Truist Financial at BancAnalysts Conference: Strategic Growth Focus

On Thursday, 06 November 2025, Truist Financial Corp (NYSE:TFC) presented its strategic vision at The BancAnalysts Association of Boston Conference. Led by Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, the company outlined its ambition to achieve a 15% Return on Tangible Common Equity (ROTCE) by 2027. The discussion highlighted both opportunities and challenges, emphasizing growth in Wholesale Banking and efficiency improvements.

Key Takeaways

• Truist aims for a 15% ROTCE by 2027, focusing on Wholesale Banking growth.
• The company plans to double revenue growth and increase deposit growth.
• Talent acquisition is crucial, with over 300 new hires to support expansion.
• Truist reports a 37% increase in Wealth AUM from Premier clients.
• Strong loan growth observed, driven by new projects and competitive deposit strategies.

Financial Results

• ROTCE Target: Truist is committed to reaching a 15% ROTCE by 2027.
• Loan Growth: Higher than expected, fueled by client projects.
• Net Charge-Offs: Very low at 20 basis points, indicating strong credit quality.
• Wealth AUM: Up 37%, driven by new Premier client acquisitions.
• Treasury Management Fees: Increased by 15%, reflecting strong performance.

Operational Updates

• Talent Acquisition: Over 300 hires across various sectors, including payments and industry teams.
• Leadership: Carrie Jasani appointed to lead Commercial and Corporate Bank.
• Sales Expansion: 35% increase in sales consultants in Wholesale Payments.
• Product Innovation: Introduction of a new treasury product each month.

Future Outlook

• ROTCE Goal: Achievable with current resources and strategies.
• Deposit Growth: Continued focus on generating momentum to support loan growth.
• Revenue Growth: Aiming to double, with a commitment to operating leverage in 2025.
• Efficiency Improvements: Ongoing efforts to enhance operational efficiency.

Q&A Highlights

• Commercial Customer Base: Described as resilient, with growth-focused clients.
• Loan Growth: Strong across middle market and commercial real estate.
• Deposit Strategy: Granular management of deposit rates, focusing on market share.
• Investment Banking: Expected growth near high-single to low double-digit percentages.
• AI CapEx: Funding CapEx for data centers, leveraging client relationships.

For more detailed insights, readers are invited to refer to the full transcript provided below.

Full transcript - The BancAnalysts Association of Boston Conference:

Terry, Host: Is a top 10 U. S. Commercial bank headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina with over $540,000,000,000 of assets. The company’s footprint includes seven of the top 10 fastest growing markets in the country. Representing the company today is Kristin Leisure, Truist’s Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, where she leads teams across commercial and corporate banking, commercial real estate payments, investment banking as well as wealth management.

She joined Truist back in February 2024 after spending more than two decades with Wells Fargo. So we’ll start with the presentation and then transition over to Q and A.

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: All right. Awesome. Thank you, Terry, and good morning, everybody. I’m going to spend a little time going through a few slides here. So before I get started, I’d like to note that our presentation is going to include forward looking statements and non GAAP financial measures.

There’s a disclosure here. And with that, I will get into it. So as you know, Truist is a purpose driven company. We feel really strongly that our purpose is going to be fueled by our performance, and that involves delivering value by executing a very clear strategy to drive shareholder returns. And I’m going to spend some time this morning talking about how we’re going to do that.

So as Terry mentioned, I joined Truist in February 2024. And in coming to the company, I saw a lot of things that you all know about Truist. We have very strong bones, like an attractive franchise with a fantastic client base in fantastic markets. But most importantly, I joined because I saw a compelling growth opportunity that where we have a right to win and we had everything we needed like right within the four walls of Truist. So delivering growth against this opportunity, we’ve started to do that.

You guys have seen us pick up significant momentum this year, but we know that we need to be delivering higher growth. Bill noted on our third quarter earnings call that we are going to achieve a 15% ROTCE by 2027. Part of doing that requires us to double our revenue growth to deliver deposit growth that we need to see for this franchise. And we have an opportunity to enhance our returns across all of our businesses in Wholesale and in CSBB. So today, I’m going to give you a little bit of a run through Wholesale, what we have in the business as well as how we’re going to contribute to driving that higher return profile.

So what is wholesale? Terry introduced it with all the business lines. It’s really a complete client coverage business. So we cover clients across the continuum from our local and regional teams, which are like have been the core of our franchise for a really long time as well as through national industry focused teams. We’ve got a full suite of products, and we’ve got scale in all of our businesses and a really attractive installed base.

We’ve also got an ability, because of our size, to deliver nimbly and provide a differentiated level of service to our clients. So the challenge here is unlocking the growth opportunity that sits directly in this business. And in the unlock, we’ve got to deliver to you all higher ROE, fuller wallet share with our clients and a higher base of fee revenue that is diversified in the way that it’s mixed. So I’m going to talk a little bit about what that growth opportunity looks like. And I’m going to do that in a way to say like where were we when I arrived in February 2024 and where are we now.

So when I arrived, wholesale and CSBB had been brought together as our two business lines in an important effort to be able to run our company in a more simple and efficient way. But in effect, what we had were a lot of lines of business underneath wholesale but not yet a truly integrated wholesale franchise. And so the very first thing we needed to do was to make sure that we are delivering a clear strategy to every person on our team where they understood the benefit of us integrating the business and what we needed to do in order to drive growth for Truist. And the good news is, is that looks like driving incremental share in every single business that we have as well as driving outsized growth in some important areas like payments, which I’ll spend some time talking about, where we are much smaller than peers and much less penetrated than our peers. So what did that mean?

In addition to outlining the strategy, though, we needed to do some more things. So let me tell you what we have done. First, we needed to find another gear in terms of execution, just like get to an entirely different gear in terms of how we’re executing. So what that looks like in our company today is literally top to bottom monthly business reviews based on data and indicators that talk about the financial outcomes that we’re achieving, what we’re changing in order to make sure that our coverage strategy is lined up against our objectives, the underlying performance indicators, some of which I’m going to share with you this morning that tell us that we’re driving towards the outcomes that we’re going to deliver. It also included bringing a totally higher sense of urgency.

And so I’ll give you some examples of what that looks like today. So one good example is when we got when I arrived, I said, okay, we need to go capture more of the market with an industry banking strategy. That meant we needed to bring on some additional talent, both in our industry teams and importantly, in our middle market and local and regional teams, and we did not want to wait to do that. So over the past year, we’ve hired over 300 people across all of the businesses, whether they be the local teams, industry teams with capabilities around payments where we needed them. But we wanted to move fast, and we were able to attract the talent in a really quick way so that we can end this year in a place where we’ve got the foundation in a great spot to continue to build momentum next year.

The other thing we needed to do was just act more urgently around client requests. So a couple of examples here. Deliver a term sheet to a client in twenty four hours, like get back to them in a day, and let’s be really, really fast about how we’re operating for our clients. Or another example would be as Dante and I partner to drive the growth between our Premier and Wealth businesses, let’s get in a room with the right people and figure out a way in a matter of weeks to automate referrals to our financial advisers and make that happen fast. So in addition to a sense of urgency, we also needed a mindset around we’re going to invest and become more efficient, and we’re going to do it at the same time.

And so we have been very clear that we’re going to deliver the operating leverage that is expected in 2025. We’re going to continue to grow in 2026 and deliver operating leverage. That’s a mindset that I’m used to operating in. It’s kind of how I’ve been running businesses at predecessors. And here, I want to make sure that everybody understands that in addition to the growth opportunities that exist within our four walls, so do the efficiency opportunities.

We can see them, and we can continue to find the dollars to invest in the revenue generating opportunities that we need, and I don’t feel hemmed in at all by our ability to do that. So let me run through a few of the facts on some of the businesses. And with each one, I’m going to try and give you my perspective on like, okay, here’s what we have, here’s where we were and here’s where we’re going. So commercial and corporate banking, this is really the engine of our wholesale business. So $100,000,000,000 of our loans and $100,000,000,000 of deposits almost reside in this business.

It includes the local core of our franchise, which is the local and regional teams run by the region presidents and their communities. It also includes the national industry teams as part of our corporate banking effort. So here’s where we were. We were in a place where we really weren’t growing. We were internally focused, and we didn’t have all of our incentives and goals aligned directly to the kind of growth that we wanted to deliver.

We also had a barbell situation with our clients where we have a fantastic client base in the commercial and middle market zone, and we had a great client base that we’ve been covering out of our investment bank. But in the middle, there was a lot of opportunity that is absolutely out there, and those clients believe that Truist is a compelling alternative to them. So what have we done? We’ve changed the way that we require our leaders to drive their business, put a lot more accountability on how they’re growing. An example would be every region president has recently delivered a plan on how they’re going to double their business.

It includes everything from how are they going to deepen with their existing clients, what new clients are they going after, what talent do they need, and we’re reviewing that with them every single month to make sure that we’re making progress against it. It also includes changing our scorecards and incentives and making them integrated across the business. What I mean by that is instead of incenting people on just new business revenue growth in any way that you can find it, making sure that we’re driving fulsome relationship wallets, including the things that are the most important, the treasury management, the fees that we need as well as the deposits, and that we’re doing that with both our existing clients and new while deepening across the areas of our franchise that we’re trying to deepen. And we’re getting results. So right now, we see results in terms of the revenue per client is going up.

We’ve doubled the number of new clients that we’ve acquired this year. We’re getting a in those new clients, we’re actually getting to levels that are akin to what you would expect in the industry in terms of those clients awarding us treasury management business and bringing their payments to us. The other thing that we’ve done, as I mentioned, is added a significant amount of talent here. And that talent has joined our already amazing talent and created a bit of a catalyst in terms of just excitement and an esprit de corps around our growth mission. And the growth that we’re seeing so far is on the back of our existing teammates.

Those new teammates have arrived in the course of the last couple of quarters, and you’ll start to see more productivity out of them as they get going next year. All right. Investment Banking and Capital Markets. So this we have a full service investment bank. This is a business that’s been built organically over a number of years.

We’ve been making all along the way investments here in talent that has given us the good fortune of having nine industry groups that are built on the back of complete teams across coverage and product and research. And we’ve also got a sales and trading platform that supports our origination businesses. So this is a great story because this is a place where we already have strength, we already have scale, and the job here is to continue to feed it and tune it. But this is not a place where there’s like big things that we have to go invest in. We need to keep letting it do what it’s doing and continue to mature.

So already, as part of the growth profile, we’ve been seeing increases in our position on deals, as evidenced by the book runner roles. We’ve seen increases in the economics that we’re getting, up 20% over the last few years. And we’ve been evolving as you would expect in Investment Banking business to grow, which is, first, you find a lot of success in the debt capital markets products and some of the those products, but you continue to build what you’re doing in M and A and ECM. And so our opportunity here is really what I view as a natural evolution of this business is that we’re going to continue to add higher returning fee content to places where we’ve already got capital deployed and really strong client relationships. The other thing that we’re going to be able to do is to grow some fee areas where we haven’t had as much focus, things like FX and derivatives that’s already growing 25% this year.

We’ve also intentionally added more corporate bankers in an effort to provide more dual coverage in the places we’ve already got capital deployed. So only 40% of our investment banking clients that we already have are dual covered today, where we’re going after the full wallet. So the opportunity here is for those corporate bankers to join up with the investment bankers and make sure we’re getting deeper wallet share out of the clients that we’re covering together. Wealth business. We are fortunate to have a scaled wealth business.

It’s got 300,000 clients. We’ve got $300,000,000,000 in assets, client assets, and it’s about 1,000,000,000 point dollars in revenue. It’s got a complete set of services across products. It’s got a differentiated center for family legacy that serves our highest Genspring clients. And it’s really got good things in place.

So here’s where it was, though. Last year, we were losing advisers. We were not investing as dramatically as we needed to be in or we were not investing enough in the platforms that the advisers and the clients wanted to see. We were not growing our net flows. And in all honesty, we weren’t executing with the right amount of precision around the opportunity that exists within Truist, within our own client base.

So what we’ve done is we’ve been attracting really high quality advisers. We’ve hired great people in all of our markets that are coming to us from larger institutions. We’ve got our adviser attrition rate down in the low single digits, like very, very low. And so now we’re building on that recruiting profile. We’ve also been, in the last couple of quarters, growing our fees.

And so we’re seeing the momentum in terms of growing the wealth management income, and we’re absolutely growing our net flows this year in a big way. So the opportunity here is the other thing that we’ve done is we’ve been really disciplined in setting up the systems that will help us capture capture more of the opportunity from Premier and more of the opportunity from Wholesale. So with Premier as an example, Dante and I worked together to say, all right, you know what, we don’t have the right number of financial advisers decked against the right branches geared in the right way. We went out and hired the financial advisers that we needed. We pointed them in the right places.

We installed systems of accountability between the premier leaders and the wealth advisor and the financial advisers where we review them every single week. And we have, in doing that, increased substantially the number of referrals that we’re getting. But more importantly, the proof of the results we are seeing. So our wealth AUM that we’re gathering from new premier clients is up 37%. That’s just the AUM, not all the assets.

And so we’re seeing significant momentum there that we expect to continue, and we’re doing the same with our wholesale clients. This is a really big opportunity for us. So only 2.5% of Truist clients today are investment clients with us. So there’s a big, big group of our own clients that are not yet wealth clients. The other opportunity that we have that’s not on this page, but I’ll highlight it is, we’ve got a big opportunity in our margin here, too.

So only 20% of our wealth clients have a securities baseline with us, and we have thousands of investment only clients that have not yet brought deposits to us. So there is a big amount of opportunity in this business. Wholesale payments is a key scaled growth area for us, one where we’re undersized relative to our peers and one where we’re underpenetrated with our own clients. Where we were a year ago is that, in all honesty, I don’t feel like we had the hearts and minds of our bankers that this was a place that they could go out and confidently market the product to their clients. So what have we done?

We’ve meaningfully improved our product set. We went this is another example of sense of urgency. We took it from a place where I would say we had some gaps to a place where we’re getting pretty close to peerish in a very short period of time. We’ve introduced new products every single month. And now the best validation for me is some of the new corporate bankers who are joining our platform from other places.

I say to them, how do you feel about the product? They’re like, I got what I need. I’m ready to roll. I’m out on the road talking to my clients. We also had to do some work on our sales strategy.

So in fairness, we didn’t have enough treasury consultants, and we didn’t have them geared or segmented in the right way. We’ve made all those changes. We’ve added 35% more sales consultants. We’ve got them lined up by the client sets that they’re covering, whether it’s industry or local. And we’ve gotten to a place where we absolutely have the hearts and minds of our bankers.

If you got off on the elevator on any floor of the Truist Center and said like, a, how important is treasury management to you? You would hear them say that it’s front and center and b, how confident do you feel? And you would hear them say, man, we’ve really come a long way, and I feel good about where we are. And that’s showing up in our results, 15% increase in treasury management fees. We’re getting more revenue per client, and we’re closing the gap in terms of penetration.

So we’ve gone now we’re much more penetrated with our existing base, but there’s a long way left to go there. And I would think about that as if we get to a place that looks similar to where our peers were, this business could be double the size. All right. Wrapping it up. So hopefully, helps you get a feel for, a, what wholesale is, how we’re operating very differently and getting a little confidence in just the absolute rigor around the execution every single day.

But what I’d leave you with is everybody in our company is going to play a role in Truist achieving its ROTCE target. From my vantage point, we’ve got what we need here. I talked to the team last week and said like this 15% ROTCE is built on the back of the plan that we are already executing with the people that are already here, with the product set that we already have. And what we need to do now is to just execute, execute, execute. We’re building momentum.

We recognize that we need to show you more momentum, especially in the places where we need to drive deposit growth in order to fuel that. But I feel like we are on pace and really, really happy to take your questions.

Terry, Host: Great. That’s great. Thank you, Kristin. Maybe just to start off, taking a step back, how would you describe the health of your commercial customer base? Are clients focused on growth and investments in this environment?

Or are they concerned with some of the potential risks on the horizon?

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: So I would say that the commercial customer base across the full continuum, right, like commercial to larger corporate, has been really resilient this year, learned to operate in terms of what has been a changing landscape. And we have seen higher loan growth than I think even we expected to see at the beginning of this year. And that loan growth for us is coming on the back of clients pursuing new projects or deciding to enhance their operations in one way or another. It’s not coming through increased utilization or things like that. It’s like true new production and new projects.

So it feels to me like the underlying health is pretty good, and the confidence levels feel pretty good.

Terry, Host: Great. And then maybe how are you thinking about

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: Actually, you know what, I’ll say one more thing, which is from a credit risk perspective, which is there’s kind of the confidence of the clients and then the risk that you’re seeing in the portfolio. We’re operating with very, very low net charge offs, something in the 20 basis point range in wholesale. And so we’re still seeing very strong credit quality within our book as well.

Terry, Host: Okay. Within your presentation, you talked about the hires you’ve made. Can you maybe just expand on some of these key hires and some of the other changes you’ve made and kind of that shift to more urgency within wholesale?

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: Yes, happy to. I put the hires in a few different categories. So there are some places where we wanted to bring in some specific skill sets. And so I would highlight we brought in Carrie Jasani to lead the Commercial and Corporate Bank last February. That was intentional in that we needed someone who had experience working in the Investment Bank and then driving the right connectivity between the Investment Bank and the Commercial Bank with a strategy that was highly oriented around industry coverage as well as a lot of expertise with treasury management, both product and sales.

So there’s an example of like I wanted a certain type of capability to lead that business. We’ve also needed to bring in industry group heads in our Corporate Banking teams because we did not have those before, so we needed to go get them. But importantly, there’s also places where in the core commercial business, we know we can do more in our own footprint. And so it’s just adding more bankers in those areas and then surrounding them with the capabilities that they need to be successful. So making sure that when we hire, we also bring on the treasury consultant or the corporate finance expert or the person in credit delivery who can help them deliver.

And then I think with respect to the sense of urgency, I think everybody is just managing in a way that is like, let’s make sure that we’re looking at things all the time, every day, every week, etcetera. And I’ll give you an example. Some of the routines that just maybe weren’t as instilled as we would like them are going through the loan only book every single week and looking at where are there opportunities to add deposits or go out and make sure that we’re pitching payments or derivatives opportunities to them. When we’re extending credit, are we making sure that we’re getting those things? And doing that with a level of inspection and granularity that does look and feel different than it did.

Terry, Host: And in terms of loan growth, which has been strong for Truist this year, where are you seeing pockets of strength and weakness? And then as you look out into 2026, what are the opportunities there?

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: Yes. So I spend a lot of time looking at the business drivers on a granular level, like each individual market, each individual industry team, C and I and CRE. And what I’d say is we’re actually finding strength across most of those areas. We’ve had particular strength in middle market loan growth this year, which has been great. We’ve also had a lot of strength in our commercial real estate business, where we’ve been lending to companies that have been our clients for a really long time, whether it be multifamily investments and or in the data center space.

And so but it’s been truly widespread loan growth across the book. And the thing that’s really good about it is it’s been a really nice combination of with our existing clients. And then the pickup in new clients is obviously contributing to that as well.

Terry, Host: And then do you see private credit or direct lenders posing a risk to your ability to support and drive that loan growth? Or do you see it as an opportunity for Truist?

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: Well, I’d say before I get to private credit, I’d highlight two important opportunities for Truist. One is we’ve got to generate the deposit momentum that continues to fund this loan growth, and we are super focused on that. It’s we have we made an important pivot in the third quarter in terms of growing client deposits, which will continue, but we’ve got to make sure that we’re generating the deposits to fuel the loan growth. And then secondly, I don’t think about loan growth as what we need exactly to deliver on this ROTCE target. I think about we need profitable growth to deliver on the ROTCE target with a heavy complement of fees in it.

So back to private credit. We view them in two ways. One, they’re really important clients to us. Just as Mike mentioned earlier, we do a lot of lending business to them, which we are able to do against middle market loan portfolios at very attractive attachment points for us. We also view them as places where they invest and with them.

We can do more operating business with them as well, and they give us a significant amount of fee business in our Capital Markets franchise. So you guys have seen us grow our FIG practice this year, our financial institutions practice. And that’s a place where, especially in the areas of specialty finance, we’re able to generate incremental loans and fees. As it relates to loan growth in the middle market, we compete with them. And I think that we have a very strong risk discipline around how and what we want to put on our balance sheet.

And so there are lots of places where they’re able to do things at higher leverage levels, and that’s okay. There’s plenty of other opportunity for us to grow, as you’ve seen by what we’ve been showing.

Terry, Host: And since you brought up deposits, I’ll shift over there. Could you just characterize the competitive landscape within the commercial space and how you’re managing the rates you pay to your clients?

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: Yes, I will. So I think a couple of things that are really consistent about how we’re managing our deposit strategy. First and foremost, it’s inextricably linked to the fact that we’ve got a key strategy around driving wholesale payments. And so just doing that and driving more operating deposits with clients is a key element of how we’re going to attract more deposits. The other thing that’s consistent is everybody in the company knows how important this is for us, and they’re focused on it.

So then when you get down to the how and how you think about it within your markets, I think we have to look at it in a super granular way. So the deposit competition in our deposit strategy has to be different depending on each and every market. So as an example, we’ve got a lot of high market share markets with a high base of low cost deposits in some of the Southeast cities. We cannot cannibalize that base and reprice our back book. So we’re being super disciplined about not doing that while growing with new clients.

We’ve got other places like Texas or Pennsylvania where we have less of a back book, and we’re able to be a little bit more aggressive in terms of how we’re going out to gather new deposits with new clients. But on balance, we’ve got to manage that portfolio of activities to make sure that we’re generating more client deposits but doing it at an attractive rate.

Terry, Host: And then shifting to Investment Banking and Trading. First half of the year, a little bit weak. Third quarter, a very strong quarter. So what would you consider more of a normal growth rate within that business on an annual basis? And then just talk about the connectivity between the capital markets and the lending platform.

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: Yes, sure. So that’s been a business where, over the last few years, we’ve been able to put up pretty consistent growth rates that I don’t know if you want to say high single, low double digits, but somewhere in that ZIP code. I think that we did have a little bit of a tough second quarter. But in the third quarter, what I saw was tons of strength in all of our businesses and especially in our leveraged finance platform. In the fourth quarter, we’re off to a strong start.

In fact, I mentioned higher content of M and A transactions in the last couple of weeks, and we actually priced a left lead IPO this week. So like we’re doing the things that we say we’re going to do there. And my expectation is that, that business can continue to grow at that kind of a clip with the right level of investment, but again, not the kind of place where we need to go out and do a lot of new things. We need to continue to mature it. The benefit I see between the capital markets and the rest of our lending platform is significant.

So I think we have a huge opportunity to capture more, say, M and A business within just our commercial, middle market, industry oriented banking clients. This year so far, we’ve generated 20% more fees off of those clients in our installed base in addition to providing the excellent coverage that we’re going to provide to our corporate clients. The other thing I’d say is important about us creating the Commercial and Corporate Banking business and putting the corporate bankers into that group is that we’ve given our investment bankers more leverage to focus their energy around driving M and A and advisory solutions, which is what we’re going to be building in.

Terry, Host: Let’s take a pause and see if there are some questions in the audience. How about Betsy right in front?

Betsy, Unidentified speaker: Congratulations on thirty five years, Betsy.

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: Congratulations.

Betsy, Unidentified speaker: Hold on one second. The mic is coming. If you don’t mind repeating the question.

Betsy, Unidentified speaker: Okay. Kristen, thanks so much for a very fulsome presentation. I did just want to unpack a little bit about the payment sleeve. And what are these new products that you have come to market with? And could you help us understand how much payments how critical payments is for you to be building that deposit growth as you look forward?

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: Yes, sure. Thank you. So the question, I’m going to repeat it for the audience, was unpack the payment sleeve a little bit, talk more specifically about the products we’ve introduced and then how critical payments is in order to be able to capture deposits. So as it relates to products, we’ve rolled out products across a variety of elements. So we have integrated receivables.

We’ve rolled out electronic bill pay presentment. Last week, we made an announcement about Truist Connect, which is our ability to work with any and all ERP systems in an embedded fashion. And so we’ve really gotten the platform to a place where we have all of the capabilities that clients should need. We also are in a place where we’ve got a foundation from which we can add capabilities and APIs now really, really rapidly going forward. So it’s been across all kinds of things, Betsy.

But I think the other area that I would highlight is we’re really focused on where the world is going with real time payments and making sure that as we’re rolling out our products, we’re really playing into what clients will want to do with real time payments. As it relates to payments as a driver of our deposit growth, I would say that I do think it’s super critical. And in some ways, that’s because it’s like a mindset. It’s you’re talking to your clients all the time about how they’re sending money inside and outside of their company, and you’re helping them do it faster and better. So when we say we come to clients with an advisory approach, being great at payments is part of that, and that will bring the deposits.

But I also think we’ve got levers to pull, understanding that that’s a slower business to build. We’ve got a lot of levers to pull that we haven’t pulled yet in terms of just attracting deposits now. So example would be like many of the places where we’ve got capital already extended, whether it be in commercial real estate, whether it be in investment banking and capital markets. We’ve got capital out there. We’re generating capital markets fees.

We haven’t asked for the deposits yet. And so we’re going through all that in a really methodical way, and that will bring client deposits quickly. The other thing, I think, is just the natural pace of new client acquisition is really important. And increasing from 2x what we’re doing now versus last year to 3x, like that will bring deposits at a rapid pace. And hopefully, we’ll get the payments within the next eight to twelve months, but we should get the deposits right away.

Betsy, Unidentified speaker: There’s a question back there from Mike. Mike Mayo with Wells Fargo. Since so much CapEx is coming from AI, what is the Truist sales pitch when you go to try to get that business to help facilitate the CapEx from the biggest tech firms?

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: Thanks for the question, Mike. So the question was about so much CapEx coming from AI. How does Truist play in that sort of industry trend? I’ll summarize it as. And I would say, broadly speaking, our loan growth is coming from CapEx in lots of different ways.

So from just regular industrial and consumer companies all across our footprint that are doing things to improve and enhance their business operations, and we are helping them fund that. There is also an element of our growth that is coming from, I’ll note, data centers as an example. So we’ve been in the data center business for probably fifteen ish years. We’ve been covering a set of clients for a long time and growing along with them. Obviously, those commitments amount commitments amounts commitment amounts are getting larger and the CapEx requirements are getting larger.

But the great thing about that business is it plays squarely into our strategy and that we’re able to help the clients with the lending. We’re able to participate in the capital markets fees, in the securitizations and able to work with them on the rest of their operating business. So it’s a place that I feel good about how we show up there.

Steve Alexopoulos, Analyst, TD Cowen: Kristen, it’s Steve Alexopoulos, TD Cowen. So every bank has a strategy to sell more products to their customers, every single one we’re hearing from. BofA did a good job yesterday of talking about how they spent billions organizing their data. Tied to that, they know where the opportunities are. They get the information to their bankers.

They basically serve it up on a platter for them. Your approach sounds a little old school. Where are you with these tools? Can you be competitive with a company like that?

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: Yes. So I would actually say that we’ve moved a lot from old school to new school, and I’ll give you a couple of examples. So we have embedded into our systems signals that we send our bankers every single day that tells them, okay, so and so has brought in some additional cash, so and so has been out looking for an opportunity or bought a big new piece of equipment or we see them doing X, Y and Z, you need to call them today. So our RMs have in their Salesforce dashboard every morning, like here are the things that are happening with the companies, and here’s the next best call that I need to go make. That’s one element of it.

The other element of it is, as I said, is we’ve got a significant focus we have a fantastic culture of people who want to work together. We can’t rely on people who want to work together to get to the kind of scaled growth that we need. And so as an example, I’ll go back to the premier to wealth referrals. Basically, using tools to say, what are all the referrals that we’ve generated that actually have resulted in us booking investment assets, apply that same logic across a broad base of our consumer clients and send them like this afternoon to the FAs for them to be able to go out and be working them. So we’re doing this in a way that maybe combines the best of both worlds, like the culture of people who really want to work together, the scorecards and incentives that make that happen and the tools that enable us to do faster without leaving to chance what any individual will do on a given Tuesday.

Terry, Host: I guess just to wrap things up here. Wholesale, really important to hitting that mid teens RoTCE by 2027. How do you think the investment community should be thinking about your ability to achieve this and continue to improve your profitability beyond just the medium term?

Kristin Leisure, Chief Wholesale Banking Officer, Truist: Well, right now, I’m really focused on delivering the medium term. And so I do not think that 15% is where we will end. But I do think that we need to make sure that just as we’ve been doing in the last few quarters that we’re delivering what we say we’re going to do and that you guys can see the execution that drives the return target in 2027, and then we’ll go beyond it.

Terry, Host: Great. Thank you very much. Thanks.

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