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The 300 companies on this year’s list brought in over $12.6 trillion in revenue for the latest 12 months, with the median revenue figure at $22 billion.

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This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

Operating throughout New England and the central parts of the U.S., the bank chain owns over 1,000 locations and 3,000 ATMs in 11 states.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

With a banking business serving customers primarily in the Northeast, Citizens operates 1,000 branches and 2,800 ATMs. Citizens held $176.7 biliion in assets as of March 31, 2020.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

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One of the oldest financial institutions in the U.S., Citizens Financial Group was founded in 1828 and now provides a variety of retail and commercial banking products and services, operating through its consumer banking and commercial banking segments. The consumer banking segment offers products including mortgages and credit cards and services like wealth management, while the commercial banking segment provides services such as lending and leasing, foreign exchange, and deposit management to companies in various sectors. Formerly called RBS Citizens Financial Group, the company became Citizens Financial Group in 2014.

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Citizens Financial Group (CFG): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Citizens Financial Group

citizens financial group

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Citizens Financial Group Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Denise, and I'll be your operator today. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a brief question and answer session. As a reminder, this event is being recorded. Now, I'll turn the call over to Kristin Silberberg, Head of Investor Relations. Kristin, you may begin.

Thank you, Denise. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. First this morning, our Chairman and CEO, Bruce Van Saun, and Interim CFO, Chris Emerson, will provide an overview of our third quarter results. Brendan Coughlin, President, and Don McCree, Chair of Commercial Banking, are also here to provide additional color. We will be referencing our third quarter presentation located on our Investor Relations website. After the presentation, we will be happy to take questions. Our comments today will include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause our results to differ materially from expectations. These are outlined for your review in the presentation. We also reference non-GAAP financial measures, so it's important to review our GAAP results in the presentation and the reconciliations in the appendix. With that, I will hand over to Bruce.

Thanks, Kristin. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call today. We announced very strong financial results today as our momentum continues. We feel like we are firing on all cylinders. Financial highlights include EPS growth of $0.13 sequential quarter, or 14%. We had strong NII growth of 3.5% sequentially, paced by NIM expansion of 5 basis points and net loan growth across consumer, private bank, and commercial, similar to last quarter. Fee growth was 5% versus Q2, paced by a tremendous quarter in capital markets, our second highest ever, as well as continued nice growth in wealth fees. Sequential positive operating leverage was 3%, as expense growth was held to just 1%. We continue to experience favorable credit trends, and we still have a robust balance sheet. Our CET1 increased 10 basis points to 10.7%. We have an LDR of 78.3% and virtually no wholesale borrowing.

We continued the strong execution of our strategic initiatives during the quarter. The private bank had a banner quarter on deposits with spot growth of $3.8 billion to $12.5 billion, which is already ahead of our year-end $12 billion target. Loans and AUM continue to track well. We have now added eight wealth liftouts to the private wealth platform, with more in the pipeline. We continue to build out our private bank team with additional hires in Southern California, and we now have around 500 people in the business, quite the ramp from a startup in 2023. In addition, our efforts across New York City Metro, private capital, and payments are all tracking well. Our efforts around Reimagine the Bank continue to make good progress. We've systematically evaluated all areas of the bank to seek opportunities to improve how we are serving customers and how we are running the bank.

We will give the full parameters of this effort on the January earnings call. Overall, we expect benefits to largely offset costs, including one-timers in 2026, with net benefits beginning to positively impact results in 2027 and becoming quite meaningful thereafter. One of my priorities this year has been to commence the transition of the leadership team I assembled a decade ago to the new refresh team that can take us forward for the next decade. Most recently, we announced that Don McCree will be retiring in March 2026, having handed the reins to Ted Swimmer earlier in October. Don has been a great partner and has made a big contribution towards our success. It's been a real pleasure working with him.

We've been planning Don's succession for some time, and I have every confidence that Ted Swimmer is the right leader to take us on the next leg of the journey. When Aunoj Banerjee arrives in 10 days as our new CFO, the team will have been largely refreshed with several younger, dynamic, outstanding new leaders. Turning back to the financials, with respect to Q4, we expect to continue to see attractive earnings growth paced by positive operating leverage, favorable credit trends, and share repurchase. We remain highly focused on executing our strategic agenda, which should deliver superior organic EPS growth relative to our peers over time, as well as further improvements in returns. We are positioned well to sustain our momentum into 2026. The macro environment remains positive despite continuing uncertainty with respect to fiscal and monetary policies.

We will stay focused on execution and the things that we can control as we continue on our journey towards building a top-performing bank. With that, let me turn it over to Chris Emerson, our Interim CFO. Chris?

Thanks, Bruce. Good morning, everyone. As Bruce mentioned, we delivered a strong revenue performance with disciplined expense management in the quarter, driving both sequential and year-over-year positive operating leverage of about 3% and 5%, respectively. We saw good growth in deposits, with the private bank hitting $12.5 billion in deposits for the third quarter, up $3.8 billion. Lending continued to pick up during the quarter, with growth led by increasing sponsor activity in commercial and the private bank. Given our strong outlook, the Board of Directors has declared a quarterly dividend of $0.46, which is a $0.04 or 9.5% increase. Referencing slides five and six, we delivered EPS of $1.50 for the third quarter, an increase of $0.13 or 14% over the second quarter. PPNR was up 9% sequentially and 20% year-over-year.

Capital markets delivered a record third quarter and our best performance since the all-time high fourth quarter of 2021. Performance was strong across all categories, demonstrating the power of our capabilities as market activity picks up. Net interest margin continues to steadily expand, up 5 basis points to 3%, and average loan volume was up 1%, which combined delivered 3.5% NII growth. Expenses were well managed, and we had 3% positive operating leverage. Credit trends continued to be favorable, and net charge-offs were lower, as expected. We continue to maintain robust capital, strong liquidity levels, and a healthy credit reserve. We ended the quarter with our CET1 ratio at 10.7%, while executing $75 million in stock buybacks during the quarter. Importantly, we are executing well against our key strategic initiatives with very strong momentum in our private bank and private wealth buildout.

The private bank continues to steadily grow its earnings contribution, adding $0.08 to EPS this quarter, up from $0.06 in the prior quarter. With this, the private bank hit an important milestone this quarter, achieving cumulative breakeven, with the EPS contribution since the launch in 2023 completely covering our investments and then some in about two years. Next, I'll talk through the third quarter results in more detail, starting with net interest income on slide seven. Net interest income increased 3.5% linked quarter, driven by continued expansion of our net interest margin and a 1% increase in average interest-earning assets. The margin expansion of 5 basis points was driven by the time-based benefits of Non-Core runoff and reduced impact from terminated swaps, as well as fixed-rate asset repricing. We continued to do a good job optimizing deposits in a competitive environment.

Interest-bearing deposit costs were stable, while total deposit costs were down slightly. Our cumulative interest-bearing deposit beta was 53% through the third quarter. Moving to slide eight, fees are up 5% linked quarter and up 18% year-over-year. As I mentioned earlier, capital markets delivered a record third quarter and our second best-ever quarterly performance. An increase in market activity drove strong M&A results even before including the deals that were delayed from the prior quarter. We saw a meaningful pickup in debt underwriting, primarily driven by refinance activity, and we delivered a solid performance across loan syndication fees and equity underwriting. We continued to perform well in the league tables, ranking fourth for the last 12 months on deal volume for middle-market sponsor loan syndications, and our deal pipelines across M&A, debt, and equity capital markets remained strong.

Our wealth business delivered a record quarter with higher advisory fees from continued positive momentum in fee-based AUM growth, given strong inflows from the conversion of private wealth liftouts, as well as market appreciation. As expected, mortgage and other income came down from elevated levels in the prior quarter. On slide nine, expenses are up 1%, reflecting continued investment in the buildout of private bank and private wealth and strong capital markets performance. Disciplined expense management and strong revenues resulted in approximately 170 basis points of improvements in our efficiency ratio to 63%. Our Top 10 program is progressing well and is on target to deliver a $100 million pre-tax run-rate benefit by the end of this year. I'll provide an update on our Reimagine the Bank initiative in just a few minutes. On slide 10, period end loans were up 1%.

This includes Non-Core portfolio runoff of roughly $600 million in the quarter, and excluding Non-Core, loans were up approximately 2% on a spot basis. The private bank delivered a solid loan growth again this quarter, with period end loans up about $1 billion to $5.9 billion, reflecting a pickup in commercial line utilization and growth in retail mortgage. Commercial loans were up slightly on a spot basis, given increased line utilization tied to sponsor activity. We continued to reduce CRE balances, which were down about 3% this quarter and 6% year to date. Core retail loans grew by about $1 billion, driven by home equity and mortgage.

Next, on slides 11 and 12, we continued to do a good job on deposits, with non-interest-bearing balances increasing by about $1.5 billion or 4%, maintaining a steady mix at 22% of the book, as our overall spot deposits increased approximately $5 billion to $180 billion. Average deposits were up 1%, driven by increases in the private bank and commercial, with spot up 3%, including some larger transactional flows towards the end of the quarter. We continue to focus on optimizing our deposit funding costs, with a further reduction of higher-cost treasury broker deposits this quarter and a decline in retail CD rates. Our interest-bearing deposit costs are stable linked quarter, translating to a 53% cumulative down beta. Importantly, stable retail deposits are 66% of our total deposits, which compares to a peer average of about 56%.

Moving to credit on slide 13, net charge-offs of 46 basis points are down from 48 basis points in the prior quarter, driven primarily by a decrease in CNI. Credit trends continue to trend favorably, with non-accrual loans down slightly linked quarter, driven by CNI and CRE, with criticized balances also declining. Turning to the allowance for credit losses on slide 14, the allowance was down slightly to 1.56% this quarter, as the portfolio mix continues to improve due to Non-Core runoff, the reduction in the CRE portfolio, and lower loss content frontbook originations across CNI and retail real estate secured. The economic forecast supporting the allowance is relatively stable to the prior quarter. The general office balance of $2.5 billion continued to decline modestly in the third quarter, driven by paydowns and charge-offs. This is down by $1.6 billion since March of 2023, roughly 40%.

The reserve for the general office portfolio is $314 million, which represents a robust 12.4% coverage. Moving to slide 15, we maintain excellent balance sheet strength. Our CET1 ratio increased to 10.7%, and adjusting for the AOCI opt-out removal, our CET1 ratio is 9.4%. We returned a total of $259 million to shareholders in the third quarter, with $184 million in common dividends and $75 million of share repurchases. Moving to slides 16 and 17, we are well positioned to drive strong performance over the medium term with our overall three-part strategy: a transformed consumer bank, the best-positioned commercial bank among our regional peers, and our aspiration to build the premier bank-owned private bank and private wealth franchise. The private bank continued to make excellent progress, as you can see on slides 18 and 19.

The private bank delivered its strongest quarter of deposit growth so far, with end-of-period deposits up $3.8 billion to $12.5 billion and average deposits up $2.2 billion to $10.7 billion. The overall deposit mix continues to be very attractive, with about 34% in non-interest bearing at the end of the quarter. We also delivered strong loan growth this quarter, adding roughly $1 billion of loans to end the quarter at $5.9 billion. This reflects growth in subscription finance, as line utilization rose with increased client transaction activity, as well as good growth in mortgage. We have added eight wealth teams to our platform, with more in the pipeline. We ended the quarter with $7.6 billion in AUM, up $1.1 billion linked quarter, reflecting the continued strong conversion rates of the wealth liftouts.

With year-to-date earnings of $0.18, we are tracking to approximately 7% earnings contribution, which is above our target of 5%+ accretion to Citizens Financial Group bottom line in 2025. We continue to remain focused on sustaining strong growth in the private bank while maintaining a high level of profitability, with ROE in the 20%-25% range in 2025 and over the medium term. Moving to slide 20, our Reimagine the Bank initiative continues to take shape. We feel very good about how we are currently positioned. However, the pace of change is accelerating and competition is fierce, so we are taking the opportunity to think boldly about what will be needed to take the bank to the next level.

We have a team of executives from across the bank working on cultivating technology and AI-enabled ideas that will empower our colleagues to run the bank better, and we are looking at all our key customer touchpoints to simplify and improve the customer experience. Aside from technology, we are looking at areas like reducing the number of vendors we use and rationalizing how they serve us across the bank. We are also looking at how we use our corporate facilities and how best to optimize our branch network to build our market share in key markets. We will have more details on the contours of the program for you on our year-end earnings call, but suffice to say, we will be running the program with our usual financial discipline, with an eye toward minimizing the impact of one-time costs and capital investments in 2026 by executing initiatives with faster paybacks.

The program will drive positive net benefits in 2027 that we expect will accelerate into 2028. With this program, we aspire to deliver fully phased-in run-rate benefits greater than Top 6, which was in excess of $400 million. On slide 21, we provide our guide for the fourth quarter, which contemplates two 25 basis point rate cuts, one in October and another in December. We expect net interest income to be up approximately 2.5%-3%, driven by an improvement in net interest margin of approximately 5 basis points and interest-earning assets up slightly, maintaining a fairly consistent spot LDR to the third quarter. We expect non-interest income to be stable, with capital markets holding steady to the third quarter and some puts and takes across other categories.

We are projecting expenses to be stable to up slightly, and we expect to deliver sequential positive operating leverage for the third quarter in a row and for the full year. Credit is expected to continue to trend favorably, with charge-offs in the low 40s basis points. We should end the fourth quarter with a CET1 ratio stable at 10.7%, including share repurchases of roughly $125 million, which, depending on the amount of loan growth, could be revised. The fourth quarter tax rate should be approximately 22.5%. Moving to slide 22, looking out to the medium term, we see a clear path to achieving our 16%-18% ROTCE target. Expanding our net interest margin is an important driver, along with the impact of the successful execution of our strategic initiatives in improving credit performance.

To wrap up, our strong third-quarter results demonstrate the quality and potential of our fee businesses, as well as the consistent improvement in our net interest margin. Coupled with our continued expense discipline, we achieve positive operating leverage for the second quarter in a row. Credit trends continue to improve, and with our strong reserves and capital level, we are in an excellent position to continue navigating a dynamic environment while supporting our clients and continuing to progress our strategic initiatives. I'll hand it back over to Bruce.

Okay. Thank you, Chris. Denise, let's open it up for some Q&A.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one. To withdraw your question, press star two. Our first question today comes from Scott Siefers with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Morning, everyone. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe, Chris, if you could spend just a moment discussing the expected margin trajectory, both near-term and then toward the $325-$350 medium-term target. I know the fourth quarter margin should come in around $305, which is up, but toward the lower end of the range you all had discussed previously. Maybe just thoughts on how things are trending versus your expectations and the puts and takes as we go out beyond the fourth quarter in your mind.

Yeah, thank you for the question. Scott, as you mentioned, we're forecasting that $305 into the fourth quarter, and as you know, that's on the back of a lot of the time-based activity, the Non-Core runoff, the terminated swap benefit, fixed asset repricing. Although we're slightly asset-sensitive, we believe that positives on active swaps and our mix will overcome the asset sensitivity and allow us to hit $305 into the fourth quarter. As we project out across the medium term to our $325-$350 range, we really look at that in a couple of buckets. We've got our time-based benefits, which is the majority of everything that you're going to see there, as well as the frontbook, backbook, which is adding a couple of basis points each quarter to round it out.

The net of our mixed pricing, nother, should take us the rest of the way into that range.

Yeah, I would also say, Scott, it's Bruce, that the initial several quarters back view was that we could exit $305-$310. I'm still happy to be at $305. A couple of things have happened over the course of the year. One is that the back end of the curve has come down. I think our original view was the 10-year would be in the $425-$450 range, and it's lower than that, which crimps a little bit the frontbook, backbook benefit. It's still there, but we assumed it would be a little higher. The other thing that's happened is that commercial loan pricing spreads have come in. It's a bit tight, and it's those two factors, really, which have brought us in kind of still within the range, but more at the lower end of that range.

Perfect. That's good color, and thank you. Bruce, maybe it's sort of a broader top-level question. The ground seems to be shifting a little in the large regional space. I think since last quarter, it looks like we're going to create a new Category IV name with one merger and then move another Category IV bank up to Category III eventually. Any updated thoughts on the role M&A might play in the Citizens story over the next couple of years, or is it still that you've got just plenty of organic runway that you'd rather sort of maintain that organic momentum?

Yeah, I'd say that's still the case, Scott. We have, I think, our own somewhat analogous acquisition to what other people are doing, which was the startup of the private bank, and we're getting significant accretion to the bottom line. We didn't have to expend any capital to do that. We took a little risk in the startup of the business, which has now already covered the initial investment. It's an excellent, well-positioned business that we're feeding to continue to get growth while we're achieving very strong profitability levels. That's our focus, to make sure we execute well on that. We set that business up to be a really valuable franchise in the medium and long term. I think we're on that trajectory, which we feel good about.

We have a bunch of other initiatives, too, looking at New York Metro and the growth that we're achieving there, looking at some of the investments we've done in the commercial bank and how we're covering private capital. We've been waiting for activity levels to pick up to really demonstrate the prowess of how that business is positioned. Now, when you see activity levels picking up, I think you can see the power of what we've assembled. We have a lot of strong growth. We're always alert for opportunities, but as I said in the past, it'd have to be a pretty high bar for us to go down that path and look at things inorganic.

Terrific. All right, wonderful. Thank you for the color.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Dave Rochester with Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.

Just real quick on the private bank outlook, you reiterated the levels you talked about before in terms of loan deposit targets, AUM. You're already there on deposits, so it'd be great to just hear your outlook there over the next quarter, the next year. In terms of AUM, it looks like there may be a little bit of a gap. If you could just talk to your confidence in hitting that target by the end of the year, that'd be great. Thanks.

Sure. I'll start, and then Brendan can offer a color. I'd say the path on deposits is not going to be linear. You're going to have, I'd say, in the second quarter, we saw some outflows near the end of the quarter, and the third quarter, we saw some inflows near the end of the quarter. You kind of have to look at this over the trajectory over several quarters. It averages out. We feel really good that we're already at the year-end level, and we would expect to see some growth, but I don't think it'll be that significant. We won't have another quarter like we had in Q3 and Q4, but we should still achieve net growth from here. That's good. I think loans is tracking well. AUM, which you pointed out, is a combination of things.

Some of it is liftouts that we've already done and how fast they're converting over their client base. Some of it is liftouts in the pipeline and when they close. Some of it is the referrals that we're getting from the private bank over to private wealth. I think the wild card as to whether we hit that number or not at the end of the year is going to be a couple of the liftouts in the pipeline. Do they happen in Q4? Do they spill into Q1? I'm not concerned by that. I mean, if it's just a timing-based difference, the good news is that we're continuing to see a lot of interest in the platform. We've gone around the whole circuit, and we've got kind of two wealth teams paired up with each private banking team.

We feel good about how it's building, the quality of what we're assembling. We have more in the pipeline. We'll see exactly when that timing hits. With that, let me turn it over to Brendan.

Oh, yeah, thanks, Bruce. Maybe start with a point or two on the medium-term outlook and then add to Bruce's comments about Q4. We feel really confident over the next year or two that this momentum we're seeing will continue. To kind of give you a few points here, the original team that we brought over back in 2023, we'd estimate maybe they've got 50%-60% of their book of business size of what they had prior to First Republic's failure. We don't expect that to get back to 100% given the market we're operating in and higher rates and so on and so forth, but the capacity to continue to grow is there. You supplement that with the management actions we've taken since we brought that team on board, Bruce mentioned and Kristin too. We started with about 150 people. We're up to 500 people.

We're slowly and surely adding scale and capacity, expanding geographies. We've added new capabilities in family office. We've added new products and partner loan programs, so on and so forth. We're doubling the number of PBOs that we have between now and the end of next year. You can see in our deck, the PBOs have over $300 million, which is incredibly large for such a short time period to open a retail branch. That should give us fuel in the tank. We also have done a really nice job connecting the franchise, particularly as of late with One Citizens. We're starting to see a lot of cross-pollination of the private bank just being us protecting it, incubating it to grow.

Now it's starting to become of scale, and they're working more effectively with the commercial bank, with our investment bankers, with our business banking team, with the retail banks, the wealth team. We're seeing a lot of cross-pollination that it's not just about growing, getting their clients back. It's now about cross-selling into the existing Citizens franchise in private banking. There are a lot of tailwinds here that we see in the future that should give you broad confidence on sustaining this performance. Not a lot to add to Bruce's comments about Q4. I would just add on the AUM front that if a team pushes out into next year, it's got a negligible net income impact in the short term. It's basically break-even in the first year. Really, it's just the headline metric.

If we end up missing by a little bit and it pushes to Q1, it's not going to take us off our financial profile or outlook at all. We've got a very robust pipeline of talent that has high degrees of interest in joining our wealth platform. Anyway, we still feel good. We got a real good shot to hit our metrics, and that's what I'd add.

Yeah, I would just close with one thought here, which is that when we initially did the deal, we gave targets out into where we thought we'd be in 2024, the next year, and then the year after that being 2025. It's likely that we'll want to refresh, kind of over the next three-year view, where do we think we can take this business. I think I've said publicly that the contribution to our bottom line could double theoretically within the next three years if we stay on this trajectory. We have high growth ambitions for the business, but at the same time, we want to run it profitably and sustain that ROE in the 20%-25% range. I think this business ultimately will occupy some of the white space that First Republic created when they went under.

We'll do it, and I think the 2.0 version is going to be even better given the totality of what Citizens Financial Group offers with a solid commercial bank. I think we can be in position to really be the bank for successful people and entrepreneurs and kind of across all industry realms, PEVC, and commercial real estate and other sectors. That's what we're aiming for, and I think we're really on the way to achieving that.

It all sounded good, guys. I really appreciate that. Maybe just one last quick one. On slide 22, I noticed you dropped your Fed funds range here by 25 bps, but you still kept the margin range intact at $325-$350. I know it seems like a small change, but the sensitivity of that, the $325-$350, is something investors have been asking about quite a bit. I thought this was a positive that you reduced that, the Fed funds, but you kept the margin range. What kept the range the same? If you could give any color on the sensitivity of that range to Fed funds changes, that would be great. Thanks.

Yeah, sure. Over time, we've been layering in hedges to protect the downside if the Fed cuts rates more aggressively. That's been a focal point. We don't want to be wrong. We don't want to just concern ourselves with the Fed cutting more aggressively because we still have a lot of inflation and we could stay sticky high. We've kept a balanced view as to let's put those hedges on opportunistically when we see little spikes. Over time, if you look back over the six quarters, I think we've increasingly solidified our view that we can sustain that cone at $325-$350, at lower Fed funds rates, down to $275, even I'd like to say down to $2.5 given the direction of travel potentially with Feds. We're working on that.

It's good to spot that because to bring that down to $275-$375, I think, is progress in how we're trying to position ourselves from an interest rate risk management standpoint.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Ebrahim Poonawala. Your line is open.

Just as a follow-up on the very quick on the sensitivity of the Fed funds to the margin, Bruce, you talked about the 10-year having coming down has taken out some wind from the backbook repricing. Is there a level that you're watching on the 10-year where it really begins to sort of hurt that $325 medium-term sort of margin outlook that we should be aware of?

No. One of the other changes that you may not have noted was down in that footnote around the 10-year range. We've also moved that lower, being reflective of kind of where the 10-year is out the window. I think our view still is that we stay kind of between 4% and 4.5% and that the curve will stay steep as the Fed cuts. That's kind of the house view. The fact is, though, that we're more sensitive to the short end of the curve and what happens with Fed funds, less sensitive to kind of the steepness of the curve, although it can have an impact. Even though we took down that range on the 10-year, we've solidified where we are in this cone. That kind of shows you that moving that $425 down to $415 didn't have much of an impact. We'll see where things go.

I'd be surprised if we get kind of meaningfully below 4%. Even if we did, I don't think it has a very significant impact. It can cost us a few basis points. I think the trajectory with time-based is the predominant driver going forward. The frontbook, backbook has been positive. It could be a little less positive, but actually not a big concern at this point.

That's helpful. I guess just another one, looking at slide 20, and I know we'll get a bigger update in January. As we think about the one-time costs tied to this Reimagine the Bank and re-architecting it, any sense of just what cost-save opportunities are there that could help fund that investment as all of us think about what expense growth could look like next year? Thanks.

Sure. If you look back historically in terms of what were those one-time costs, they tended to be either severance-related or consulting to implement some of the ideas or some frictional cost in terms of vendor tear-offs or write-off of technology platforms. I wouldn't expect the kind of one-timers to vary from that bucket. The question is, what's the pacing on how we're incurring those costs? Can we make sure we have a list of fast actionable items that can start to spin up some benefits in year in 2026 so we can largely neutralize that? What we tried to do on this slide was really just show you the contours of the exercise. We're turning over every rock. We're looking at customer touchpoints, how we're running the bank, etc., etc.

When we bring it back to a financial framework, we're trying to make sure it scales so that ultimately we achieve meaningful size, similar to or better than Top 6, that we don't go backwards and have a negative impact on kind of 2026. If we do, it's quite mild. It's moderate, modest, I would say. We start to already see some real benefits coming in in 2027, and that kind of really the ship comes in in 2028. That's kind of the way we're thinking about it. Brendan, you can add some color to that and maybe talk about a couple of the fast action ideas that we're thinking about for 2026. 2026, yeah.

Yeah, sure. If you bucket our ideas into two categories, I'd sort of broadly describe them as tech and AI-enabled for 50% or so, and the other 50% would be less so around tech and AI-enabled. Maybe you could categorize them as more traditional and what we would have seen in a project top in the past, but with a longer-term outlook, a more strategic application of those categories. Vendor simplification, post-COVID reevaluating our workforce and where we want it to be over the next five years, and cleaning up our corporate facilities where we can take out some excess seating capacity and strategically restructure to build our culture and have people co-located to move faster and more innovative ways. There are things like that. The branch network, as an example, we think it's time to position it for long-term net household growth and deposit growth.

We have made strong and steady progress, but there's more work to do now that we have better visibility into what the post-COVID world will look like for retail banking. We still have a number of branches that are underperforming and can help fund the journey of repositioning the network and densifying in other markets to position for growth. All of those things we have analyzed, and we have enough quick wins there to drop to the bottom line that it can self-fund whatever one-time costs come along with it. When you turn your attention to the tech and AI-enabled initiatives, it will require technology investment, which will be a little bit higher probably than some of our other top programs, just given the amount of the runway of three years multiplied by introducing new things like AI, like data and analytics into the ecosystem.

Because we would capitalize that over time and get the benefits over time, those costs are, you could consider them one-time as an investment, but the way you would account for them, they would be linked to the benefits over the three-year window. It allows us to smooth it out and make sure that there's a de minimis J curve on the portfolio of initiatives that we're going after. We feel pretty good that we can accomplish that. Certainly, our principal objective is to deliver our 16%-18% ROTCE target over the medium term. This should be accretive to that, not take us in the wrong direction. We've engineered the whole program to do just that.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Manan Gosalia. Your line is open with Morgan Stanley.

I wanted to check in on the capital markets side. You noted it's the second best quarter ever, the best third quarter. I understand some deals were pushed to 3Q from 2Q. Can you talk about the pipeline that you're seeing today, what the outlook looks like going into 4Q and going into next year?

Sure. I'll start and flip it to Don. I think we've seen strength this quarter across the board. If you look at the major places that we're playing, our bank lending, syndicated lending business has been strong. Our bond business has been strong. The equities calendar has opened up, that's been strong. M&A activity has picked up. If you think of those as kind of the four big areas, we're doing well across all four. I'd say looking out, the conditions that we've gotten used to, the uncertainty and some of the headline risk that takes place, market participants are saying this is the new normal and we have to get on with doing business. Having spreads really tight is good for refinancing and pull forward in that realm.

We have strong pipelines into Q4, and we feel good about how we're positioned and we can have a sustained period of increased activity, which benefits us relative to peers based on what we've built out in the capital markets. I'll turn it over to Don with that.

I don't really know what I can add to that. It was pretty complete. I think the thing is I look back at the third quarter, and as I look into the fourth quarter into 2026, it's the diversity of the flows. As Bruce said, we're seeing it across M&A pipelines, bond pipelines, IPO pipelines, equity follow-ons, and syndicated finance. The one thing that we haven't really seen, which feels like it's beginning to get going right now, is private equity leaning in. I mean, you've seen some big private equity mega deals be announced, but the core middle market private equity, Brendan and I were at one of the houses yesterday, and they said, "Finally, we're starting to see the 2021 vintages begin to get refinanced." That is not in the pipelines in a significant way.

We think that could be quite a big opportunity for us as we go forward. I would just say that as I look back on second quarter, third quarter, into fourth quarter, into 2026, we've just got a real diversified flow of business. Remember, we are a middle market investment bank, and we basically make a lot of our money and a lot of our transactional volumes with our core clientele and with our core private equity relationships. I don't really see it slowing down anytime in the future. As Bruce said, I think the backdrop is better than I've seen it in three or four years, just in terms of Washington sentiment, liquidity in the marketplaces, interest rates. There are a lot of positives out there that should continue to propel the capital markets feeling.

That's very helpful. Maybe if I can pivot over to credit, there's a lot of focus on the risks around private credit this quarter. You have a slide at the back where you show that the exposure is about $3.3 billion. Can you give us some more color on what that exposure looks like and where you see potential risks and what you're broadly seeing there?

Why don't I pick up on that also? The way we lend to the private credit complex is really through securitization structures. It is very, very high credit quality with diversified pools of collateral. I haven't looked completely, but I don't think we've had any losses in our private credit pools related to any of the big headline kind of bankruptcies that have happened in terms of the underlying. Just think about it. We lend against 100 to 150 different collateral pools of individual credits, and we have very strong structures, very strong protections in terms of covenants, collateral kickouts, visibility into the underlying structures. We are super, and as you said, it's a very small portion of our overall book, but it's actually one of the highest quality things that we do across the entirety of the commercial bank. I'm very comfortable with it.

The thing I always look at is, are there structural degradations going on in terms of terms and conditions, in terms of how people are lending into some of the private credit funds? We haven't seen it, and the structures are holding up pretty well so far. Most of these are 364-day lines. They're pretty short term, so we can adjust the book if we see anything that disturbs us pretty quickly.

Yeah, I would just add that if you look at big categories like subscription line financing, or securitizations, or asset-based structures, their kind of loss history is pretty pristine, and they're all investment grade across those three categories. We are very diligent on who we're kind of lending money to, and we're very diligent around the structures that we feel protect us. We have a very positive view on credit in those areas.

Thank you. Your next question comes from Chris McGratty with KBW. Your line is open.

Oh, great. Good morning. Bruce, the 16%-18% ROTCE over time, does the, I'm trying to connect the Reimagine the Bank benefits to the range that you've previously given. Do the benefits from this new plan, which we'll get in January, does that give you a bias to a certain part of the range or perhaps a sooner realization? I'm just trying to connect the two.

Yeah. We're on our way to 16%-18%, and we're not reliant on the Reimagine the Bank today to get into that range. To me, the question is, you know how soon do they have meaningful impact? That should allow us to torque those numbers up a bit. I think it's too early to do that. We're just kind of flashing you the contours of the program. Anyway, I think we'll have more specific color on that when we get to January and we give you a more fulsome forward outlook.

Okay. It's additive. I guess you're not announcing this plan because you're not on track to get it. This gives you greater confidence that you will get there.

Right. Once you get those benefits, the question is how much will flow straight through versus do you want to reinvest and accelerate the growth rate in private bank and have the flywheel go even faster, which creates positive operating leverage and more PPNR growth? You have all those decisions. I think importantly, if you're improving your cost structure and your cost base and your customer experience, that puts you in a very strong position to have optionality of the things you want to do. That's how I would think about it, Chris.

Okay. Thanks for that. My follow-up would be on just use of capital. You've talked about the earnings contribution of the private bank picking up. The loan growth is picking up. Any other, I guess, near to intermediate-term uses of capital, either organic or inorganic, that we might need to be thinking about? Thanks.

I think the number one is to facilitate the loan growth as it comes back, which we think will continue. We want to grow the business and grow the number of customers that are customers of the bank. You saw also we announced a dividend increase. We want to now get back on a regular cycle of dividend increases. I don't, at this point, see meaningful uses of capital on bolt-ons. We can look for other M&A boutiques and industry verticals that we have. If we don't think we have full coverage, we can look at doing some interesting tech-oriented acquisitions in the payment space again, which won't use a huge amount of capital. There's a good likelihood that we'll continue to be repurchasing our share with the excess capital we're generating. As I like to say, I still think the stock is cheap if we continue to execute.

Thank you. Your next question comes from John Pancari with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

Oh, just on the expense front, I know you cited the ongoing investment in the private bank and teams as well as in the parts of the commercial bank, but also the Reimagine the Bank initiative. Given all of that and given where you're running right now in terms of your expense growth, how do you think about the pace of expense growth that's reasonable as we look at 2026? If you're unable to give us too much around that, is there a way we could think about the degree of positive operating leverage that's attainable as we look at it? Certainly, it's a pretty wide range in terms of some of the projections out there, and it could be pretty meaningful as you look at the pace of your revenue growth at this point.

Yeah. If you look at this year, we're already back into the positive operating leverage territory. I think we'll continue to see that NIM expansion and NII growth, which really comes without a lot of additional expenses. That's very accretive to the efficiency ratio improvement and positive operating leverage. Where we have been leaning in on investing expense dollars has been the buildup of the private bank. This year, we were running, say, 2.5 to 3 on the core business and then add another 1.5+ to the private bank. I think investors should feel really good about that. We're getting a great return on those expense dollars.

Looking out into next year, I don't want to get into guide because I say we're going to do it in January, but I think we'd have even more positive operating leverage because I think we'll have higher revenue growth for the full year, and the expense growth shouldn't be too far off of what we're doing this year. It's just an early glimpse.

Okay. Thanks, Bruce. I appreciate that color. It's helpful. Regarding the margin, I know earlier you cited a bit tighter commercial spreads that had impacted the margin performance in your outlook a bit here. Can you maybe elaborate a little bit? Where are you seeing that tightening and what areas is it? What competitors are you seeing that are driving that pressure? Is it more temporary, or do you think there's a degree of permanence to this that's going to require a reaction out of you?

No, I think if you look at the broad markets at every credit index, we're tightening across the board. The good news is that that's reflective of lots of liquidity in the marketplace, but it's putting a little bit of pressure on refinancing. As we think about returns in terms of the customers that we're banking, we, of course, focus on NIM and return on credit allocation, but we look at overall returns on relationships. You add in what Brendan's done on the private bank, which is just another way that we can kind of interact with the clients that we're banking. The real strategy that we've tried to build over the last 10 years has been one of broad-based financial services applications where we can make a combination of fee income and NII on the commercial side of the equation. I think that that's proven to be quite effective.

If you look at our overall returns on our client relationships, they're going up quite a bit. If we're giving a little bit back on spread here and there, we're making it up on fee income. You can see that in some of the results that we've been doing. I don't see that equation changing a lot over the next year or two. There's a lot of liquidity, and I think spreads are going to remain tight. We just got to pick our spots and make sure that we generate broad returns across the relationships that we're trying to bank.

Got it. Thanks so much, Don. Very, very helpful.

Thank you. The next question comes from Matt O'Connor with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Citizens Financial Group (CFG) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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