Truist Financial Corporation (TFC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

This is Jason Goldberg, and I cover the U.S. large-cap bank stocks at Barclays, and this is our 19th Annual Global Financial Services Conference. Next up, very pleased to have Truist. From the company, we have Bill Rogers, Chief Executive Officer as of, I think, Sunday. Very pleased to have him in his first public sell-side presentation, at least as CEO again. He obviously was at this conference many, many times as CEO of SunTrust as well as CEO of Truist. Bill is going to go through a short presentation, and then we're going to have some Q&A. [Operator Instructions] And there's a button called survey. Please provide answers to questions we have up for them, and we'll look at those results tonight. Bill, welcome.

Thanks, Jason. Good morning, and great to be back. Before we get started, please take note of our forward-looking statements and non-GAAP information on Slides 2 and 3. So with that, I'm going to start on Slide 4, as we always do, with our purpose. Our purpose is to inspire and build better lives and communities. And Truist's purpose is, it's not a marketing slogan, it's something our teammates live out every single day, and it's the framework for our decisions. As part of our own purpose activation, our teammates have worked to articulate their own personal purpose. They reflected on how their personal purpose interacts with the company's purpose, and that's the proverbial flywheel that's created that provides clarity for teammates on their individual and our corporate goals. That brings us to Slide 5. Because our companies were so well aligned on purpose and mission, the Truist cultural coalescence happened quickly. In our culture, purpose, performance, intensity, teamwork, trust and a client-first mindset exists harmoniously. This alignment around purpose also allows us to move seamlessly on ESG, producing Truist's first 2 ESG reports at a 19-month time frame, but more importantly, making commitments to advance diversity equity inclusion, setting quantitative targets for emission reductions and focusing on climate revenue opportunities and, of course, continuing to deliver on our $60 billion community benefits plan. Our value proposition on Slide 6 summarizes why I'm so optimistic around the future of Truist. We're just an exceptional company with a comprehensive and diverse business mix with distinct capabilities that resulted from selecting the best of both from our heritage companies. We have strong market shares in many of the most vibrant U.S. markets. And due to the merger of equals, we have unique opportunities to harvest significant cost saves and invest in technology, teammates and marketing, which we believe will deliver strong growth and industry-leading profitability. Combined with our conservative risk profile, we're confident Truist can generate earnings growth with less volatility than our peers over the long term. Let me expand on some of those themes through the presentation. Slide 7 introduces the first element of our value proposition, which is Truist exceptional business mix, and the next few slides explain why we believe that to be true. Let's move to Slide 8. With more than $520 billion in assets, Truist is the seventh largest U.S. commercial bank and I believe, places us in the sweet spot in terms of size and scale. We've got the scale we need to invest and innovate, the breadth of capabilities to meet client needs, and formidable density in the best markets. We're also large enough to generate substantial capital to invest in growth. A recent example being our Service Finance acquisition, which I want to highlight later. At the same time, Truist is small enough such that we can deliver a localized experience to make decisions close to the client, while leveraging our community bank model. We also have strong and connected culture that can operate as one team, which is critical for implementing our integrated relationship management strategy. Finally, our less complex and diverse business model results in lower capital requirements than our larger peers. Slide 9 highlights the enviable market position of our core retail, commercial and wealth lines of businesses. Our markets are projected to grow the fastest and we have the highest deposit share relative to our peers and their footprint. However, we're not planning to passively benefit from a rising tide. Our teammates who are just outstanding, are engaging with existing and new clients to provide advice and deliver solutions using a much more comprehensive range of products and services. Moreover, investments in technology better equip us to meet clients where they are, which is increasingly in digital. Thus, given our market position, combined with our talented and purposeful teammates, our broad set of capabilities and our ongoing investment in digital, we believe we're well positioned to maximize this advantage. That's evidenced on Slide 10, one of the most compelling benefits of our merger is diversification. Truist has a diverse set of businesses, including some that are more focused on our Southeast and Mid-Atlantic footprint, while the others are more national in scope. The merger improved the diversity of our business mix and loan portfolio, which reduces risks and creates more optionality. Notable examples include investment banking, insurance brokerage, leverage to our corporate lending and subprime auto, amongst many others. We stand ready and willing to invest in growing profitable businesses that have a competitive advantage, which deliver value-added advice and services to our clients. We're also willing to exit businesses that have inadequate scale to compete or which are not additive to our overall product suite. With that model, I want to highlight 3 areas where we continue to invest through their favorable long-term prospects. Slide 12 brings us to the first area I want to highlight, which is Truist Insurance Holdings. Insurance is an important source of revenue, diversity and growth, and also a business I've really enjoyed learning a lot about in the last 2 years. We've provided more insurance lives than usual as many of our bank investors are not as familiar with this space. Truist Insurance Holdings is the world's seventh largest insurance brokerage, facilitating approximately $31 billion in annual premiums from a balanced mix of retail and wholesale clients. The business produced $2.5 billion in revenue over the last 12 months and has delivered 10% annual growth in the past 10 years, roughly split between organic and acquisitions. Insurance is fundamentally an advice-driven business, and our teammates work closely with our clients to solve challenging risk management questions. Continuing to Slide 13, our business is approximately 50% retail and 50% wholesale. Retail means individual or business engages with McGriff as their broker to help update coverage. In wholesale, we assess retail insurance agency that may not have the breadth of experience or expertise or relationships to place end coverage. Wholesale operates under several brands, which are listed here. Slide 14 captures our expertise across 13 industry verticals and shows our capabilities to deliver a broad range of products to clients of all types and sizes. There's also a strong alignment with our markets and corporate investment banking specialties. Turning to Slide 15. As I mentioned, we're the world's seventh largest insurance brokerage firm and performing well relative to competition. Our strong organic revenue growth reflects new business, firm pricing and strong client retention. Margins have also improved due to our strong growth and operational improvements from our insurance holdings optimization program that began in 2018. Moreover, we're attracted to this business for the same reason brokers command higher multiples in banks: low capital consumption, consistent growth and less correlation to traditional banking cycles. Slide 17 brings us to the second area I want to highlight, which is Truist Securities. We've invested significantly in talent over the last 15 years to build a universal banking platform with a full range of product capabilities and extensive industry expertise. We have 7 industry practice groups with over 20 subindustry verticals, robust equity research and a trading platform with over 700 companies under coverage. We also serve 2,000 corporate clients, generally midsized, for more than 15 offices around the country. Slide 18 describes Truist Securities' competitive advantage, which is integral to its success. Clients choose us because we have the same capabilities and expertise of our larger peers, but we deliver them in a one-team manner that's more focused and so more tailored to the middle market. Investment banking fee income has grown 10% annually since 2010 and has accelerated since 2019, reflecting strong market conditions, but also the really early benefits of the merger. We continue to believe that our competitive advantage positions us to take share and grow long term. Slide 19 shares how Truist Securities provides a competitive advantage to our other lines of business like Commercial Community Bank. We have a significant opportunity to advise on the entire financial life cycle of the business center. Our business clients are backed day in and day out by their Commercial Community Bank relationship manager who has the local expertise. But at some point, most business owners are going to face some type of transition. And when that happens, we have all the expertise and all the capabilities we need within Truist Securities and Truist Wealth to help them navigate and successfully execute those transition events. We're still in the first innings of realizing this opportunity, but the early results are really strong. As you can see, capital markets income from clients outside of Truist Security segment is up almost 50% year-on-year with M&A being one of the key drivers. This is a good example of the revenue synergy opportunity that we referred to internally as IRM or Integrated Relationship Management. Slide 21 brings us to the last area I want to highlight, which is our national digital lending capabilities. We continue to invest in this space, most recently with our announced acquisition of Service Finance, to meet clients where they make decisions, which is increasingly through a digital channel or a point-of-sale. We approach this space with deep conviction and experience given our own Sheffield and LightStream businesses, but also partnerships with other companies in this sector. We've learned that you achieve the best results, both financially and strategically, when you approach the entire experience end to end for manufacturers, dealers and contractors, the technology stack, risk and compliance infrastructure and, of course, the end client. When we do this, we become more relevant and we capture growth at better margins. Consequently and in light of the pending Service Finance acquisition, we've terminated our third-party partnerships with certain point-of-sale financing providers. These are great companies. We've been great partners. We've benefited from those partnerships. But ultimately, we believe we're building a more durable earnings stream over the long run by growing it in-house. Slide 22 highlights an exciting opportunity and strategic imperative for Truist. Service Finance sits at the intersection of multiple growth areas: payments, point-of-sale lending, digital client experience, home improvement and sustainable financing. Service Finance has relationships with home improvement manufacturers and over 14,000 contractors. In a typical transaction, a homeowner who is working with an in-network contractor, applies for financing through the Service Finance platform. Over 80% of their applications are done on the mobile app. They've grown rapidly by taking and making share, not by expanding their risk appetite, and we believe there's significant room to run. Partly because of secular growth in home improvement, but mostly because they have an excellent management team, a proven track record with still low market share in a large but highly fragmented market. Lastly, it's a highly profitable business with a 3% cash run rate ROA. So we're excited about this opportunity. It's strategically compelling. On a stand-alone basis, the acquisition is financially dilutive in the first couple of years. That's primarily due to the transition that we made from originate-and-sale model to balance sheeting its production on our books. But over the long term, it's accretive to all of our KPIs. In the future, we'll also explore together how to leverage our combined capabilities even further. Slide 23 introduces the second element of our value proposition, which -- that Truist is uniquely positioned to deliver results. Slide 24 addresses our strategic decision to take a best-of-both approach to merger integration, meaning we selected the best heritage platforms for Truist. This is really very different from a typical bank merger when one company's data systems and processes are simply lifted and shifted to another company's platform. Best of both makes sense for Truist because BB&T and SunTrust invested in different yet complementary parts of the technology and business ecosystems. This results in an integration that arguably takes longer, requires more upfront investment than a typical acquisition, but one that positions us leaning forward and will yield long-term benefits for our clients, teammates and shareholders. Slide 25 depicts just one of the many examples where best of both delivers benefits, in this case, yielding a leading commercial loan platform for Truist. Part of the merger, BB&T had implemented the AFS Vision commercial loan system. AFS Vision has a very strong back-end functionality, including a modern interface, real-time transaction posting. Meanwhile, SunTrust had adopted an industry-leading nCino platform as its commercial lending front end system. Since the merger was announced, we've been combining the nCino front end with the AFS Vision back end, to form what we believe will be a best-in-class lending ecosystem. Connecting the sales pipeline to underwriting to closing will enable seamless deal collaboration, yield better, faster client experience. It also provides a stronger foundation for future digital innovation. Lastly, this is a concrete example of how merger-related charges and incremental operating expenses related to the merger are applied in the technology integration, ultimately to deliver enhanced experience for clients and teammates. On Slide 26, if you look at the big picture, our integration effort is the first pillar and first step in Truist digital and technology strategy, which we summarized on this slide. This integration allows us to begin our journey with a best-of-both approach from which we can continue to modernize in the form of APIs, open banking, more flexible foundation and architecture. However, modernization only takes you so far, unless you're willing to take like your clients. So we're interacting with our clients. We're co-creating relevant experiences in journey rooms. Our teams are also focused on ways to better leverage data, so we can provide more personalized experiences for all of our clients. And finally, we've got to move fast. Of course, that means being agile. We allow our teams to fail fast, learn and iterate, to respond to changing client needs. We're also leveraging Truist Ventures to complement our own learning around innovation and commercialize at scale, while we jointly recognize those opportunities. So continuing to Slide 27. As we've noted, Truist is the first large merger in the digital age. So we're highly focused on ensuring a smooth transition for all of our digitally active clients. Our new Truist digital experience reflects 2 of the 3 principles I just outlined: co-creation with our clients; failing fast to learn fast. We've built this new platform based directly on clients' feedback, and we're introducing it in waves, learning from each release and getting better every time. Approximately 35% of our digital clients have been migrated to the new Truist digital platforms through the end of August with more than 2 million users logging in. We estimate the vast majority of our digital client base will be migrated prior to core systems conversion in the first quarter of next year. Moving to Slide 28. Our merger integration is on track and our core bank conversion will be completed in the first quarter of 2022. As integration and activities intensified this year ahead of our core bank conversion, so did our merger cost. We expect merger cost to peak this year and then decrease significantly next year before going away in 2023. Concurrently, we continue to make progress on our cost saves. We are on target and firmly committed to achieving our annualized cost save targets for the fourth quarter of 2021 and 2022. From a shareholder perspective, this means complexity will decrease, earnings quality will increase over time. Our cost savings come primarily from the 5 areas shown on Slide 29, details of which we've shared in the past. We'll continue to provide as much transparency as possible to help you judge our progress against our cost save goals. But we also remind investors that our business mix is very different from where it was at the time of the merger, most notably in higher fee income, as I outlined earlier. Slide 30 shows the considerable progress we've already made towards generating best-in-class returns and efficiency. Our adjusted efficiency was the best in our peer group for the second quarter, and we have the second highest adjusted ROTCE. The merger has created unique opportunities that enable Truist to deliver best-in-class profitability while we invest in the future. Besides the cost savings, we also have highly complementary businesses that are already yielding revenue synergies. We've highlighted a few of those today. And we're investing concurrently with our cost saves in our digital and technology capabilities to provide a modern and personalized experience for our clients. Slide 31 introduces the final element of our value proposition, which is our strong capital position and conservative risk culture. Turning to Slide 32. Truist has a conservative risk culture that values diversification, prudent client selection, appropriate risk compensation and effective and early problem asset resolution. Our disciplined approach has served us well and is reflected in better than peer average credit metrics as you see on this slide. As Slide 33 indicates, our conservative risk culture does not come at the expense of strong returns. Our risk-adjusted loan yields are strong relative to peers and our performance in CCAR stress scenario also affirms our leading risk-adjusted profitability position. We also can improve our position over time as merger costs diminish and additional cost saves materialize, giving us significant flexibility to optimize our capital position over the long term. Slide 34 articulates our clear priorities for capital deployment. At the top of the list is organic growth as we identify opportunities to enhance the client experience and meet our client needs, whether through technology, new or improved products and services or just good, old fashioned loan growth. We want to invest in those opportunities first. Next is our dividend. We fully recognize many of our shareholders value a stable and growing dividend. After dividends come targeted strategic acquisitions and investments that build over long-term capabilities and/or add net new clients and after that, share repurchases. The Constellation and Service Finance acquisitions reflect our capital allocation philosophy. Together, they'll consume approximately $3 billion of the $4 billion to $5 billion near-term capital deployment potential we highlighted in our last earnings call. On Slide 35, we sum it up again with our value proposition. First, I could not be more excited about Truist and the opportunity set that's available to us. We're well positioned in great markets. We have an exceptional set of businesses. We've got purpose-driven teammates, and we're approaching a natural pivotal point away from merger focus towards a performance focus. Second, as a result of the merger, we've got the opportunity to generate industry-leading profitability, which we can use to invest and generate long-term growth. And finally, we've got a strong capital position, particularly in the context of our risk profile, which provides us the flexibility and capacity for long-term growth, while also providing safety in a downturn. I believe the allocation of this capital is my primary responsibility to create sustainable, long-term differentiated value for our shareholders. All of this is underpinned by a purpose-driven culture. It's the foundation of how we operate and how we serve our clients. So Jason, with that, I'll turn it back to you.

Thanks, Bill. Appreciate that. [Operator Instructions] Bill, I appreciate that you're obviously the CEO of SunTrust, the COO of Truist for several years, and obviously a key architect with Kelly King, putting 2 companies together. But each CEO has a different flare and take to them. I guess as you look out, are there any tweaks or differences between the two of you or any kind of maybe strategic areas of emphasis that will be different that we should be on the lookout for?

Yes. I think the context that you put it in, in terms of tweaks, is maybe the way to think about it. I mean the foundational part that absolutely won't change, and Kelly and I were committed to from day 1, is that this was a merger built on purpose. I mean it is the foundation of what we do. And then the second thing is getting the merger done. So we've got work to do. We're going to continue to get that focus, realize the saving, get the merger cost out. So we're going to stay focused on that. We're going to -- if you see sort of any type of shift, it's going to be the natural shift, and I mentioned that in the prepared statements, that we're sort of shifting from a merger mode to an operating mode. So we're using some of that capacity that we've had to merge to get into sort of this mode of operational excellence, focus on the things like the insurance capabilities across our company, capital markets across our company, business transition. I mean I think we're really in the early innings of that and the opportunities are significant. So I would say anything would be tweaks. We had really, really strong alignment. Kelly was a fantastic partner, continue to be a fantastic partner and excited about where we're going in the future.

Fair enough. Listen, I'm looking at my inbox and I'd be remiss if I didn't ask the next question. But third quarter outlook, Daryl provided a bunch of different guide points on the second quarter earnings call to what to expect. Can you maybe just talk to, given the -- only 2 weeks ago in the quarter, how things are tracking versus expectations?

Yes. Without going through them one by one, I would say we're on track to where we said we'd want to be, probably some little small pluses or minuses related to all that, but I think certainly within the zone. Probably one of the pluses is the fee income side is probably a little better than maybe we guided to than part of that. But everything else makes right on track.

I guess one area that a lot of people had been asking about is just expectations with respect to loan growth. It's -- I think everyone's kind of plus and minus flattish for the third quarter. But maybe you can kind of -- you obviously have an extensive footprint. As you talk to kind of commercial customers maybe kind of what are you hearing, what are they thinking? What are you seeing with respect to utilization rates? And just the overall temperature across your landscape?

Yes. I've been out a lot in the last several months and visiting with a lot of clients to really try to get an understanding of where their head is and where the market is. And I'd say, overall, it's pretty positive. I mean commercial clients are -- most of their businesses are strong. They've got liquidity. They have plans to invest. Probably some of those plans are mitigated a bit by labor shortage and supply chain issues, which I think will mitigate over time. But they're primarily leaning in. C&I, I think, is improving, core C&I. We've got the same headwinds in terms of dealer and mortgage warehouse, CRE and some of the things that others have. But I think core commercial will see a little bit of improvement. Pipelines continue to be strong. Production continues to be strong. Utilization rate, month-to-month week-to-week, but sort of has little bumps and downs against it. But I'm long term, confident, whether this is in the next quarter or in the next 6 months or in the next 9 months, I'm more confident that maybe this recovery is just going to be extended versus stalled out.

That sounds fair. And you kind of said the quarter has some pluses or minuses. One of the pluses you mentioned was fee income. In your presentation, you talked about insurance and investment banking. And I think to us, one of the things that got us excited about the merger was taking the insurance product BB&T add into the SunTrust customer base. And the capital markets products that SunTrust had into the Truist customer base is -- I guess, that's what's kind of driving maybe the better expected results. Or just maybe more texture in terms of what you're thinking there? And just maybe delve more into that opportunity and help us size it?

Yes, I think that's part of it. But in fairness, that's on the increments. That's probably a little higher percentage of the growth, but the -- but just the overall excellence in execution from -- and you are hiding both of those businesses, just a great execution in both those businesses. They've got consistency, really strong leadership. They've grown more organically in Truist Securities and then organically by acquisition and the insurance side. So I think primarily, it's just in their prowess and their execution. And then the part about penetrating each other's clients base, I'm really excited about where that's going. I think as I mentioned, it's sort of in the early innings. Those sales cycles are longer, but all the cultural aspects we're seeing, all the integration we've built, all the one team activity that we want to see, I feel great about. There are countless examples of just great introductions, people expanding their business, business transition. I was with a client 2 days ago. Perfect example, we were -- it was a heritage BB&T client. We were advising them from a heritage SunTrust basis on an acquisition. They ultimately didn't get the acquisition. It was bought by a private equity. They got to continue to invest. And then Truist Wealth was helping that business owner with that transition, and we knew the provider really well. So its incorporated all the components. And by the way, they were also an insurance client, just to put it on top of it. So there are hundreds of those examples, and I think there'll be thousands of those examples going forward.

Got you. And then I guess you said pluses and minuses in the quarter, and you gave us the pluses in fee income. Can you extrapolate on maybe some of the minuses?

I think we're -- again, everything is sort of pretty close within those elements. Net interest income and NIM probably slightly -- maybe a little bit of the lower end of the range, but more than offset by the fee income on the higher end of the range. So when you net it all out, I think we're really solid with our guidance.

Yes, that's pretty consistent with what we've heard from others. Maybe we could spend just a bit more on capital and capital allocation.

Sure.

I think on the second quarter call, you guys lowered your capital target, talked about $4 billion to $5 billion in capital pickup for buyback or acquisitions. You kind of increased -- or came out of the $4 billion buyback or so and then you kind of quickly put $2 billion or so to work on the sort of Finance acquisition. So maybe talk about just how you're kind of thinking about allocating capital in the current environment?

Yes. Maybe just sort of taking a step back and go into some of the initial capitalizations we thought about the merger. We started with a premise that we were going to have merger risk, and we were going to have economic risk. We had no idea about the pandemic obviously, but we knew that those were going to be significant risk. And we said, let's go into this with a higher capital level. So we set 10% as sort of a CET1 approach. But we also said, as the risk of the merger comes down and the risk of the economy improves, we would change that. And the 9.75% sort of reflects the view that we -- all the things that we're doing in the merger, people think about mergers as just one big outcome at one date, when it's actually hundreds of different activities. If you think about we've successfully merged our capital markets business, our trust business, our brokerage business, mortgage origination business. I talked about what we've done on the digital side. So we've had a lot of successes in the merger. So we see the risk of that going down, that's reflected a bit of that capital position. Then the economy, sort of post pandemic, made a little Delta variant component to that, but the economy post pandemic looks like it's going to be better, that reflects that. So I think we'll continue to make those type of adjustments, Jason. Maybe this won't be a quarter-to-quarter kind of thing. But as we think about those relative risk reducing, that will be reflected in how we think about the capital that we need to deploy against our business. And then as you mentioned, I think consistently, sort of in that stack of organic growth and the ability to invest, I mean, we used $3 billion. If you take Constellation and Service Finance, we used approximately $3 billion of that. The next $1 billion to $2 billion, I think probably if that's in share repurchase, that probably sometime in the first part of next year.

That makes sense. And then, I guess, speaking of the first part of next year, I think you talked to kind of the core systems conversion in the first quarter. Is that still on track?

Yes.

And with that, another key milestone you need to get through to -- can maybe take another look at that capital ratio target because it's still -- even 9.75%, U.S. Bank presented yesterday,good profitability metrics good risk profile like Truist and they talked about 8.5% to 9% CET1 target.

Well, and we're in the middle of the merger, so we want to get that underway. We want to be conservative. I think appropriately so, while we're in this space. But if you look at our relative risk profile, I think you can get confident about where we'll be. It's not so much specifically tied, this milestone equals 4 basis points of this, and this milestone equals 10 basis points of that. I mean we just sort of don't think about it that way. But I think you're accurately displaying the first quarter or the first part of next year, we'll have the bulk of the major conversion work behind us. We'll still have some of the expense work to do with decommission and those type of things, but the bulk of the conversion work will be behind us, and we'll pull up and reflect at that time. And we'll also see where the economy is. And I'm quite frankly optimistic, really optimistic about both of those.

Makes sense. And then you kind of reiterated that $1.6 billion net savings number for the merger. And you initially -- your upfront -- you had some gross savings, and then reinvest a portion on technology. I guess, has there been any change kind of in the gross kind of savings number as you kind of work through the merger and look ahead and we just don't see it because they net? Or is it kind of tracking pretty much on target what you thought in the announcement?

Yes, we've got a little more in the gross savings opportunity. And we have tremendous opportunity to invest, and you've seen some of those investments. I'm actually talking about some of the businesses that we already covered. Some of those investments, for example, were in talent in our investment banking. So we've taken some of those gross over net savings, and we found really strong opportunities with really high paybacks to continue to invest. So that's why we feel really confident on the net part of that savings.

Got it. And then here is an audience question. When the leadership team is sitting around the executive conference table and discussing how to drive growth that better delivers on share gains, what do they want to get significantly better at to drive above-market growth? I think he's referring to the [indiscernible]...

Yes, I think -- yes. No, no, that's great. We were just having that sit around on the first day on Monday, talking about that exact topic. I think it's several things. One, it's just executional prowess. It's run our businesses really well, run them with excellence, make sure we've got the right talent, the right people in the right place. All those things. So that's number one. Number two is getting the value of Truist. How do we bring this one-team element together? How do we make sure that this integrated relationship management approach we have is delivering above normal results? So how do we make sure that, that's happening? What are the things that we need to do? Do we have the compensation right? Do we have the systems right? Do we have the technology right? What are the things that we need to make sure that, that really, really works well? And then the last is just capitalizing on the markets and the opportunities that we have. I mean we're really in the best markets, and I think they just continue to get better. I mean the migration of companies, the migration of individuals to our markets, I think, is -- I don't even think the story has been told on that. I mean all the data is backward looking, if you look forward looking. So it's also making sure that we've got the resources against that opportunities and that we're maximizing the places where we're investing and optimizing.

Yes. I guess that makes sense. Maybe it's too soon to ask this, but I'm going to ask it anyway. When I think of SunTrust's acquisition history, I think of Crestar and National Commerce. And when I think of BB&T's acquisition history, the list is too long to kind of go through, but it's quite exhaustive over my 25 or 26 so year of doing this. I guess once this merger is kind of put together, and it sounds like by the end of the year -- end of next year, we should be fully integrated, cost out pretty much, and the like. Is there impetus to, I guess, do another big acquisition? Clearly, you could double the size again and still be below 10% share. Just your thoughts around larger-scale acquisitions in general?

Well, I respect the fact that you said it's too early to ask the question, but I will answer it. I think I start with, we did the biggest one. So between the both of us, we did a really big one in coming together as a merger of equals. And the runway that I see in terms of the organic growth for Truist is just that every day I turn the page, it really adds to the runway in terms of that opportunity. So the organic opportunity within our existing franchise -- I don't wake up any morning thinking we're deficient in something. We're deficient in geography or we're deficient in product and capability, any significant. So the ability just to leverage, add, grow organically with what we have, I think, is absolutely the #1 priority. And that's -- really sits in front of us. To your point, when we get through next year, our capacity to do something is significant. I mean we've got a really strong capital base, we've got a really good risk profile, and we have a really, really modern -- we'll have a really modern platform from which to do things big or small. So I think priority #1 clearly is the opportunity that sits within Truist. As we get into next year and we think about other things, then we'll reevaluate at that time. But we've got a lot, a lot of runway ahead of us, and I want to be really clear about that.

Perfect. Bill, thank you so much for joining us today, and we look forward to catching up again in the near term.

Great. Thanks, Jason.

Thank you.