Truist Financial Corporation (NYSE:TFC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Bill Rogers: Yes. Ebrahim, again, I am not going to comment on sort of where we are from a speculative standpoint, other than to say, we love the insurance business. We want the insurance business to grow. We have done, I am staring at John, probably 100 acquisitions over time. So, we have got a really good framework in assisting that business to grow. But as I mentioned in my earlier comments, it is a consolidated business. So, we want to make sure that we have got all the flexibility and capability to create capital and support all of our businesses and their growth.

Ebrahim Poonawala: Got it. And I guess just taking a step back with the merger integration done, the cost behind you. Remind us in terms of like what we have not heard so far on the call is the scale benefits as we think about go forward in terms of picking up bigger deals on the lending side, on the fee revenue side? Just remind us some of the revenue synergies we should expect from the Truist franchise on a go-forward basis and why you can outperform just the peers within the market or within your asset size set?

Bill Rogers: Yes. Great question. And one of them I talked about just a minute ago was the deposit franchise. So, the scale, and the ubiquity, and the size, and the prowess that we have in our markets, I think is a distinct advantage and you see that. The other component of that is the markets that we are in. So, not only is it scale, but at scale in the right places. So, we have markets that I think will sustain sort of any economic environment with higher beta to the upside and a lower beta to the downside, so, in markets where we have a lot of in-migration versus out-migration and business development and growth. So, that’s one component. You mentioned the capital markets side, and I have talked about the community bank, the prowess that we have seen there, 36% increase in left leads and those type things.

That comes from scale. That comes from an ability to be more relevant to our clients, to have discussions with them that we weren’t having before, to be more strategic and to be in that left lead spot versus that right lead spot. And we all know the economics of that. I mean the economics are multiples of where you are in the spectrum. So, our relevance is not only related to our scale, but also related to our product and capabilities. We have tried to sort of put a number on that. And I would say sort of back-of-the-envelope kind of math, I mean it’s at least 10% of some of the growth that we have seen in our investment banking business, we could attribute to being more scale-oriented, again, not taking outsized positions, but taking positions that are on the left versus the right and the economics that come along with that.

And then everything to do with all the operations and efficiency, so, everything to do with the base that we operate from. We just had more opportunity to create more efficiency. So, when we do something that has previously had tens of millions of dollars of impact. Today, it can have $50 million and $60 million of impact because you are doing it across a bigger base and a bigger capability. The ability to negotiate better contracts with our providers and our partners and we saw a lot of that in the merger. Our ability to go in and be more relevant and more important to them, get terms that we think better reflect that. Mike, what else am I forgetting in that list because it’s a long list, I mean it’s a great question and one we probably ought to talk more about.

Mike Maguire: Yes. I think it’s been moving more relevant on capabilities, more relevant on size. You are seeing it in the results, whether it would be the ability to manage expenses.

Bill Rogers: The financial markets, our pricing on debt deals.