Truist Financial Corporation (TFC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning to those in New York, and good afternoon to those throughout Europe. I am Jason Goldberg, and I cover the U.S. large-cap bank stocks here at Barclays. Welcome to our Annual Americas Select Franchise Conference. This is a conference I've been associated with for 20-or-so years. And it's kind of blossomed from what used to be many, many years ago, 4 New York Brits wanting to go -- having an excuse to go to London to play golf to a kind of a full-fledged conference. As you know, each year, we like to host this event in London to give the -- basically the European investor base access to management. Unfortunately, for the second year in a row, we're doing this virtually, but highly confident at this point, we'll be live in person in London in May 2022. We're very pleased to have kicking off the bank portion of this morning, and we have a slew of banks presenting throughout the morning. I'm very pleased to have Truist Financial, which plays in many, many aspects of the financial services industry. From Truist, pleased to have Daryl Bible, the Chief Financial Officer. Daryl has been a long-standing supporter of this event. In fact, I think of the top 20 banks in the United States, Daryl was also the longest-serving CFO, really, kind of coming -- becoming CFO and coming to Truist towards the end of the financial crisis, where it came through the financial crisis relatively unscathed. And since then has really blossomed, obviously, up until a few years ago, where it basically doubled it's size with its mergers of equal of BB&T and SunTrust to form Truist. I'll end it there and turn it over to Daryl.

Thank you, Jason, and good afternoon or good morning, everybody, depending on your time zone. I'm excited here today to talk about Truist. We have a lot going on at Truist. We love coming to your conference, Jason. We love talking to the European investor base. They're very important to us. And we're just excited to just tell our story today. So if you want to start on Slide 4, for those of you who may not know our company well, we start our presentations with a culture slide. This reflects our purpose to inspire and build better lives and communities. The purpose has resonated with our teammates and drives our actions at Truist. Our mission statements around our responsibilities to our clients, teammates and stakeholders. And these commitments were very much part of our decision-making during the pandemic. Our value statements revolve around trustworthiness, caring, working as one team, success for clients and thereby, for all of us and happiness, creating a positive impact in every interaction. We believe culture is the primary determinant of a long-term success because it brings us together around our shared purpose. Truist was formed by the merger of equals between BB&T and SunTrust in December of '19, 2 high-performing organizations with long histories. The merger creates amazing synergies and opportunities at a time when financial service is changing fast. Across the board, Truist is the 6th largest commercial bank in the U.S. in a strong position to grow and achieve top profitability among our peers. Truist has a unique mix and national businesses, including the world's seventh largest insurance broker and J.D. Power award-winning digital products and platforms. And our banking regions operate in 7 of the 10 fastest-growing metropolitan markets in the country. I will focus on a couple of these key businesses later in my presentation. Over the last 5 years, the banking landscape has experienced significant transformation in terms of footprint and scale. As you can see here, we believe Truist is uniquely positioned relative to our peers. Today, our footprint covers many of the fastest-growing markets in the U.S., and we have unmatched scale in those markets. We believe that this provides a strong foundation for future growth, achieving our medium-term performance targets and delivering value to our stakeholders. Both BB&T and SunTrust had strong lending and fee income diversification. But together, we are much better because we are -- have very little overlap in our business models. In lending, we're approximately 60% commercial as BB&T focused on smaller community banking clients and SunTrust focused on larger clients. While recent trends in loan growth for the industry and Truist are slower, we have a diverse portfolio and take a through-the-cycle view of credit with low concentration risk and a mixture of assets that produce a strong margin. Fee income is definitely a strength of our company. With the seventh largest insurance broker in the world, this business is not dependent on interest rates or credit cycles or economic cycles and was stable even during the global financial crisis. Investment banking and trading business is diverse and bring 7 verticals, providing high level of expertise for our clients. Residential mortgage is a large business coming off a record performance year that provides diversification during periods of low interest rates. Wealth management is a strong segment, providing a more stable income stream. Truist is a preferred place to work, and we are adding talent in insurance, investment banking, technology and wealth. We are also adding bolt-on strategic deals in fee income, particularly in insurance, when it makes sense and is accretive compared to our share buyback. This slide, our insurance brokerage, which has no exposure to underwriting risk. It is unique advantaged, as I have discussed and has no other large bank has. Truist Insurance Holdings operates a unique national platform and is diversified within itself with 51% wholesale and 45% retail. The business enjoyed 6.4% organic growth in the first quarter this year and increased about 12% total. First quarter '21 was a record quarter. New business growth was strong, up 12.8%, so this business is performing very well. Our insurance business continues to drive strong revenue growth ahead of the industry. 2020 slowed because of the pandemic-driven recession, but was still positive, which we have seen in this business in past recessions. EBITDA margins have steadily expanded in recent years with improving business mix, a firmer pricing market and effective implementation of an efficiency program at Truist Insurance that has been very successful. These factors also continue to lead a best-in-class organic growth rate, driven by strong new business development, which I discussed earlier, and strong client retention, which is above 90% for retail and about 85% wholesale, both very strong levels. Finally, we continue to seek strategic bolt-on acquisitions to further grow the business from its current level, about 10% revenues into the mid-teens as a percentage of revenues. Our investment banking and trading platform is an efficient, diverse platform, offering expertise in 7 verticals to support our clients. Truist Securities is focused on being the leading corporate and investment banking firm targeting the mid-cap space. We continue to add resources to grow our business and support more large and mid-cap clients. Specifically, our goals are to drive strategic relationships, engage and lead advisory banks to clients, earn mandates and capital market transactions, optimize share of wallet and return on capital and position the bank to earn additional earn wallet. Like insurance, Truist Securities has a national presence and had a record year in 2020 and a record first quarter. We continue to have opportunities to hire talent from larger banks and believe this business has a great future. Truist has been widely recognized recently as we work to achieve our purpose and mission. For our clients, J.D. Power has recognized we have 2 top digital client products. For teammates, we continue to win awards for diversity and inclusion in the workplace. For our communities, we have also received recognitions for supplier diversity, supporting women and minority-owned businesses and a key component of our purpose. Completed a few years ago, a Truist leadership institute remains a competitive advantage for us, offering unique leadership training for our teammates, clients and potential clients. And also contributes to the community support as we offer leadership training for educators. During the pandemic, we offered online training and support to teammates, clients and frontline medical workers and others. Highly seasoned executive leadership team has an average tenure of 24 years. Truist has a risk balance, pay-for-performance structure that's aligned with shareholder interest. Compensation includes base salary plus annual and long-term incentives, annual incentives tied to EPS, relative return on assets and our strategic objectives. Long-term incentive is dependent on a 3-year return on common equity and return on tangible common equity and performance relative to peers and also includes minimal performance hurdles. At Truist, our purpose is to inspire and build better lives and communities. For us, the purpose is more than words on a page. It's something we live out and do each day. When we say better lives in communities, we're talking about our clients, teammates and stakeholders. For instance, we're delivering on our $60 billion community benefits plan, which supports low and moderate-income communities, and we are the sixth largest lender in the latest round of PPP loans. We also have unwavering commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. As you can see, we recently signed a Hispanic promise and received 100% score on the Corporate Equality Index, and we are very proud of that. Our corporate purpose influences everything we do, including commitment to ESG. ESG is one of Truist's top 10 enterprise strategic priorities. This slide highlights some of the top 2020 ESG accomplishments. We have performed 1,700 community service projects through the Lighthouse Project. Truist received the highest possible overall rating of outstanding from the FDIC for our most recent CRA exam period. We will be releasing our 2020 CSR report at the end of July. This report will include many items on this slide. You will notice we have a lot of climate projects on here. This is really important to us, given how critical it is for everyone around the globe to take action on this collectively, including Truist and our peers. In terms of human capital and DEI, we also will be disclosing our EEO 1 data or race and gender and job category level of the workforce for the first time. It will be in our CSR report. We continue to work on increasing diversity at Truist, and we have goals set to do so. And while we didn't separate our social category on here, that's not because we've overlooked it. As you saw on the previous slide, our community involvement and societal contributions are central to Truist purpose, to inspire and build better lives and communities. Overall, we really are looking forward to what's ahead for ESG. We are increasingly seeing commercial opportunities to seize related to ESG, whether it be solar funding, clean energy financing, affordable housing units backed by loans, Truist taking ESG data company public or a similar company or advising on an acquisition of a wind farm by an oil and gas company. Again, all those transactions are hypothetical, just examples. Business opportunities ahead for ESG are exciting, and we are committed to making them an important part of our growth strategy in the years ahead. We put together 2 really strong companies with our merger of equals, and it's playing out in performance results. On an adjusted basis, we deliver return on tangible common equity at the high end of our peer group last quarter as we continue to have excellent credit quality. Deposit inflows continue to pressure margins, but strong performance in our fee businesses, like investment banking and insurance, have helped offset pressures on net interest income. This slide shows why we are taking the best-of-both approach to integrate our heritage companies. Prior to the merger, heritage BB&T invested primarily in back-end systems and data centers while SunTrust invested more in front-end applications, making our companies highly complementary. By bringing our companies together, each company's investments and strengths benefit the other and will put Truist ahead of its peers by the time the integration is complete. This slide shows key milestones along the merger and journey. While the core banking conversion won't be completed until first quarter of '22, we have already made a lot of progress. We have successfully combined our securities businesses and our wealth brokerage and trust areas. We're in the middle of our retail mortgage origination migration and continue to consolidate our branches. The important takeaway here is that we are reducing risk each and every day. Every time we complete a conversion, there are lessons learned that we apply down the road. We are excited about the new Truist digital experience. It's rolling out to our clients later this year. In order to complete the digital migration ahead of the core bank conversion, we are utilizing innovative proprietary approach known as a digital straddle. The digital straddle allows us to migrate clients to the new digital experience in waves, reducing migration risk and avoiding onetime migration early next year. We recently launched a successful internal pilot of new digital experience and expected to migrate our clients in a series of waves during the third and fourth quarter. This slide shows how we are building for our clients. For example, our consumer clients have access to a full suite of wealth and investment tools, including robo-advisor and advisory-led planning. We have already launched a robo-advisor tool for heritage SunTrust clients called BrightFolio. We continue to automate investing platforms and tailor to individuals desire for risk and mix, and we're very happy with the market performance. We continue to build tools that allow more face-to-face interactions between adviser and client right within the digital platform. For our commercial clients, we will build a comprehensive suite of treasury management and lending solutions in a single experience so clients can effectively manage financials seamlessly without multiple log ons. This brings different treasury solutions, our core cash management platforms and online checking deposit, which has separate user IDs today into a consolidated digital platform with just one user ID and accesses everything plus a companion mobile app. We continue to expect a total merger cost to be approximately $4 billion through 2022. Through April, we incurred about $2.4 billion of the $4 billion total merger costs of traditional merger-related and restructuring charges as well as incremental operating expenses related to the merger. Incremental operating expenses or costs we are incurring to deliver the best of both, they are different from traditional merger expenses because they have future benefits. The important point here is that these merger costs will end in 2022, after we complete the integration and decommissioning of the systems. After that, these costs drop off and are not part of our expense run rate. We are absolutely committed to achieving $1.6 billion in net cost saves, and we are making great progress across the 5 buckets. Through the first quarter, we have reduced our third-party spend by 9.3% and closing in on our targeted reduction of 10%. We have also closed 374 cumulative branches and taken out 3.5 million square feet of nonbranch facility space. Average FTEs were down 9% since first quarter of '19. Technology savings are back-end loaded because they are dependent on decommissioning systems. At the same time, our expense reductions are funding critical investments in areas at the bottom. We're doing -- what we are doing in the digital is incredible because we are pushing ahead with digital migration to a single Truist digital experience at the same time we're integrating our heritage systems. This also increases our agile team so that we can increase our frequency of our releases. And these investments aren't just tech, they are also brought on new teams and producers and invest in banking, wealth and insurance so lots of good things are going on. This slide shows how we think about expenses and cost saves. Adjusted noninterest expense is reported expenses, adjusted for merger-related charges, incremental operating expenses, intangible amortization and onetime nonrecurring gains or losses. Since these adjustments will ultimately go away, adjusted noninterest expense reflects the future run rate of expenses for Truist. We also talk about core expenses. Truist is a dynamic company. Since the merger of equals, we have grown our fee income businesses through tuck-in acquisitions, bringing on more producers and being more productive, all of which adds expenses. These are good expenses because they are tied to revenues, but they are expenses nevertheless. Core expenses strips away and gets to the measure of expenses that is directly comparable to the company that existed at the time of the merger. That is why we use this measure and our progress against the $1.6 billion of net cost saves. The waterfall on the left shows how we got from adjusted expenses to core noninterest expenses last quarter. If you take into consideration the first quarter seasonality and the high variability comp due to strong fee income, core expenses were in the range of the fourth quarter target. And we remain committed to achieving that target. On the right hand, you can see our medium-term targets include the return on tangible common equity in the low 20s. Further moderation of merger and economic risk may enable us to revisit our target CET1 ratio. Truist has near-term and long-term catalysts for positive operating leverage. In the near term, we are experiencing strong results on insurance, investment banking businesses as well as recovery in the mortgage income from the first quarter levels. Truist also has expense discipline, and we believe we can manage our expenses to be flat in the second quarter and lower in the back half. Some of our longer-term drivers include revenue synergies from our integrated relationship management strategy as well as bolt-on acquisitions and asset mix changes towards consumer loans, achieving our $1.6 billion cost saves will help us drive positive operating leverage. Truist was formed from 2 highly complementary companies with limited overlap, which provides excellent diversification and significant opportunities for integrated relationship management. In closing, this is our value proposition. Many of these concepts I've discussed in earlier remarks. We are in an important period building Truist, implementing our best approach to build an agile top performer that meets and exceeds the needs of our clients, teammates and communities. With that, let me turn it back to Jason for questions.

Daryl, thanks for that informative presentation. We have about 15, 20 minutes left for Q&A. Feel free to email me questions at [email protected]. Just include TFC in the subject, and we'd be sure to try and get those to Daryl. I guess, Daryl, maybe first off, you reiterated you expect expenses to be relatively changed in the second quarter. Given we're about halfway through the quarter, maybe just talk to maybe some other trends you're seeing, whether it's loan growth, margin, fee income, et cetera?

I would say we had a lot of momentum in the first quarter on our fee businesses. I think we are expecting, and that's continuing in the second quarter. I think insurance is strong, investment banking and brokerage. We will have strong performances across many of our fee businesses, which is really good for us. As far as loan growth grows, we shrunk in the first quarter from the fourth quarter. We guided for loans to come down again in the second quarter, and that's going to -- that happened. But if you look underneath, we are growing some loans in some of the consumer portfolios. Our Sheffield business, which is a business that basically lends in power sports and line equipment is growing nicely. LightStream, which is our digital lending platform is growing, doing well. It's basically home improvement, debt consolidation, unsecured type lending. So we have good growth in our consumer portfolios. Where we're facing headwinds right now is in our residential mortgage portfolio. Our prepayments in the first quarter were approaching over 50% there. I've never seen as high as 50%, shows you the quality of borrower that we have in that book on our balance sheet, and they've been able to refinance. I expect that to kind of subside over the next couple of quarters. And we continue to book more jumbos on the balance sheet and other types of loans. So that will probably fade away over the year. And then when you look at the commercial portfolio, the main headwinds that we had, and we talked about this earlier, was our utilization rate tends to be at a very low level in the 24%, 25% range. We're hopeful that, that starts to pick up this quarter and into the second half of the year. We have the headwinds of PPP. We were very successful with our PPP one, funding almost $13 billion. PPP is about $3.5 billion. On average, we're probably having $2 billion to $3 billion of forgiveness come off each quarter from these PPP loans. If we could just get a couple of percentages increase in utilization, that could overcome that. The other thing though, if you look at the underlying businesses and you look at the community market. So our commercial community business has 24 regions. We have 9 regions that are actually growing now. It's in the markets mainly where the economy wasn't shut down as much and is now much more open. So as the markets continue to open up with the news that we got late last week around masks and not having to wear a mask if you're vaccinated. Our hope is that these other regions will continue to lift up, and we'll see growth out of the community -- commercial community bank from that perspective. So I think there's good things coming. We are performing really well right now. And once we get our loan growth growing, I think we'll just have a really, really strong financial performance.

Got it. And then maybe the deposit growth has been quite robust and has been weighing on net interest margin. Talk to in terms of what you're seeing in terms of deposit flows and just how you're managing the balance sheet against the evolving interest rate backdrop?

Yes. So we continue to see deposit inflows come in from additional -- the government's given to our clients in our company and basically growing deposits. If you looked at our first quarter levels and you look at total deposits, we're a little bit above the peer group average. We are continuing to grow this quarter. And for the most part, our deposit costs are pretty much close to the bottom, they might go down another basis point or 2. But I think 4 or 5 basis points is probably as low as we go for interest-bearing deposit costs. Our decision right now is to invest the majority of the excess liquidity. We're keeping about $15 billion to $20 billion at the Fed and investing in treasuries and CMOs and MBS in the investment portfolio. And if rates were to rise, loan demand goes, we just wouldn't make those investments. And we have a positive mix change, positive impact on margin as we switched from security yields to loan yields, that would be a positive impact. And we probably don't expect the Fed deposit or the deposits to shrink until the Fed starts to shrink their balance sheet. And we don't think that, that's going to happen in the near future. And so we think we're very comfortable with our strategies. You have to remember, our investment portfolio is spinning out anywhere from $8 billion to $9 billion of cash flow every quarter. So that gives us a lot of room to either deploy in loans or if deposits were to shrink to pay off deposits. So we feel very good about that strategy right now.

So I guess, it sounds like lower net interest margin, but probably relatively stable net interest income in the near term?

Net interest income is a function of loan growth and also a function of our PPP -- not PPP, our purchase accounting runoff. And there's a little bit of volatility potentially. We expect maybe 3 to 4 basis point impact on average on runoff of purchase accounting. And depending on how much loans grow or don't grow, will also have an impact on net interest income.

Fair. I guess one of the other things you mentioned in your prepared remarks was revisiting the 10% CET1 target, which, I guess, given where you are in the conversion almost coming into the final [ crush ], given how benign asset quality is, which we'll get to in a second. I guess, what's the holdup there? How low do you think you -- how much lower do you think you could take it? And then what would you do with the freed up capital?

We definitely were very happy where we put our CET1 target when we merged, we had no idea the pandemic would hit. But we're very fortunate that we planned for things that could happen, and they actually did happen so that we were really in a strong position. I think as Kelly and Bill and the Board look at this, what I would say is they're looking at the economy. And as the economy continues to get better, that's a favorable sign. And we're seeing that in our credit quality statistics and economy growing, although the jobs growth a week or so ago wasn't so hot, but still expect overall the economy to continue to grow. We are -- submitted our capital plan in -- back in April, we're going to wait and see what our results are that come out in June. And then we're really looking at the conversion. The slide that we had in our presentation, each and every day, we are making good progress on conversions. This weekend, what there weren't any real client conversions, but we had some successful conversions in Workday. We had conversions on our contingent workers. So every week, it goes by, we are getting more and more conversions behind us. We're really derisking the company from that perspective. So at some point, I would expect Kelly and Bill and the Board to make a decision potentially to maybe lower that 10% target. And the timing of that is really dependent on those things that I just talked about.

Got you. And then you didn't really touch on it in the presentation, which may be a good thing. But credit quality is, obviously, something we still have to ask about, credit metrics have been obviously significantly more benign than people thought at this conference a year ago. As you look out, can you talk to any areas of new concern, anything you're looking at more closely and maybe expectations for further loan loss reserve releases in the near term?

Yes, Jay. So what we're seeing is, besides the improvement in the economy, which is real. We use Moody's analytics that we run on the scenarios, the base scenario as well as the pessimistic, optimistic scenarios. All those continue to get better each and every month, which is a positive sign. But we're also starting to see upgrading of our commercial loans now. So when they come up for regrading, they did a great job this past year, rightsizing the businesses during the pandemic. They have a lot of liquidity, and you're starting to see some upgrades, and that just creates positive pressure from a reserve perspective. So I would expect to see more releases and depending on the economy and what we're seeing in the underlying credit quality, size is going to be dependent on that.

I guess, I think one thing we struggle with is trying to figure out, we kind of obviously know where reserves are today. We think we have a sense of where they should be, kind of just the pace of which you kind of get to this normalized reserve, just given -- looking out -- if you look at most economic forecasts, it looks pretty good. And I think, better than a lot of these baseline forecasts that banks use for their ACL. So I guess, is it another big kind of reserve release in 2Q and then we're done? Or you think it's something that will persist throughout the remainder of the year?

I would say it's going to take a couple of quarters, whether it's 2 or 3 or 4. It's really hard to say. It really depends on the mix of the loans, how quickly that they're curing from that and the pace of the economic growth. But we're seeing positive signs, Jason. I mean, things are really good. I don't think it'll be one and done, though. I mean, a lot of the peers released this past quarter, my guess is they will continue to release more as the economy continues to get better. So whether it's done by the end of the year, it's hard to say, but definitely positive trends from a release perspective.

I think you had a few slides on insurance and a slide on the securities unit. I'm going to talk to, obviously, heritage BB&T was very, very good in insurance. While both banks were in the Securities business, I would say, SunTrust was probably better there. Maybe just talk to any initial successes you've had in terms of kind of taking the heritage BB&T insurance product into the SunTrust heritage customer base. And maybe the same thing kind of the SunTrust, Robinson Humphrey offering into the BB&T customer base. And just how this big of an opportunity can those be for the new company?

Yes. I would tell you, Kelly and Bill and all of executive leadership are totally focused on integrated relationship management. We think that is kind of one of our key objectives, something that we can do and really take advantage of putting these 2 companies together. So for example, if you look at heritage BB&T, we had a very small broker-dealer, but we had about 20% penetration of those clients into the insurance space. When you look at penetration now that we have of Truist Securities versus the penetration in insurance, it's less than 10%. So if we could just replicate that percentage over the next couple of years, that would be huge revenue. You have to remember, all of our clients are buying insurance from somebody today. So the sales cycle is not something that would be immediate. It might take a year or 2 or 3 depending on that. But we're going to get shots at that. And we're going to have opportunities, and we're going to win some business, and we're going to continue to grow that percentage. On the flip side, I would say, when you look at the BB&T middle market clients and what we've been able to do versus the now Truist securities and capital markets. We've actually seen some really big wins early on and able to really lead some advisory roles, do some syndications, help with either selling or buying assets. So I would say that, that is a proven story. What we really focus on is that we have people in the market that are local. And then we bring in the expertise, whatever is needed to help with the client to advise them on what their needs are. And that seems to have a lot of success, and that continues to play out very well. And just the integration between Beau's team and David's team is going really, really well and expect really good things and continue to have success as that moves forward.

Got it. And then you've been pretty consistent from day 1 in terms of $1.6 billion in net merger saves. I guess other larger acquisitions we've seen, and it seems like some under promise or over deliver, and that number kind of gets upgraded over time. And I guess, it's so much on the question, you kind of gave us a net number. Has there any been maybe changes in the gross number? And do you see kind of additional opportunities beyond kind of what was initially laid out?

There's definitely lots of opportunities to continue to get savings throughout the company. We have those 5 cost buckets that we talked about on our earnings call last quarter. We talked about expanding that. When we put our company together in '19, we did a great job putting it together from what we knew about each other at that time. But we know a lot more about each other today. And we know how we can become more efficient and maybe deliver products and services to our clients and communities much more effectively. So we will continue to basically change and optimize the company. So definitely, we have opportunities for more savings. As far as investments go, as you know, there's just a lot of investments from a digital technology perspective. What they are doing right now in the digital straddle that we talk about, I don't think has ever been done before, Jason. When you think of it, we're changing and combining our core application systems. When we talk about that, the retail system, the commercial system, we have to stand up a Truist environment first because you're co-mingling heritage SunTrust and BB&T systems together. And then we have to convert BB&T and then SunTrust clients to it. And right in the middle of doing all that, we're rolling out a whole new mobile digital platform at the same time. I remember vividly, this was in the summer of '19, and we were meeting weekly as executive leadership. We didn't know when the deal would close or whatever and Bill and Kelly pushed our team and whatever, and we decided to make investments and build out our digital and agile teams. And you're seeing the benefits of that now. Those investments that we made, pre-closing the company is now making us to basically do this digital straddle. I expect in '22, those teams will be able to deliver more often, more products and services out to our clients much quicker and faster. I mean, the real key is putting this company together but still keep it relatively simple, even though we're a big company, so we can deliver products and services out as efficiently as possible.

No, got you. It makes sense. We do have a couple of questions coming in from the audience. So I'm going to read a few. Can you comment on any structural trends you are seeing in your business in light of the geographic footprint you had and the change in demographics?

Well, we're definitely having huge positive impact in demographics, you saw that one chart that we put in there. Just in Charlotte, I was reading something the other day, and they said that we're getting 120 people to Charlotte every day in our market. And that's just not Charlotte. I mean, the Southeast is just really growing very, very fast. When you look at -- I talked earlier about 24 community bank regions, 9 of them have loan growth, the majority of those regions are in the markets that are more open. And if you look at that, Texas, Florida has been wide open for a longer time period, Georgia, so those markets are growing faster and coming back faster. So definitely seeing positive there. But our expectation is with the -- what CDC came out last week, that should open up other markets that were kind of on the fringe and make that more wide open, and that will also hopefully lead to more demand down the road.

Helpful. I'm showing 1 minute on the clock, so I'm going to ask a final question. Could you confirm if the digital banking has been built in-house? Or are you using an existing platform? And that was another question from a European investor.

Yes. We have a strategy to really do both, Jason, so we partner with outside people when it makes sense for us to bring something quicker to the market. And if they have a great client experience already built. And a lot of times, we build our own client experiences and keep it proprietary. So it's a blended approach is what we approach and use today. We think that's the most effective way to do it. It can't be one way or the other way. We have to be nimble and able to take advantage of what's open in the marketplace. If you look at like Truist Ventures, we continue to make investments. And one of the investments we made is in Fintech. Fintech is going to be helping run some of the LightStream offerings that we're rolling out later in the year and into next year. So those partnerships that we're creating in Truist Investments are really helping us drive and partner with them and commercialize some of the advantages of that partnership.

Perfect. Daryl, thank you so much for participating again this year. I think last year, I promised you next year in person, didn't come through there. But I'm highly confident that next year, we will be in person in London. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe and hope to see you in person real soon.

Thank you, Jason. Have a great day. Bye-bye.