service. The payment facilitation portion is the easy part. And we'll start with that, helping our ISV clients provide a point-of-sale capability for merchant acquiring. That's easy. The moat or maybe the challenge is -- when you start thinking about embedded finance generally, is this automated underwriting of credit. And so we've talked about that a lot internally. It's that -- and Bob said it in his presentation. We want to make sure that we're not changing our risk appetite or trying to create a product that we don't feel comfortable originating today through our relationship managers. We want to make sure that the embedded finance component is term financing for that restaurant to buy a new piece of equipment or an unsecured facility that would fit within our credit appetite today for our small business lines of credit. So the challenge for us is making sure that we are finding the right type of end users that would meet our credit box and that we're not expanding into areas that we're uncomfortable with or bringing on a national footprint that we wouldn't want to lend into.

And maybe a follow-up. I think the biggest difference between the last Investor Day and this one was that Investor Day was all about being decentralized, right? Decisions are made in the field. This is the way of Synovus. Here, this is all line of business today. So we think about empowerment, which has been mentioned about 100 times. How do we think about -- it sounds like there's a consistent centralized approach now to the way you run the business. So where are you on that spectrum of people actually being empowered in markets to provide customized solutions, which is what I would think would actually separate you guys from everybody else?

Well, look, and I think Wayne touched on it up front, part of the message is that we are going to create certain product solutions and strategies at the top of the house. But one size doesn't fit all. And I mentioned earlier we have 55 markets that we serve. And one of the things, when I took the seat in April, was we started the process with what we call the empowerment tour, where we sat down with our bankers and said what are getting in the -- what items are getting in the way of you serving your clients and making sure that you can do your job well. We put a list of items together and we went through with all of our leadership team and we made changes. We changed process. We changed procedures. We changed policies. And we went back out to our bankers and said, "We've heard you." So we're trying to do the best of both worlds. We're trying to create some centralized, overarching strategies and actions but allowing -- and the reason you've heard it so much today is that we want to make sure that we haven't changed. That person who's sitting on the front line, we actually want them to have more autonomy and more accountability on delivering to our clients because I believe if all we do is build a big bank, segment-driven line of business model, we're competing with the large money center banks. And then we lose our competitive positioning in all of these marketplaces. The other thing I would tell you that works well within our model is, you've heard multiple times, that our people work better together. What I see with our competitors is they become overly siloed and myopic as to their line of business. We have a plan in place, and we work on it every day -- it's not easy, to ensure that we work seamlessly across our lines of business, delivering as one team, not as a line of business. And Wayne oversees our community bank, which still runs our community model where we have local market executives that serve as the face of that community, but they're asked to work with wholesale, with treasury, with CIB, with all of our partners, to ensure that we're delivering as one team, not this bifurcated, siloed approach that you get from some of the larger institutions. Chris?

I had a quick question for Katherine. As it pertains to the ACH and to your relying on that through your payment reassociation and other services, how do you envision ACH changing in the years ahead? Is there a new fee structure that may come on as FedNow and blockchain gets further developed? And does that actually help your revenue model even further?

It absolutely does. We're thinking about that now because real-time payments will affect wires and ACH. So we have to think about how we're going to look at our model going forward and how we're charging and how the solution sets go with those solutions and how we make up that revenue on the back side. That's why we're not rushing to RTP. A lot of the banks aren't rushing to RTP for that exact reason. A lot of them are waiting for FedNow, which is supposed to launch next year. We'll see if that happens. But yes, we are looking at that. But as you look at payment reassociation or AR Match, that solution set is taking the current AR inflows for a client and taking out the time element, where you're not having to go hunt down the e-mail or try to do dual-screen posting. It immediately matches. So from that -- like I used to say cash isn't going away anytime soon. Checks aren't going to be gone. I mean we're hearing that from our Deluxe partners who are the 80% lockbox provider of all checks in the U.S. So we're not seeing it go immediate, but we are thinking about it right now because we know there will be an impact with RTP and FedNow.

And Chris, she's -- Katherine is working on a lot of RTP solutions. You'll hear from Zack later today about our USDF Consortium, where we're looking at blockchain as a potential channel to move money as well. So I think where Katherine stated it correctly in the industry, we're looking at all the alternatives instead of choosing one today and having to switch down the road. Do you have an online question, Cal? And then we'll go to Kevin after that.

All right. From the online audience, thank you for all the work that your team has put into this day. Is your Banking as a Service platform a national initiative? Or do you expect it to be an in-footprint tool? Any way to size it, number of potential clients or revenue.

Wayne?

So it will absolutely be a nationwide platform because we'll be distributing it through the ISV. So really anybody who signs up to that ISV, they could be located anywhere in the United States. In terms of number of clients, we're looking at -- in the first year, we'll attempt to onboard 5 to 10 ISVs, ramping that up to 20 to 30 and then adding 25 to 30 each year as we go through the next few years.

Okay. Why don't we go to Kevin?

Thank you. My question is for Tom. So with the CIB opportunity, you mentioned how this has been done a number of times in the past, different platforms. Can you talk about what made it successful in the past? And if you wouldn't mind sharing where that was done. And what excites you about doing it here at Synovus. And maybe just to throw on there, what inning you're in, in terms of this hiring of talent? And is it going to be more of a bringing your old band back together? Or is it really more bringing people from in-house or it's wide open? So a number of different outlook question.

No. Certainly, Kevin. In terms of the build -- so my background, I began my corporate investment banking career at what is now Wells Fargo, Wachovia Securities, Interstate/Johnson Lane. I worked at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey here in Atlanta over 7 years. Most recently, I ran some industry practices at Regions Securities. Look, I think the -- let me speak to the talent question. I am open-minded to where that talent comes from. It's really about fit. It's important that the right profile candidates for us are bankers who have built businesses before and who understand the time, the effort, the focus that's needed to do that. Someone who has only worked at a fully built-out platform is not going to appreciate the challenge and the opportunity that we have here. And I really see this as an opportunity. It's getting a clean sheet of paper. Or to use Katherine's analogy, you go into the closet and you pull out all the pieces and you get to put it together. But what we're putting together is going to make, I think, very good strategic sense for this institution and for the bankers that we bring to this platform. We are looking broadly in our search. I've been very pleased at the appeal of the Synovus brand. We've gotten great traction there. But we have posted for positions. We have an active talent acquisition process. In some cases, teammates have referred people to us who were not previously known to this institution. And I think the themes are very similar, skeptical at first. You can feel the excitement, the enthusiasm building. This is different. This is unique. This is a real build. This is a great opportunity. I know -- I see it. I've done this before. I know what you're talking about. So they can really map it out well.

Brody?

Yes. I guess I have a couple of questions. The first one is on CIB. I guess just looking at the deck, it sort of implies 2024, $30 million of revenues, $100 million of revenues by 2026, just kind of looking at the efficiency ratios and the PPNR. So I guess, one, it looks like most of it is going to come through NII. So I guess what do the loan yields look like for this customer set? And then could you remind us what the fee income items are going to be?

Sure. So Brody, yes, there is a significant NII component. We think about it this way. This will build one banker or one client at a time. But again, I think good, experienced coverage bankers getting to scale, supported with credit and junior support over time should start getting to scale 3, 4, 5 years in with client books that will generally be producing $25 million, $30 million or so of revenue. To the spread and yield question, this will look similar, I think, to a lot of our other specialty businesses in wholesale in terms of yields and spreads. We are focused on relevance. So we're not going to chase after a lot of 75 or 100 basis point over reference rate business, where we are going to have to really fight to win other opportunities in those client wallets. We really think it's going to be at the low end, call it 150 spread to up to 400 with really a sweet spot in that 225, 250 to 350 range in terms of expected yields. Good utilization overall because we're focused on the middle market, so think commitments, and then fundings in the 55%, 60% utilization range.

And Brody, I'll just add to that. One of the things, misconceptions maybe, that as I've spoken about Tom's business is that most people jump straight to the capital markets piece and think that this is largely going to be a highly volatile debt capital markets, equity capital markets play. We're starting with a coverage banking model. We'll have -- we'll deploy capital. We'll provide depository and treasury services. But as they move upmarket, as Tom mentioned, it gives us the opportunity more for advice. But over time, as we fund our growth here through the business that he brings in, we'll add capabilities to the fold when clients desire those. We're not going to go out and build a securitization business day 1. We're going to have clients that need securitization capabilities, and we'll add it to that point. That's the way in which we can build it in a more scalable, prudent fashion.

Got it. And then on MAAST, I appreciate the sort of client growth perspective. But I think you've previously stated that over the first 5 years, it's a $100 million revenue opportunity. And so could you help me think about -- I guess when you add the 5 to 10 and then the next 10 to 20 in the next 25 plus, like when do you kind of reach -- I guess like within that $100 million, when do you reach a sustainable kind of revenue run rate that will be above, I guess, that $100 million because that's kind of a cumulative number, right? So...

That's right. We think it will be right after year 5, we'll start achieving that run rate because as you can imagine, each ISV represents, on average, about 1,500 to 2,500 potential clients underneath their portfolio. And so as you onboard, the first ISV by year 2 and 3, you're starting to go from 10% of those customers on your platform to 20% to 30%. So each one is growing almost exponentially as well. So we think in the fifth year, we'll be at that run rate.

Okay. And then my last one would just be on the SMART Tool and then the sales force marketing that you've outlined in the past, I think the SMART Tool was supposed to be $20 million of new annual run rate revenues by the end of 2021. And then the sales force was supposed to be $20 million in new annual revenues by the end of 2022. Did you achieve the $20 million by year-end '21 on the SMART Tool? And are you still sort of thinking $20 million for the SMART -- the sales force marketing?

We're -- yes, Brody. I think we're not quite at $100 million on SMART and for many different reasons. We -- as Katherine mentioned, we -- about 70% to 80% of the leads that come out of SMART are treasury. We're going through a Gateway migration, and we had a lot of our team members working on that. What we are seeing is good traction from an RM perspective. Wayne mentioned that. As we go forward, we think it can generate $20 million. It's part of the reason you saw Katherine saying that she can double her fees. It's because those smart leads are providing insights to our bankers to be able to introduce a treasury person. As it relates to the second portion of that, the extra $20 million, you'll see when Liz talks later today about being able to add consumer analytics into that fold, which will have a similar impact to the company. We think in total by the end of the '24, it will be about $35 million for total analytics. So it got pushed a little bit, but we still feel very confident we'll be able to deliver. Your second point was on the sales force?

Yes. The -- you previously outlined in a prior deck that you expected $20 million of additional revenues from the point of like sales force, marketing.

I think that's the -- yes, that's the same Personetics and Amplero tools that you'll hear about in a second from Liz. [ John ]?

On the loan growth front, I guess can you just talk about the competitive backdrop in the Southeast? Clearly, there's -- it's a heavy focus by a lot of the larger, deep-pocketed banks. And separately, given that, do you think you can -- I know you've indicated in the past the ability to grow loans in excess of GDP. Do you think that's attainable given the competitive backdrop?

I'll start and please, any of my peers, add any comments. Look, it's a competitive marketplace, [ John ]. You know in this business, there's never going to be a time where I stand up here and tell you that there's a lack of competition in banking. The good news is -- and Bob continues to adjudicate this as he looks at credits. What we're not seeing is that competitors are changing structure or they're expanding risk appetite. They're doing it with price. And it makes sense because everybody is flush with a tremendous amount of liquidity and they can either set it at the Fed at 15 basis points, deploy it in their securities book at $1.25 or go out and get a LIBOR plus 75 loan that Tom was saying we won't chase. So pricing competition is going to continue to be difficult. Now as it relates to our ability to outpace the GDP, you'll see in Jamie's presentation what we're projecting for '23 and '24 in loan growth. And I think you'll see there that we do believe we can do that. And that's not just by focusing on the same, tried and true businesses. It's about getting better productivity, as Wayne talked about in his business; as Kevin talked about, adding, extending to things that are working but continuing to bring on new opportunities for growth in loans like CIB and others that have yet to even be discussed in this room yet. So our goal will be to make sure that we not only have our core business operating at a higher productivity level but continuing to add new sources of loan growth, which will allow us to grow in that higher level than what GDP would suggest.

Okay. Great. And then one quick follow-up, super quick. With the MAAST effort, what's the typical client that you're bringing on, typical size, typical industry at this point?

So our client will be the ISV, right? And so those ISVs are generally -- they have payments revenue. It's the best way to categorize them since they start in that space of $100 million on an annualized basis. And that's sort of our sweet spot, [ John ], to start with those, because they're the ones trying to figure out how do they begin to extend to other banking services. So those are the ones that we'll be focused on. And we think that out of the 5,000 ISVs, there's really about 2,000 of those that are really in that sweet spot to date. But of course, it's changing every day as people develop new technology and new software.

And this is a surgical sales approach, [ John ]. Wayne and his team are looking at which ISVs have the end users that meet our profile, the ones that we want to do business with. And so it will be a selective approach to how they go after and sell to those ISVs. We have time for one more question before break, do we? EB?

Just following up on that. The $100 million revenue...

Give him the microphone just so people on the phone can hear.

The $100 million revenue, is that coming from like -- are you going to be picking up deposits? Are you going to be charging a fee to these ISVs for transactions? Just how do you make money out of it? And you mentioned the end user will dictate to you. What's the end user? Will that customer ever become a Synovus customer or you want to limit your relationship to the ISV?

So what we're starting to think about it is, of course, we want them to become our customer, and they will be our customer through the Banking as a Service platform. And so we'll be offering initially -- when we did our initial study, we said there were 3 essential products, the payment services, the deposit account and lending services. Those were the 3. And then we've got sort of a list of priorities to come right behind that. But with those again, the software vendor will offer the opportunity to their merchant client today or to their software client today, and we'll begin to show them how by coming on to our platform, it's going to enable them to run their business more efficiently effective, like deposits to be real time in their account from payments. Then we can see their data and offer them loans -- loan offerings that are tailor-made for them because we've already got their information to guide that.

Okay. Well, look, we're going to take a 15-minute break. So if we're back in here in 15 minutes, we'll start back up with our consumer presentation. Thank you, guys, and we'll see you in 15. [Break]

Please welcome EVP, Head of Consumer Banking and Brand Experience, Liz Wolverton.

Well, Good morning, and welcome back, and thank you for coming back. That was a great morning. Kevin asked me a little administrative announcement. Jamie's deck is now available on the Synovus website and, I believe, on the Investor Day website as well. So it's available for download now. But as the voice from above said, I'm Liz Wolverton, and in my role as Head of Consumer Banking and Brand Experience, I get to lead some of the most dynamic areas of the bank, and you have heard flavor of them sprinkled throughout the morning, digital, analytics, marketing and our consumer banking strategy. But before I get started, I want you to turn your attention to a video featuring one of my executive partners who is in the back of the room today, Bart Singleton. Bart is EVP and President of our Financial Management Services company, and he not only does a great job in front of the camera, as you're about to see, but he will join us for Q&A. And in fact, Bart informed me this morning that he would really be pleased if all the Q&A questions were directed to him. So let's not disappoint him. Take a look as Bart behind -- provides you a behind-the-scenes view of why Synovus is winning in wealth. [Presentation]

Thank you, Bart. Wealth is a powerful story at Synovus. And I'll share later how our consumer teams are helping to contribute to those packed pipelines that Bart talked about. So a little bit about me. I've been with Synovus for 18 years. That makes me feel a little old. I started with Synovus in 2003. I'm a recovering CPA. I started as a -- in the finance team. And in fact, my first job at Synovus was to implement our Sarbanes-Oxley program. Fun fact, in January of 2005, I delivered Synovus' very first SOX report and my first child within 2 weeks of each other. So stress-free beginning at the bank but despite all that, I stayed. And in 2010, maybe after the 7-year finance itch, I had an opportunity to take on a role under our line of business, and I did so. I joined our Chief Banking Officer at the time and his leadership team, developing new banking and go-to-market strategies. That is where Wayne Akins and I became fast friends, developing a lot of strategies post financial crisis. In 2014, I was given the opportunity to initiate the Chief Strategy Officer role under Kessel Stelling, leading corporate strategic planning and cross-functional initiatives. And in 2019, we pulled the marketing and digital teams under that umbrella, and we began to build a modern brand and customer experience road map. And you've seen the fruits of some of that labor today, as you've heard about some of the digital and customer experience gains that we've had. Fast forward to now, 60 whopping days into my new role and how is it going? Well, I am drinking from a fire hose but I am truly loving it. I use the word "dynamic" to describe the combined areas that I lead, and it definitely fits perfectly. Actually, I looked this up. It's characterized by constant change in progress as well as positive in attitude and full of energy and new ideas. And the consumer bank has been the heartbeat, I really think, of Synovus for 130 years. It's got leadership with expertise and tenure, awesome talent across the footprint, namely our new COO of the consumer bank, Susan Pitts, with 30-plus years of experience, a right hand to me in my transition. And the areas of digital analytics and marketing has been on a fast track for development, as you've heard. We've attracted some amazing talent there from inside and from outside of banking, and that's been really important. But blending those leadership teams together, even in the first 60 days, is exciting to watch. It's creating that new energy and new ideas. It is definitely dynamic. So I hope you leave here today with a strong feeling of that fierce integration that we are driving together. What's also energizing and before I go into consumer, I do want to just acknowledge the new strategic plan that Kevin referenced at the start of the meeting. It is progressive, and we are very much a bank in motion and foot forward in many ways. This is reflected in the new Get There branding that you're getting a sneak peek of subliminally today. We'll be rolling that out in March. And thank you, partners, for the plugs. I've heard them. The group you're hearing from today represents the most cohesive management team that I've been a part of. This team gets up every day, thinking of ways to win. It's rare that e-mail exchanges don't start before 7:00 a.m. I think it was 4:30 this morning. Thank you. That was musically driven. And it's not the 7:00 a.m. e-mails you want to avoid. It is about what's next. So the team embraces the art of the possible. And like Tom said, we are already having a lot of fun growing the bank. So let's talk consumer. The consumer bank has an important role in our Synovus model and certainly in the go-forward strategy. If the story of the commercial bank that you heard this morning is growth, the story for the consumer bank is continuing to adapt and shift. I'll let my friends to the left drink the protein powder, and we are going to work on our flexibility in consumer. It is the primary source of efficient and dependable low-cost funding. The road to $30 billion does not come without us. We represent 40% of core deposits. This makes us a relationship artery to the bank. We're acquiring clients. We're nurturing relationships. And we connect a large number of those opportunities to community, to wholesale, to wealth, all across the bank. We have a firm foundation with an exceedingly loyal customer base, consistently scoring in the top tier of NSF, as Kevin mentioned earlier, and reaffirmed by the J.D. Power 2021 survey. But consumer banking is not a place for the timid. Significant decisions lie ahead, physical footprint, disintermediation, general market and consumer uncertainty. All these present new challenges every day, but we are well prepared for that challenge ahead. So as we look over the horizon for the next several years and as you listen to me today, we're going to talk about not the what, but the how. The 3 components of our consumer strategy cascade from the core pillars that Kevin described earlier this morning. As we reposition for growth, we are shifting delivery, reducing branch dependency, and you'll hear a lot about powering digital. As we embrace to simplify and streamline, we will accelerate digital sales, enhancing the customer experience and acquiring with greater efficiency. And finally, further empowering high-touch and high tech with analytics, creating a culture that is equally known for advice as it is for those service scores. So let's get into some of the details of the how. Shifting delivery starts with further optimization of our branch network. In December -- and I'll note the first week after I took the role, Kevin Blair announced a target of 15% and $12 million run rate of savings through branch efficiencies by the year-end of 2022. That is a sizable reduction. But I'm confident in our ability to execute because we've done it before. Over the past decade, we've been highly successful at strategically closing branches and capturing efficiency, and the result, improved efficiency, minimal customer attrition, continued growth in impacted markets, and no real changes to our overall market share position in those markets. So we have a history of successful optimization. And as we continue to base our decisions on data but our analysis is expanding, our historical approach in terms of our historical approach in terms of -- our historical approach of branch assessment has been largely focused on retail efficiency, low-performing branches in terms of retail sales or low market share, branches positioned in markets where we have the ability to de-densify, and reevaluating presence in submarkets where there is shrinking growth opportunity. That's been the historical view. And those factors are still a big component. But as we get more aggressive in reducing physical locations, the considerations grow for all of our lines of business. So we really are approaching this as footprint optimization across line of business considerations. My partners sit at the table with me, and we're evaluating cross-business line opportunity and location dependency within each submarket. With the advancements that we've made in digital -- and you've heard it's not just consumer, across the organization, we have greater confidence in pushing the physical borders out. And while maintaining a high level of retention gets harder every time we take action, we strongly believe that there are continuing market factors that contribute to drive this optimization. Teller transactions are down 24% since 2019. Our customers are voting with their feet. We do not think that's going to change. COVID further loosened the ties of branch dependency, and that's unlikely to go backwards. Given the large number of reductions, we'll be deploying a higher level of targeted marketing and retention strategies than with past reductions. So there is extra effort there. And as we finalize our branch closure reviews, we will start these efforts in parallel. I believe acting boldly now is the right move. I am confident in achieving our targets. We're finalizing the closures for second quarter now, and we will have a really good view of the full 40 by the end of February. So it's very important that the consumer bank stays focused on growth while we run the branch optimization play. And we aren't just looking for any growth. We want growth based in primacy, as where Synovus is the true center of the customer's financial life. Our projections for consumer balance sheet growth over the near term are steady but they're not oversized. Our strong deposit position insulates us from the need to pursue nonstrategic customer acquisition. So our consumer bank will focus on our sweet spots, specifically targeting the mass affluent and the emerging mass affluent. The data is clear. These customers pursue deeper relationships and stay longer, providing that funding sustainability that is primary to our purpose. Our solution set aim down the middle, focused on the fundamentals of the relationship, strong HELOC, credit card and other core personal loan solutions and broader relationship programs like Synovus Plus and Synovus Inspire under our Elevate flag that are compelling for the emerging mass and mass affluent. And that focus on the fundamentals obviously works. 77% of Synovus customers feel they have a personal relationship with us, as compared to 63% among peers. And really important to that sweet spot strategy, 96% of mass affluent customers want to continue to do more business with us. We think that is a strong voice of primacy. We're confident that these mass affluent relationship programs are competitive and support a strong customer-deepening strategy. And the proof points make it easy to believe. We launched Elevate in 2020, about 1 month before branches and COVID disruption hit, rewarding customers for more benefits as they do more business with us, including premium pricing, advisory services and those priority care services that you saw in the video. And we see a 22% higher on-us average balance for clients in our relationship program today. That generates significantly more value per customer and solidifies that primacy. Driving growth and engagement with these customers also helps us to fill those wealth pipelines that Wayne and Bart very much appreciate. To that end, with Elevate, we implemented a guided and sales-force-supported referral process from our consumer teams to our wealth teams. We successfully captured, even with that disruption I spoke of, 20% of targeted clients in our program. And that's good traction, but we've got 80% to go, and that 80% provides us a huge opportunity to grow based on that deepening strategy. The other large opportunity for us, and you've heard a lot about small business today, is the small business growth. Our branch teams drive small business sales, and we've improved branch sales since -- from pre-COVID levels. We believe that success has been triggered by the strong support our bankers provided, 28,000 clients through PPP assistance. In fact, last year, we distributed a relationship survey across every segment in the bank and the strongest sentiment and loyalty perspective across all segments with small business customers who have received PPP assistance for Synovus. So we've earned strong fans, and we need to build upon that now. We've recently enhanced digital and treasury capabilities through the Gateway program. That platform is absolutely best-in-class for this customer segment. And Wayne referenced our community relationship center. That team combines legacy small business and retail talent in streamlining the credit and renewal process. And that is great for efficiency. But beyond that, we have tasked this team to make that renewal not just tactical but opportunistic, taking advantage of the customers' focus and attention at renewal time to identify broader opportunities. So with all this positive momentum, you can absolutely expect this to be a bigger role in the consumer bank performance going forward. So as we pivot to talk more deeply about delivery, digital is obviously the centerpiece. And we're focused on a holistic view of digital maturity. And we look at it across the spectrum, equalize, monetize, humanize and then innovate. And note that I did not say digital transformation. That word is not allowed. That was very 2019. Digital is not a destination. It's a road. It is part of the overall business model. And so it's ultimately about business transformation, not about digital transformation. But it is a partnered effort between my team and Zack's technology team. You'll really hopefully feel that today. And we've completed some heavy lifting over the past 24 months. We implemented a new platform in 2019, and that 4.8 app rating you see on the page looks even better when you put the 1.8 pre-platform rating by it. So I would say that's pretty substantial progress and a strong platform to springboard from and which we have. COVID created a surge in adoption. In 2020 alone, we jumped enrollment over 13% a year. And better yet, we're increasing super users, so those people that are in our device 33x or more a month. That number is up 20% over the past 24 months. P2P usage, which we just launched Zelle in last December, is up 135% since we launched. And that is where the monetization component begins to occur. As we engage people more deeply in the digital experience, it's important to know that we are engaging them more with Synovus, and that's where the customer deepening occurs. It also then makes it our responsibility to build a more human relationship in the experience, and we're doing this through our analytics and true personalization. Personalization used to mean when you logged in, your name was on the screen, maybe in all caps, maybe not. But winning personalization today means much more, interacting with you way beyond that transaction, adding context, adding advice and even adding personality because that's what makes it feel relational and not transactional, and that is a business model change. But to make these shifts, especially as a regional bank, we need strong partners. And we've done a fantastic job of partnering with best of the class fintechs. You see them on this page here. Zack and I are both very active in these partnerships, serving on many of our partners' advisory councils and spending a lot of time one-on-one with their leadership teams. We are proactive in the ecosystem. We want to be an influencer and not just a participant. And we're expanding those fintech relationships from product enablers to product innovators. We've entered the crypto space, as you've heard, with NYDIG. We're excited to be foot forward in the space, starting small with crypto, buy, sell, hold. But it's these types of partnerships that are expanding the art of the possible for myself and my other line of business leaders, and we're actively assessing expanding offerings. Consumer is a business where every sales and operational service capability should be available through the digital channel. And I've set a goal for the team, and it's big, 5% to 50% online deposit acquisition in 3 years. And even though that sounds scary, in 2 years, with our mortgage online offering, we went from 0 to 70%. Over 70% of our mortgage applications are now occurring online. So I have confidence in our ability to execute but it won't be without [ deliberacy ]. We need to mimic what's worked, which includes -- on the mortgage side, we have the process connected to an MLO who introduces and guides customers to that online channel. And we will invest in marketing. That's built into the plan that Jamie will cover later. But we're also changing our marketing approach to more robustly embrace digital marketing channels, better leveraging paid search, better leveraging search engine optimization, and analytically driven digital display. Those tactics drive efficacy but also guide a customer directly into our online origination experience. So that's the journey we want to create. In addition to marketing, to achieve this goal, we'll be retraining teams, changing incentives and redesigning the in-branch interactions. Our branch team is going to benefit from less time in the origination systems and more time with customers. It's truly a win on the experience side both for customers and our team members. One of the realities that I am hyper-cognizant of as we make this shift is that the strategy cannot end with the online origination capability. We have to connect the relationship. We know the balances that we're acquiring digitally average lower than in branch originations. And also, the industry sees greater attrition when accounts originated remotely. And we've been thinking exactly along those lines as we've developed our analytics capabilities in parallel with our sales strategy. So analytics is going to be the super-enabler of high tech and high touch for us. For years as a bank, we have used what I like to call circumstantial evidence to interact with customers, disaggregated data points and despite our efforts, pretty overly generic assumptions and approaches. But today, through advanced modeling, we have CSI-worthy forensics to help us be more discerning, more timely and more valuable ultimately to our partners. So again, we're partnering with proven performers in this space through Curinos and Personetics to jump-start our capabilities. And in parallel, as I hope you saw recently, we have added a Chief Analytics Officer to build out a broader analytics program. His team is charged with a simple premise: turn our data into insights, turn those insights into action and turn those actions into value. I mentioned relationship deepening as a source of growth. Our initial program -- so the use cases you see here are pointed at our existing customer base. Both use AI models to develop personalized insights. That could be in the form of highlighting recent spending patterns, savings opportunities or digital services that the customer is not leveraging today. And they enable us to deploy real-time, right-time, hyper-relevant connections to our customers, inserting moments of reflection and maybe a little nudge to action in the form of digital marketing through Curinos. So that's that sales force connection that somebody asked about earlier. And then with Personetics, that's in the form of embedded insights each time you log on to the mass Synovus platform. We are targeting $15 million plus in annual revenues from these first 2 use cases. And the investment that we've made here is very scalable. It's fractional incremental cost versus the incremental value that we can build on these new use cases. New use cases will include delivering insights to our front line in parallel with the delivery to the customers and designing guided engagement. So I hope it's obvious why I'm excited about this new role. We are fiercely progressing the consumer bank. We've got a lot to get done, but we're well positioned to move quickly. We are removing the boundaries of physical locations. And make no mistake. We are creating a consumer bank that is strengthening, not retreating. And personally, I think it's awesome. And speaking of awesome, I get the pleasure of introducing Zack Bishop to the stage. It's very appropriate that we're back to back in the program because where one of us is, the other generally follows. That's true strategically and logistically. We have offices next door to each other. And when we work from home, unfortunately, we can't get away. He's about 2 blocks down the road. And on a sunny day, I might see him skate by on his skateboard. So glad to present your 2021 Gonzo award winner, Zack Bishop.

Well, Good morning. My name is Zack Bishop, and let me get this pulled up here. This is my disaster recovery plan in case my iPad goes down. Sorry. So I've been with Synovus for around 3 years. Prior to joining Synovus, I worked -- I've been in banking for 25 years. My entire career has been focused on technology, innovation and security and not advanced presentation and speaking skills, which will be a proof point to you all in the next 15 minutes. I manage numerous divisions for Synovus but my primary focuses in 2021 and 2022 have been and will be modernizing technology, process improvement and efficiencies, innovation, preparing for growth and building for tomorrow. And it's about partnerships and really executing on my partners' needs. In addition, like you heard, I'm part of many tech- and fintech-focused advisory committees, chaired numerous coalitions focused on banking, open banking architecture and overall bank technology and money movement. This organization I just described controls around 23% of the total expenses for the company. Again, that's across numerous divisions, not just tech. But if you extract technology in digital, it's around half of that or 12%. In 2022, we estimate we'll spend over 350,000 hours on projects. 275,000 of those hours would just be on growth and modernization. These hours and dollars will power all the needs of all the projects you've heard about today from our business partners. And then this group makes up around 20% of the total staffing, around 965 people if I'm not mistaken. And if you extract tech and digital out of that, it's around 300, so around 300 technologists in the company. We truly are building a great bank for the future. We focus on the customer experience and every customer's journey when they interact with Synovus and not only how they interact today but how they'll interact in the future. Our infrastructure stack now matches fintechs and not legacy regional banks, which you'll hear about in a few minutes. It's about automating everything. And it's not only automating for efficiency purposes. It's really service increases and service level increases. And then innovation and research and development, in 2021, we established an innovation office that reports directly to me. They're not nestled into different product groups and they really focus on the entire enterprise, entire ecosystem of our fintech partners and verticals that we haven't even thought about in the past. And when we talk about customer journeys, which is at the top, identifying what's most important to our customers, what consumes too much of their time today and how they interact with banking in the future, really helps us identify what we should focus on and how we should prioritize. Internally, last year, we built a team that focuses specifically on customer journeys. It's very different from marketing and customer experience. Customer journeys is really about the process that takes place internally within our organization when the customer interacts. For these -- I'm listing today, it started in 2021. But one is commercial lending. Reinventing our commercial lending journey is a huge focus for us and how we adjust and relook at dated processes and systems for every commercial origination we do. We've recently implemented a full-scale kind of process mapping exercise, and we implemented numerous of those process changes already. And that process mapping didn't match that of just our regional banking peers. The process mapping really mapped back to every lender in this space. You've heard about some of these projects earlier today, but we will power these changes with the nCino platform. This will be my third time utilizing the nCino platform to power these journeys, and we're excited about it. We're estimating that we'll roll out our first phase this August. Second up is account opening. Of course, digital fraud resisting account openings of all types will be one pillar. It's not only about the checking deposit account or the digital account openings that you've seen in the past. It's really a streamlined process with a continued focus for all products and services we offer. Money movement is the third, and you've heard from Katherine and others today about money movement. And it's not only about wire transfers and ACH. It's also about virtual currencies and stablecoin and the blockchain. Just in January, we joined a stablecoin consortium as a founding member of a prototype bank-to-bank stablecoin movement. And then last, rebuilding self-service tools for a more simple process to make easy things like profile and maintenance changes more simple. I think the heartbeat of it all though is technology modernization. And technology modernization defines the future, I think, of the entire banking industry, not just Synovus. We've got to embrace and focus on the ecosystem of fintechs, connecting everything through macro and micro services and advanced API cloud layers. It's rebuilding and reinventing the foundation the company's technology stack operates on. And at the end of the day, when all the foundational work is complete, one of the last steps is core monetization. Banks will have to transform the core to move away from batch-based processes and really take advantage of cloud-native platforms that are more simple and easier to adjust and build products within. And when I referenced the foundational work that must be completed, this is a journey 2021 took us on. This is not a utopian thing that may come out. This is what was completed in 2021. And it's not about the words on the slides or potentially acronyms. It's really about we followed a very detailed, sequential process that considered all dependencies. This is my favorite slide and my favorite piece of the story because the items on this page represent the foundation of almost every company, not just our company, in every industry. This is how organizations connect. This is how they authenticate their users. These are the networks they travel on. These are all the things that live kind of under that most people don't care about. I do. I care about them. But the differentiator is now that our foundation doesn't match a 100-year-old regional bank. We match that of fintechs and start-ups and emerging disruptors but layered on with the right security protocols. We can support any level of business need, whatever my partners' needs, whether it's legacy-driven or super innovative. We can plug and play into fintechs easily, and growth now is much simpler. We're on a journey now to migrate every existing app and new application that consume the value of this foundation through application migrations. Our transformed fintech-ready foundation wasn't built to move our bank to digital first. It was built to empower and balance the high-tech experience mixed with the high-touch reality. Our great bankers are what separates us. And these tools and platforms will just make them even better. So I'm incredibly proud of our progress on this one. We're moving at a pace faster than our peers, and we really have built something great. But it doesn't get there magically. We've got to enhance our talent along the way. We've got to upskill and reskill and power skill all the team members. Enhancing our talent, as you heard from all of us, is a top priority in 2022. We have great team members. Some just need an opportunity to take a break from the legacy product support and maintenance. We regularly talk about every skill we need here at Synovus, and we've been very, very clear with our communications in 2019. We wanted everybody to have an opportunity to get the skills they needed before we started through this journey. And so we regularly talk about them. We built internally these things we called transformation pods. And let me give you an example what that means. When we wanted to modernize our network, we took everyone in the company that worked in development or security or operations or technology, and we put them in a transformation pod for 90 days. Mixed with consultants and others, we said transform and modernize our network within 90 days. Then you'll be pushed back in the organization now as subject matter experts and architects on the system. And so every one of those team members have the ability to upskill. And we've continued that through every one of those foundational elements that you saw on the page, and we'll continue that as we go into 2022. But look, it doesn't always happen. It doesn't always work. So even outside of our upskill team member progress, we had to balance out any technical skill gaps. We brought in over 50 very skilled, strong technologists in 2021 alone. But it's really a win-win for everyone, the team members, customers, shareholders. During the year of 2021, we graduated close to 20% of our entire technology team. In 2022, we'll have graduated over 70%. Core modernization is exciting. We'll -- this will be one of the most significant projects every bank will have to go through. And we're fortunate to be a few years in front of this. We completed over 10 proof of concepts since 2019 with every emerging next-generation core out there. We have moved most of our efforts to 2. We feel 2 out there outshine the rest, and we have shifted our efforts to focus on these and really give them the time they need. And I think one of the things that kind of separates us right now are we're very fortunate to have great team members who are highly skilled in this space. Again, we're 3 years into research and development, proof of concept after proof of concept on how modern cores can make our bank even better. Our mass product that we've heard about many a time today actually resides on a next-generation core and is leading-edge in all ways. We'll launch that. Our estimate -- we will estimate to launch that in the first quarter of 2022, if I'm not mistaken, with the estimated go-live in second quarter. Tomorrow's core will definitely move data real time through services and operate similar to kind of like an enterprise service bus, if you can think back that, they allow for rapid product development and completely different approach to transactional processing. I think one of the big wins, though, that a lot of people lose traction on, is how impactful it is to change a product or a service on a legacy core. Like one of the big values we get out of the next-generation core is not just that it's cloud native and real time. It's the ability to power products and services faster than we ever have been able to do in the past. And then automation. Look, automation has got to be a focus. It's a primary focus for us in 2022. But again, it's not just about efficiency. It's focused on service level increases, hardening processes and preparing for growth. We really wanted to get our foundation completely rebuilt before we focused on automation. It was about automating the bank of tomorrow, not necessarily the bank of yesterday. We've built a center of excellence focused on automation and allocated some of our top most creative performers into it. Automation is not new to Synovus. We've had automation groups and center of excellences in the past. And we've been very fortunate to repurpose some of those for, again, automation on the bank of tomorrow. We're focusing on the back office first and we're slowly moving into other verticals. So we've actually integrated some into our call center right now. We actually just rolled out a brand-new product we're calling our call center as a service platform for all the call centers. It's AI, it's virtual callbacks, it's virtual hold times. It has automation layered into it, and we're also moving into the service desk. But we're very dedicated to using automation to build great solutions and experience for all our customers. Now since you all probably are most interested in this slide, and it's really about the numbers, we're actually -- have decreased expenses in my overall organization since 2019, moving from 24.7% down to 23%. And tech increases have increased. So rarely is an increase in expense a story you want to share, but we truly are investing in transformation and modernization, but it's coming from initiatives led through Synovus Forward and other internal plans, creating a reallocation and repurpose of back-office dollars to focus on what's most important. And so even though you see this technology investments and a significant allocation up top allocated to transformation, it was all built through reallocation, reinvesting and building efficiencies. This increase in technology spend that you see here really spreads the gamut from new consumer and commercial digital platforms; mass, large allocations to treasury and payment services; enhanced modernized foundations that we've talked about; large allocations; data and analytics; and over 50 large initiatives completed in 2021, while reducing expenses in the overall organization. Growth has become easier now also for organizations that have transformed. After you modernize the foundation, growth was less complicated and most commonly, a matter of licenses and advanced data movement. The value of skill has slowly changed over the years. And when you break down all of these spends in this group, it's really 3 different groups making up this technology spend. This one is the mandatory items that just have to happen. The second is modernizing the bank's foundation. And the third and the largest is really business enablement and preparing for growth. And now that Synovus has rebuilt our foundation, I think the sky's the limit for us. Customer expectations will continue to change, and Synovus will be at the front of it. We're no longer a slow follower. We're leading the change and really building a better bank more quickly than many of our peers. Outside of a massive foundational transformation, we built out many new innovative solutions. And they either reside today in proof of concept or beta or production, but crypto and payments and digital banking as a service, which I've heard about already today, blockchain and stable coin movement, they're all focuses for 2022. Last year, we won numerous innovative and tech transformation awards and we continue to assist and put pressure on the entire banking industry to transform and modernize. The Gonzo award that was mentioned is actually a very funny read, but puts us down as the most transformed innovative tech stack in banking. We're a $57 billion bank in Atlanta. That's exciting to me. Synovus has a very clear vision and clear direction on where we're heading. We have a fine-tuned, mature and innovative road map in front of us. Our infrastructure stack and foundation of our company now matches that of fintech disruptors, but is scaled to power a bank of our size and any level of growth in front of us. We're enabling businesses, preparing for growth and positioning ourselves not only to be looked at as a bank leader in our successes and our excellent customer service, but a true technology leader in the banking sector in the years to come. Thanks for your time today. I'm truly excited about our progress and our future. And I would like to introduce one of my favorite currently employed Synovus CFOs, the Jamie Gregory.

All right. Thanks, everybody, for joining us today, and I get to wrap this up. I'm very excited to be here. I'm excited to see everybody in person. Thanks for coming to Atlanta. Obviously, this market is incredibly important to us. Our largest market, Atlanta, is the third fastest-growing city in the United States from 2015 to 2020. It's an exciting place to be. Braves won the World Series. A lot of good things happening here. So we're excited about it. We're excited you are here today. To those who are streaming today, thanks for joining us online. We appreciate your interest. I just want to walk through the messages you heard today and then put all together into our financial objectives and how we think that will impact the shareholder. So Kevin started us off today about why Synovus, and then Sharon came in right behind and talked about our team, how engaged the team is, how excited the team is about the opportunity in front of us. And that opportunity is contagious, and it's why there's a tailwind to recruiting. People want to be a part of a growth platform, and we see that all the time. Then we heard from our commercial leaders about how we are building complex financial solutions for our clients to help them achieve their financial objectives. And then Bob came in and talked about our credit discipline, credit infrastructure, how we are maintaining credit discipline in a state of strong growth. Liz spoke about the consumer bank, about our efforts there to modernize and enhance our digital offerings and optimize the branch footprint. And then Zack walked through our tech infrastructure, about how we are not only building for the bank of today, but for the bank of tomorrow. So my presentation today is centered around our 3 financial objectives. First, robust earnings growth. We will deploy capital to areas where we have the right to win and towards organic growth. Second, sustainable long-term profitability, ensuring that we have effective balance sheet management practices in place. And third, top quartile operating metrics, return on tangible common equity, return on average assets, tangible efficiency ratio, ensuring that everything we do has profitability in mind. And I'm going to start with robust earnings growth. This is very important to us, and we believe we are well positioned for it. Our markets, they're poised for growth. Our balance sheet, it's built for growth. Our team is motivated by growth. And 2021 was a proof point showing increasing growth momentum. When you look back at last year, we had strong growth in both the balance sheet and the income statement. Loan growth of 8%, led by the wholesale bank, but it was not just one area in the wholesale bank. As Kevin walked through, he has 11 businesses, all 11 businesses grew in 2021. So diverse growth in the wholesale bank led the way. Production, as Kevin Blair mentioned, up over 50% in 2021, but also diverse growth in our fee revenue businesses. He had core banking fees up 20%. We have treasury and payment solutions up 30% and wealth management up 24% in 2021. We expect these trends to continue, and that's what I'll speak to. When we look further out, so beyond what you've already heard from us about 2022, we believe that growth will accelerate. We are forecasting 8% or more loan growth on average in 2023, 2024, again, led by the wholesale bank, but with the tailwind of initiatives like CIB. That strong loan growth, 8% or more on average for the 2 years, will lead to stronger revenue growth, 10% or more revenue growth, 2023, 2024. And where that comes from is the NII from that loan growth, broad-based fee revenue growth and then also the asset sensitivity on our balance sheet. And we are continued -- continue to focus on expense management, expense discipline. We're committed to taking out 1% to 2% of our cost base every year. It's part of our continuous improvement. We're committed to completing our Synovus Forward $175 million objective. We believe that this focus, including the spend for this strong top line growth, will result in 5% or more positive operating leverage on average from 2023 to 2024. When you have top line growth like what we are forecasting, 10% or more, with effective discipline on the expense line, it leads to even stronger PPNR growth. We're forecasting 15% to 20% average PPNR growth in 2023, 2024, 12% to 15% growth in earnings per share. On the loan growth, as I said, this will be a continuation of trends you've seen recently. Kevin Howard discussed this in detail, but we expect loan growth to be led by the wholesale bank: first, by their specialty businesses; second, by middle market; and third, by CRE. Diverse growth within the wholesale bank. And then you can also see the impact of our nascent CIB business. In 2024, we're expecting that to have a meaningful impact on the balance sheet. And you also see the continued growth in community and smaller commercial. What you don't see on this slide is third-party consumer. We are not forecasted to grow our third-party consumer book in this forecast. It's not part of our guidance. However, we will continue to use that as a balance sheet management tool. And we have the capital and the liquidity to support this growth. You all are aware of our capital targets, the range of 9.25% to 9.75% and the fact that we're at the middle of the range today at 9.49%. We -- our intent for capital is to deploy it to our primary objectives of a competitive and sustainable common equity dividend but also for organic growth, and that's what you see in our plan. We are forecasted to deploy the vast majority of the capital generated through strong core earnings to these primary objectives. This will result in a forecasted total payout ratio of 50% or less, and it should result in top-tier growth and tangible book value per share. Our secondary strategies for capital deployment are inorganic strategies that could include nonbank acquisitions if there were something that would provide us a new capability, a technology, a product, a solution for our clients. And then we also use share repurchases to balance our capital. On the liquidity side, we are all aware of the deposit growth for the past 2 years. We've grown deposits by $11 billion in 2 years. This has led to a sharp decline in our loan-to-deposit ratio currently at 80%. And it's also allowed us flexibility in improving our deposit mix. Outside of deposits, we do have significant liquidity available to us. When you add up the liquidity from unencumbered securities, Federal Home Loan Bank advances capacity and cash on the balance sheet, we're at 26% of assets. Now pivot to revenue growth. When you look at 10% or more revenue growth average for 2023, 2024, a lot of that comes from core business expansion. The majority of it comes from core business expansion. 40% to 50% of the revenue growth will come from NII associated with the balance sheet growth we described earlier. 10% to 20% will come from fee income. A lot of that comes from our core businesses, a continuation of broad-based growth, but you'll also see a lot of that from our new initiatives like MAAST and Agent Bank. We also get 35% to 45% of this revenue increase from interest rates. We're forecasting federal funds rate to end 2024 at 2.25%, and we're forecasting U.S. treasury -- the 5-year treasury to end 2024 at 2.3%. When you think about the drivers behind this growth, they're diverse. But first, it's our markets. And specifically, it's our larger MSAs that are seeing rapid growth. We expect that to continue over the forecast period. Atlanta, Orlando, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale. All of these markets are seeing strong in-migration, and we expect that to continue. We think that's a tailwind to growth. We think we're well positioned there with both people and brand to win. We also have high-growth businesses. We've spoken about specialty lending, Kevin walked through that. Bob talked about the remarkable credit experience in specialty lending. We're forecasting that to grow from $10 billion to $13 billion in 2024, a nice tailwind to growth. Katherine walked through treasury and payment solutions, she's forecasting $90 million in revenue in 2024, just strong continuation of growth in that business as they roll out new products, new solutions, and we leverage analytics to get deeper with our clients. And then we have our growth investments. We have CIB, software solutions like MAAST. These will all be tailwinds to revenue growth. But specifically on these new initiatives, I wanted to dive into the financial impact because they are significant in 2024. We're forecasting these new initiatives to add $3 billion or more to the balance sheet in 2024. This will be led by CIB and the restaurant vertical. $120 million or more in revenue from these initiatives. 2/3 of that is NII with the loan growth, 1/3 is fee revenue. And that fee revenue will be led by MAAST and Agent Bank. All of this will result in $70 million or more in PPNR in 2024. So the growth initiatives are very powerful when you look at our income statement out in 2023 and 2024: 10% or more revenue growth with expense discipline leading to 5% or more positive operating leverage; 15% to 20% average growth in PPNR; ending up with 12% to 15% EPS growth. A few assumptions that are embedded in that are the allowance, returns to day 1 levels, CECL day 1 levels; payout ratio, as I mentioned, 50% or less; and a stable effective tax rate. While we are excited about the growth opportunity in front of us, we are highly committed to sustainable, long-term profitability. And what we mean by that is ensuring that what we put on the balance sheet, we are managing the income statement volatility of the balance sheet exposures. So first, NII sensitivity. We leverage -- we have a derivatives hedging program that we use to hedge interest rate sensitivity. And we saw that protect us in the declining rate environment through the pandemic. It helped lead to revenue stability. Today, we're asset sensitive. We expect rates to rise, we're positioned for rates to rise, and our asset sensitivity only increases through time. It increases through time because we have fixed rate assets like our securities portfolio and fixed rate mortgages that will reprice over time. We have our hedges will mature and roll off. So our sensitivity just increases as we go through time. And Bob and Kevin walked through the credit exposure. We have remixed the balance sheet. We have changed our underwriting standards over the past decade, and we are firmly confident in our credit book. As a matter of fact, when we look at our forecasted balance sheet, we believe that the balance sheet will be less risky in the future than it is today. And last, our third financial objective is top quartile operating metrics. With our commitment to growth, our commitment to sustainable long-term profitability, all of these come with top quartile operating metrics in mind. When you look at our business strategies, our financial objectives are distilled down to the business level in all of them. In the consumer bank, Liz spoke to how we are enhancing our digital offerings, how we're modernizing our branch footprint. That success there will enhance our operating metrics, enhance our profitability. Kevin Howard spoke in the wholesale bank about how they are growing the balance sheet with deeper relationships in capital markets and treasury and payment solutions partnerships. Success there will enhance our profitability. Wayne spoke about how in the community bank, we're leveraging advanced cash flow analytics to know our customers better to get deeper in their relationships, which will enhance our profitability. Bart spoke about growing assets under management and enhancing the partnership across retail, commercial, wholesale to get deeper with those relationships. That will enhance our profitability, enhance these key operating metrics. In 2024, we're forecasting a return on tangible common equity of 16% to 17%, we're forecasting a return on average assets of 1.3% to 1.4%, and we're forecasting a tangible efficiency ratio of 50%. This embeds all of the growth and the strategies you've heard from everybody here today, all of these strategies where we believe we have the right to win to serve our clients better. And this focus on top quartile operating metrics is expected, we believe, will drive shareholder return. If you look in 2016, we were middle of the pack in these operating metrics. And we remain focused on improvement, improving our returns, improving our efficiency, improving our profitability, and we were successful. If you look at 2021, we are top quartile on these metrics. We believe that helped lead to shareholder returns. We outperformed the peer median over the past 5 years by 4%. We outperformed the peer median over the past 3 years by 25%. And when we look forward, we believe that sustainable long-term profitability, top quartile operating metrics but layered in with strong growth, we believe that, that will lead to the next leg of shareholder returns.

We're going to start here in the audience with Steven in the front row.

So first -- I had 2 questions actually. On technology, so following up on the client and infrastructure journey, Zack, you said that you're no longer a fast follower, you're now leading, on par with fintechs. Could you give us some tangible examples of what you are now providing from a product, a solution standpoint, experience standpoint that other banks are not offering?

Yes. No. Great question, Steven. So I think there's 2 pieces of that puzzle. I think the first piece is I'm going to say, lift up the bank, rebuild the foundation, put the bank back on it. So it will put you in a position to innovate. From an example standpoint, I would say everything you've heard about today in 2022, it should be easier for us to implement. Plug-and-play becomes something much less impactful than it was at one time. Everything is cloud-based. You authenticate in the cloud. Your network goes straight there. So you don't have these legacy kind of connected back into the on-prem data center build-out. So it's less about today what we've offered different, and it's more about how quickly we can offer things in the future. Does that help?

Yes. So second question. So Kevin, it was said a couple of times today. You're an ideal size, right? You're big enough to competing against small banks. You're more nimble than the larger banks. There's a substantial growth opportunity ahead, Jamie just covered that pretty nicely. Can you say to the markets today that this is a pure-play organic growth story? Or is M&A still -- bank M&A, a key part of the strategy?

Absolutely, I can say that. We believe that the best investment that we can make today is in Synovus, our organic growth that we have in our businesses. And quite frankly, don't believe that going out and doing whole bank M&A is a good alternative. I think people underestimate the risk around the revenue runoff and some of the transition and talent and cultural elements that exist with a large bank merger. So for us, part of the plan, starting with Synovus Forward, was establishing certain initiatives and principles that would allow us to achieve this sort of elevated growth profile that could result in top quartile performance, but doing it organically. So we wholeheartedly agree with that statement. Chris?

Kevin, Jamie articulated really well the percentage of revenue growth that comes from higher interest rates. If the Fed were to be slower to raise interest rates, how do you pivot there and to kind of make up that gap?

Well, it's a good question. I still think -- I talk to Jamie all the time about conservatism and interest rates. What we didn't want to share with you today is a plan that's predicated on rates driving our growth. And I think you saw on his slides, it represents a smaller percentage of future growth than maybe what you would expect. The thing that we've created, Chris, with Synovus Forward is being able to adapt quickly to the environment. So if rates are not rising at a pace that we would expect, you heard Jamie talk about a 5% positive operating leverage, we've got to continue to look at both sides of the equation, whether that's additional efficiency opportunities or whether it's leaning in, in some of these other businesses, what Jamie said in our assumptions is as we look out the next 3 years to generate these numbers, it's what we have in production today. It's what we're working on today. There are ideas and things that we're formulating. You heard Liz talk about the art of possible, the things that we're continuing to work on. We need to come out in 2022 and 2023 with new ideas that are going to generate new sources of revenue. And I think those are the type of initiatives that will allow us to offset or mitigate any impact that we see with lower interest rates or, more importantly, I think we're more concerned about a flat yield curve than we are about the front end of the curve. I think that we all somewhat have consistency around the front end of the curve, it's the flatness of the curve. But we have to be mindful that the plan is not going to play out as we intended. And every day, we're going to have to recalibrate and come up with new ideas and be more efficient in other areas. This is a living, breathing plan that we'll have to adapt to. [ John ]? Can you get back there and then we'll come to you next? [ Brian ]?

And then just quickly, conversely, on that question, if you get rate hikes that exceed expectations because it sure seems like some estimates are implying higher than what you're looking for. Does the positive operating leverage potential widen from there? Do you -- or do you think you're going to put that into the bank and it remains around that targeted level?

I'll start, and Jamie, you can answer the forecast. I think it's a little bit of both, [ John ]. I think if we saw that revenue was rising at a faster clip because of the asset sensitivity and rates moving, I believe you've got to look at what are those next decisions that you basically said are next in line to make an investment. And if those have a good ROI, then we would move forward with it. But what it wouldn't do for us is say, "Hey, we have all this extra money. Now let's go invest in things that have a 3-year earn back. " It doesn't change our filter on how we think about investing because if you're doing something that has a 3-year earn back, I'm not sure that's the best way to use our capital. But conversely, if we're making a little extra money, one place we want to put it back into, and I'll hark back to what Sharon said earlier today, we've got to invest in our people. And sometimes we forget about that. It's not just about the next product or the next technology. We've got to deploy some of that back into our teams to make sure we're developing, advancing their careers and obviously compensating them in a way that is going to keep them here at Synovus.

The only thing I would add, John, on that is when you look at that scenario, a couple of uncertainties. So embedded in our forecast is approximately a 25% deposit beta, so over this few year period. I would say in that scenario, that's uncertain. I'm not sure how that would exactly play out. And so the repricing of deposits, you could argue it could be more, it could be less. The second thing would be is, is there a belief that the Fed policy is right? And is it -- could it lead to the next correction? And so we're always looking 3 years forward. We're always looking at the horizon and thinking through, really, how does it impact not just the current year income statement but long-term growth prospects.

Got it. And then a follow-up might be for you, Jamie or Zack. Just in terms of the cost of the modernization program, or the effort, $175 million, can you just talk about the cadence of that? What's the duration of the project? Any updated expectation there? And I know you mentioned 2 vendors, is Nymbus one? And then can you disclose who the other vendor is?

Yes, absolutely. So this is -- this journey has been, again, kind of a self-funded journey as we've gone through it. And so -- let me think about this. So for the next 2 years, we will continue to modernize to get to where we're going. I don't think there's large cost in that, and let me tell you why. We're following depreciation cycles. We're following server in the life. And so for instance, as things begin to fall off, that's the point where we modernize along the way. So you're not going to see massive upticks and this foundation or modernization continue. On the core side, specifically, it's pretty similar. Like when you think about MAAST, MAAST does reside on Nymbus. That's one of the cores. And it's a brand-new product and vertical, right? I think that you'll continue to see core modernization products stood up next to the entire banking core and not a rip and replace yet. I think that rip and replace will come later. FIS also has a modern core that we're looking at as well as Nymbus. But I think along the way, you have -- you've got to move at the product level. And then if your contracts are right, so for instance, if you're a per customer licensing model on the left side in the legacy core and a per customer licensing model on the right side, and you move product verticals out, in theory, minus a little bit of overlap, you'll reduce costs on the left, increase them on the right. And on the right side, it will be a more efficient cost structure.

And I think just on that point, this distributive core principle that Zack's talking about. What you won't see in the next 3 years, as he's mentioned, is a big $175 million expense. Zack is slowly working down expenses in operations in other areas to put more funding in tech and innovation so that our run rate of technology, although it will start to go up, it won't be a big onetime expense that we incur.

I guess, Kevin, maybe to start with a big picture question. You laid out tons of initiatives today, growth on top of the existing businesses, new initiatives. And I was hoping you could just spend a minute or two just talking about where do you feel you have the greatest degree of confidence in terms of your ability to execute on these things. And as you mapped out these plans, where do you think you're stretching a little bit and the need for execution could potentially be higher? And I have a follow-up.

Yes, it's a really good question, Ryan, because what I would tell you, and Steve and I had this discussion after the earnings call, when I got the question what I'm most excited about, what I'm most excited about is that we have a lot of options to generate growth in this company. And we have a lot of areas in the bank that are performing at a very high level. You've heard from most of that today, so I won't reiterate all of that. But the growth that Kevin Howard was able to build in wholesale banking this past year, $2.9 billion of growth, it's pretty phenomenal, given that the market wasn't constructive for the first half of the year. You look at our wealth income that Bart is setting up here today, 24% growth in our wealth income despite AUM only being up 9%. We're bringing in a lot of new clients, and we're improving our margins. Treasury up 34% year-over-year. So we have a lot of areas that are performing, and I feel very confident with the momentum that we have there. When you start looking at new businesses, there's a little bit of uncertainty and probably a lower probability for the same reasons you guys were asking the questions about MAAST. I mean we're entering areas that it's not something we've been doing for 100 years. And so we need to make sure that on those big initiatives -- and when we talk about strategic initiatives, we don't have the opportunity to miss on 2 or 3 of these. In our size, at $57 billion, we can't just write off big investments. So we need to make sure that when we choose a strategic investment, that we're putting the foundation in place to be largely successful at delivering on that. And so what you'll hear from us and the reason it sounds like a lot today, but we're really ring-fencing where are those areas that we have to spend our time, resources and attention, and we're going to deemphasize other areas so that we can make sure that we don't fail because we didn't put the energy, the resources and capital into those businesses. So long-winded answer and probably not a very good answer, but I really feel confident across the board, and the fact that we have so many levers to pull is what gives me confidence in our future.

So maybe as a follow-up to the question that Steve Alexopoulos had asked before. So clearly, there's a lot of organic opportunities. Jamie said there could be some nonbank. And sort of a 2-part question. I'm curious why on the Corporate Investment Bank, you chose to go about it organically. We've obviously seen a lot of regional banks attempt to do small tuck-in acquisitions to build it. So curious about the thought process there. And then second, Jamie said you're not assuming any third-party purchases. We've obviously seen a big move by a lot of regional banks to acquire platforms that would originate those type of loans. And if I think about most of the initiatives today, they're mostly geared towards the wholesale side, but is that something that could be of interest to the bank down the road to generate more customer acquisition on the consumer side?

Yes. So on the CIB answer is I believe that you can attract teams of bankers, as we said earlier, to provide coverage where you don't have to go and pay a premium to go out and buy a company. Now down the road, if we were to get more heavily involved in things like M&A, it would make sense to go look at a boutique firm or someone that would be more of a turnkey, look at that from the solutions and product side. But when I think about coverage bankers that are in CIB from these regional and super regional banks, I'd rather attract those teams to our bank and then build capabilities around them, whether that be organic or whether we purchase it. I'll start with third party. I'll let Jamie add. Look, the reason that I think he was so emphatic on the fact that we're not planning on that is that we have such good organic growth in commercial and other areas. And we started the presentation with repositioned for advantage by saying we can focus on those areas where we think we have the right to win. Today, we don't believe that we have a platform or the right to win in a national consumer lending platform and to go out and buy one and to compete with the others that are doing it in a marketplace that those margins are compressing every day because there's more and more entrants into that point-of-sale model. So we believe instead of going out and purchasing our own platform and trying to compete, we'll continue to look at strategic purchases on the consumer loan side from a balance sheet diversification. But ultimately, we look at that as a risk return trade-off. How do you -- purchasing those loans or having a forward flow arrangement, can we earn just as much profitability from doing that as we would going out and buying a company and having to compete in that point-of-sale market. Sorry, Jennifer, you're next.

You talked about stablecoin and going in on a consortium with others on that. Why not go it alone? And does that really dilute your ultimate market opportunity?

Jared, I'll let you in. Zack, you take that.

So I have to -- 2 things. Number one, we're in that consortium now, but we've been playing in this space since late '18, just checking out everything, doing blockchain systems internally from a reward standpoint, minting coins just to see what happens, right? And so I think the consortium component was more exciting to me because you had similar people with a like mind all together to test this out and see how it goes. We have one of the lead developers on that consortium is here with us today. He is building and adjusting the open source on a daily standpoint. I think it's going to be hard in the future for any one bank to win in this space, and you've got to be in a consortium. Just an opinion, that's my thought.

Yes. Well, look, I'll add. I mean I think the issue with stablecoin today is not the fact that there are cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology, is that you don't have counterparties and folks that will accept that in terms of payment. So for us, the partnership is less about losing the monetization of that process. It's about having peer banks with FDIC deposits behind it that will allow us to transact with them, move money around and then you can build a platform for which customers will feel comfortable about moving their money. Not unlike Visa and Mastercard in the yesteryear when they started creating those rails with banks.

And just sort of a follow-up, I guess. You hired a lot of technologists. You've talked about bringing more people on board. How hard is that? What's the -- how hard is that to get somebody to come to a bank that has that background? And what's your -- what are you offering, I guess, to get them to come here versus, say, a technology company?

Yes, I've got -- it's very hard. I got to convince them with my awesomeness. I mean I think at the end of the day, like really in this world, though, that technologists want to work in a world where they're going to do something cool, they're going to be excited about it, they want to be paid fairly and they want to be surrounded by other great technologists, right? And I think when you build that platform, and again, in pandemic world, it's a little bit different, but here in Atlanta in a big hub, where there's technologists everywhere wanting to be a part of it. And we're not hiring new technologists to work on legacy programs and protocols, right? We're hiring new technology to fill the gaps and the skill sets we need. So most commonly, they're excited about it.

Jennifer had a question up here. And then Cal, I'll go to online after Jennifer and then we'll circle around.

It sounds like from your presentation, about 2/3 of your loan growth is going to come from the wholesale piece of the company. Does that assume -- so Kevin, you're going to continue to work really hard. Does that assume any other lending specialties are added in the next 2 or 3 years?

It doesn't. And Kevin and I just had this conversation last week where we have a wholesale strategy council where we meet frequently to talk about what are we seeing in the marketplace, what new opportunities are arising based on industry specialties, teams that are being made available. What Kevin rolled out today was really restaurant services and a white label leasing product was really the new initiatives that he had under his leadership. But that's the point that I made earlier, we have to sit down and look for new opportunities that could serve as a mitigant to headwinds that we have, or more importantly, to serve as a tailwind to drive even faster growth over the next 3 years.

My second question is on your markets. One of your slides, you had Atlanta, Lauderdale, Tampa and Orlando. One -- interestingly, one of them that was not mentioned was Nashville, which is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. So are you underrepresented there? What -- how do you think about that market?

Yes. Look, Nashville is a great market. But part of the discussion that we have internally, we serve 55 markets and our level of density in each market is different. And so we don't have a one-size-fits-all model. And although the economic growth is strong in Nashville, we have a very low market share with 9 branch locations and roughly 30 basis points of market share. So we're not a mass market brand in Nashville. So what will -- where we go to market in Nashville is with specialty. We have a very strong mortgage team that sits there, we have a middle market team that's there and a private wealth team that supports that. So what we're going to do going forward with our geographic model is build out a structure where we can be successful in each of the markets that we serve and not try to put a one-size-fits-all where we're adding branches because the reality is, if we started adding branches today in Nashville, we'd be late to the party. Let's do one online, and then we'll get Brady in the back.

We've got one for Bart. Bart, Synovus Family Office has been a growth driver for you. What has been the key ingredient to success in this group?

Well, I appreciate the question. It's a -- I think that the family office at Synovus is a real competitive differentiator for Synovus, great team, great business and really has had a great 2021, both in terms of assets under management. As I mentioned on video, new customer origination, revenue. We really had a good year. We got a lot of momentum going into 2022. We've got a very experienced team, long experience, great depth of expertise. The person running the business, Katherine Dunlevie, is a great leader, very energetic, very smart. Where she has positioned the business is where I think we should be. A lot of our competitors lead with financial or money management. They really try to lead with that with clients and prospects. We think money management is essential, and we're good at it, and we do a really good job. We do a lot in terms of alternatives. We do a lot in terms of direct investment in private companies. But the real strategy is to focus on family enterprise and focusing on family dynamics, and we really do a lot to work with families on governance. How do we pass the values of the grandparents and the parents down to the grandchildren and the children? How do we handle conflict resolution? What do we do in terms of planning, whether it be estate planning, financial planning, strategic planning, all sides. Those are the things we really put the emphasis on because we really think that drives the business. And we know we've got to do -- we've got -- it's a given. We've got to produce results, which we do very competitive in investment management. But we really focus on those family dynamics. That's been very successful for us. As I mentioned, we -- on the video, we've actually doubled the amount of new clients that we've had in any previous year in 2021. One of the big opportunities that we see right now, there's a demographic of privately held businesses where a lot of people are reaching the age in these private business, a lot of you in the room know this, where they're at a point they're probably thinking of retirement or selling just because of the baby boomer generation and that. At the same time, money going out of the bond market, going into private equity is driving very high multiples. And what we're seeing today is a lot of privately held companies are getting liquidity events, and we see that sustaining. And it's really been driven even faster by the fact that anticipated tax increases in the future, I think most people think we're going to be looking at higher tax rate. So that's been a huge opportunity for the Family Office, and we are positioned to take advantage of that. And I think we've not only coming out with a lot of growth in 2021, but a ton of momentum going into 2022 and beyond.

Thank you, Bart. And I'll add just one quick point to that. Bart said it in the video, but what's, I think, unique about our value proposition, other than the approach that Bart laid out, is we go to market as a team. A lot of those 12 families that we onboarded came as referrals from our community bank or wholesale bank. And what I've seen with other institutions that have a family office, they're usually on an island. And they're not talking and working seamlessly across the lines of business. And our teams being more seamless at how we deliver those services. Brady?

Yes. So there's been a lot of talk about growth today. $10 billion in loan growth is going to be great to see from you guys. How do you think about growth in the asset base? It seems like you have a lot of liquid assets that could kind of self-fund that growth. I'm just wondering, as the Street thinks about 1 3 to 1 4 from an ROA point of view, -- what -- how do we think about that?

Yes. I mean, Brady, you're right. The liquidity, we're very well positioned for that with what we have on the balance sheet. On the asset side, we're not really forecasting significant growth in the securities portfolio as a percent of assets. But we plan to leverage the liquidity we have and then future deposit growth. I mean this year, we're not really forecasting a lot of deposit growth because we think we'll grow core customer deposits but then we continue to optimize the mix and run [ all flight] broker deposits. And so we think that we have the balance sheet to support it. So a short answer of total assets might not increase as fast as total loans because we have the liquidity on balance sheet.

And then as you look at this growth, it feels like you have the capital or you're going to generate the capital internally to self-fund all this. But is there a scenario where you could need some external capital over the next few years?

Our plan does have the capital within our current range, and the range could evolve, right? We were at 9% target pre-pandemic, and then nothing has changed in our outlook of loans. As a matter of fact, as we said, we think the loan portfolio will be less risky in the future than it is today on a percentage basis. So capital degradation in a severe adverse scenario would be less in the future than where it is today. So -- but even if you hold our target range where it is today, we have sufficient capital for the growth we've laid out. And you could even include some share repurchase in there to help be measured in your capital and not just be building. But we'll see when we get there. I mean we've been comfortable at lower ratios before. It's not our plan to adjust our targets. We feel good about where they are. But that's our plan on capital. We think there's enough. I would love to have that problem. I would love to see client growth beyond $10 billion and -- because it's all accretive. If you look at the marginal returns to this growth, you're talking mid- to high-teens ROA, even higher. As Tom builds his business and it gets deeper relationships and more fee revenue, the return on equity is even stronger. We're excited about that growth, and I would love to have the debate around how to -- what we do, how do we get the capital for it.

Okay. We have time for 2 more questions. So EB and Brad.

Jamie, just to follow up on Brady's question about asset size. You outlined a 1 3 to 1 4 ROA today and a lot of great things. It should all be additive to ROA. You guys were doing essentially a 1 30 ROA in 2018. Just kind of curious, how should we think about the plan you laid out today? Do you think you're conservative? Do you think there's upside there? Or do I need to think about that ROA as maybe the bank running less hot or less levered and a more -- a less risky return on average assets in the future?

Yes. When I look at the ROA compared to earlier times, like you describe, the delta between what we are guiding to in prior years is really an NII, like your -- the point you're getting to. And so I mean, our balance sheet, again, will be a little bit less risky. It's likely that the spreads will be a little bit tighter. That's embedded in this outlook. And so I would say when we think about the ROA, that's going to be the difference to prior years, but then we've offset it with efficiency efforts. We've offset it with fee revenue growth. And so that's the kind of mix. I mean we obviously believe it's achievable. These are our targets. We think that the plan we have is good. Hopefully, what you've seen from this leadership team is that as the environment evolves, we will evolve with it. And so I guess that's what I would say to that.

EB?

Just one follow-up question around deposits. I'm not sure if you had outlined what your assumption was for the loan-to-deposit ratio. Where is that going? And just talk to us in terms of faster rate hikes, faster QT, what does that mean? Is there a certain level of subset in the customer base that may be more sensitive to higher rates sooner in the cycle than what we saw last time?

Yes. So when you think about loan-to-deposit ratio, we would obviously have that increasing through this forecast fee with the strong loan growth. Pre-pandemic, we were high 90s. With this scenario, we're low to mid-90s on loan-to-deposit ratio. The mix today is actually stronger than it was pre-FCB, like when we think about the quality of our deposit franchise. And so we believe that gives us flexibility. And so it gives us flexibility on the deposit side. You can always raise some of the higher cost deposits if you need to. But we believe that our mix has us well positioned as far as deposit cost and deposit betas. Being in the low 90s, we were comfortable higher than that pre-pandemic. As we think about if there is QT and we have deposits decline or just stop growing, we think that the balance sheet is prepared for that. We mentioned the 26% available liquidity. There's a lot of liquidity outside of deposits that's kind of at our fingertips. And so we think those are all tailwinds to managing deposit costs. And so deposit costs in the mid-20s, we think, makes sense through the cycle. Obviously, we would expect betas to be very low here at the beginning and then increase as you go through. And as we think about it, we think about it as kind of a stairstep as you go through the rising rate environment.

And Ebrahim, I'd add, it was interesting to me when I was listening to the presentations again today, you heard Kevin talk about their growth. Base target 50% deposit growth for every dollar loan growth. Tom is probably in the 30% range. When you think about MAAST, Wayne talked about being able to bring depository services on the platform. So most of our initiatives are not just asset generators. It will come with some level of liabilities to join along with the assets. And that's what gets me excited. We can't build a one-sided model that just focus on asset generation because we're all going to be in a position in the near future and nobody knows when that is, when liquidity is going to return to a more normalized level. Okay. Cal, is that?

That's it.

Okay. Well, I'll -- you guys there, and I'll wrap us up. Thank you. So as my peers step down, that's a little over 4 hours, so I appreciate your perseverance making it through that. We've shared a lot with you. We try to put a lot of content in there. And you can see from our team that they are extremely passionate. And I want to thank all of our leadership team today, for being excellent presenters, Zack, but also for what you've done for our company to this point and what we'll do when we leave the room today because for us, this is cathartic. We've been wanting to share a lot of this, and now we get to go out and execute on a lot of these strategies. I realized this morning, I was remiss in recognizing some of our distinguished guests that are with us today, and that's not just you, but we had some of our Board of Directors with us this morning. Kessel Stelling, our Chairman, who doesn't really need an introduction, but Kessel, thank you for joining us today. Tim Bentsen, who's the Chair of our Compensation and Human Capital Committee. Tim, thank you for joining us. And Betsy Camp has been with us for most of the morning, but she had to step out for another Board meeting. She is our Independent Lead Director. So it's so nice to have our Board with us today. They are such a big support and a lot of the things that we are doing and are helping us not only from an input perspective, but also to pressure test a lot of our initiatives that we're rolling out. The one thing I want to hit on before I let us adjourn for the day is you heard Liz talk about Synovus and get there. You heard many of our presenters. As we're transforming the bank, what we've learned is that our customers want more. They want more than just friendly and courteous service. They want advice. And so we're evolving our brand to match our strategic plan. For the last 5 years, Synovus has been the bank of here. And that was so important as we unified the brand and reemphasized our commitment into those communities that we've strengthened and helped for so many years. But I think what our customers are telling us, just being present isn't enough. We actually have to help them. We have to provide a level of energetic banking, one that's built around advice and consultation and one that's proactive. So our new brand, and you'll start to see commercials in the near future, is Synovus get there. We are here to help our customers get where they want to be. Getting there is more important to them than the level of service that they have received to this point. So our purpose is helping people achieve their full potential. And we'll bring that purpose to life through our new brand. So as we end today, I thought about some of my favorite quotes, and I thought of the one that I use and maybe my father used with me the most, which said, "Opportunity is missed by most people because it's dressed in overalls and looks a lot like work." That's Thomas Edison. And so today, as we conclude, it's exciting to talk about the opportunity in front of us. But don't be mistaken that we understand the hard work and dedication that's in front of us and the commitment to be able to deliver on this opportunity. I think about our core franchise. What we're doing today based on this strong client loyalty, based on a team member base that is ultimately engaged at the highest levels, delivering growth in the current period in 2021 and 2022, but then I add in all of these investments that we're making, highly probabilistic investments that we're very confident in, and I'm sure, I am confident, I've never been more confident that we can deliver the elevated growth profile that Jamie shared with you. And ultimately, we can be up here every 3 years, because that's our commitment, we'll come back in an Investor Day every 3 years and share with you not only what we've done to achieve that top quartile performance, but what we're going to do in the next 3 years to maintain it. So thank you for your time today. Thanks for those of you that have joined us in person. Those that are on the virtual cast, thank you for being with us for 4 hours. I hope everyone has a great rest of your week, and I truly appreciate you being here today and for your interest. Thank you.