The next session. But before we begin, I've been asked to tell you that Raymond Chun's comments today may include forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from forecasts, projections, or conclusions in these statements. Listeners can find additional details in the public filings of TD Bank Group. Okay, thank you for joining.
Thanks for having me here, Darko.
Always a tough one to have with a bank that had an Investor Day so close to, and then a good fourth quarter. And your fourth quarter in particular was interesting in the sense that when I went through the results, there was an amazing amount of guidance in your numbers. So a lot of what I'm going to ask today is maybe for some refinement on a few things. And I do want to go back to the Investor Day and the plan. So what I wanted to sort of touch on is some of the things you said in the last fourth quarter call was pretty interesting in terms of credit card penetration, referrals from wealth, the strength in mortgage origination.
So I wanted to touch on knowing a little bit about sort of how that's coming about so quickly, so strongly, the momentum that you've peaked, what's changed, how is execution going, and how should we think about those things as we head into 2026?
Sure, lots there. I could take 35 minutes just on that one question there, but I'll try to maybe get it down to five, everybody. Listen, we had our Investor Day, which was in September. I mean, in some ways, it feels like it was a lot long, much longer, but it's not that long ago. Let me start by saying, as we come out of the Q4 earnings season, the momentum that we have at TD coming out of the Q4 would be better than I would have anticipated at Investor Day back in September, and so part of what I said on the call is around EPS and ROE. Do we think that there is some tailwind opportunities in those metrics, assuming that the macro environment conditions stay relatively stable? I would say yes.
And so I do think we are further down the journey than I would have anticipated already at this point, even though Investor Day was only in September, so the execution portion. And so what gives me that sort of confidence or the proof points that you would say that the momentum is better than we would have said? I mean, when we exited 2025 on the Canadian Personal Banking, which is certainly the area of the organization that, from an organic growth perspective, is driving a lot of our growth, from a year-on-year growth perspective, we were number one in personal deposit growth, number one in credit card growth, and number one in RESL growth. In the Wealth Management business for Direct Investing, which is a critical business for us in Wealth Management, we had 27% account growth on a year-on-year basis, 37% growth in trades per day.
I mean, these are huge numbers on top of already sort of on a year-on-year basis. I'd say the momentum there. Then you look at TD Securities and Q4 at CAD 2.2 billion in revenues. We continue to see the benefit of the fully integrated North American global platform that we've introduced, and we're just getting started on that journey. I'd say the cost management piece, and I'm sure we'll talk about cost management, Darko, is the piece that we are early days, but I'm excited about. We are doing cost management differently under my leadership and moving to this unit cost management and driving structural costs out, and I'll be happy to talk about that. But on the RESL side, I think it's been a very positive story. For me, winning on RESL absolutely does matter.
If we look at our RESL portfolio, for our clients that have a mortgage with TD, they are 2x more likely to have a checking account, a savings account, and a credit card. And so this whole, remember the three big themes that we have at TD Bank that came out of the Investor Day strat review that we laid out was number one was deepening our relationships across every business line with our clients. Number two was a simpler and faster bank, and number three was disciplined execution. I would tell you having a mortgage matters when you're trying to deepen relationships across the organization. And we are doing things differently on the mortgage side to drive that growth. The mix is one. We've gone from sort of more on the broker side historically to a mixed move towards proprietary mortgages.
And so we're adding 500 mortgage specialists inside of our 500 largest mortgage branches. We have 1,000 MMS, and these are our mortgage mobile sales force that are the hunters. Historically, those individuals would have been hunting externally while the branches were taking care of the organic growth, Darko. Last year, what we did is we brought the mortgage sales force back into the branches. And so what I would tell everybody is that the turnover rate in the personal banking inside of a branch is every 18 to 24 months, you see the personal banker sort of rotating through. There's probably 30% of mortgages that no matter how well you train that group, think self-employed, think rental properties, multi-units, multiple properties, they're just more complex for someone that's only been on the job for 18, 24 months.
Get the mortgage experts, the 1,000 colleagues that are TD proprietary to do that, and that's exactly what we've done. And even in a down home market in 2025, we had record closed deals in mortgages in TD Bank, and it's because of some of these changes that we've made on the RESL side. And then from a profitability perspective, what you've seen, Sona and team has put significant attention towards managing the profitability and the margins, and you're seeing margin expansion on mortgages on both acquisition and renewal. And so the product itself is becoming much, much more profitable from a margin perspective, deepening the relationship, it's key. And then for us, making sure that we become the bank of choice from a relationship banking is critical as part of our strategy.
And so how do you manage the spread, especially with all these renewals going on? Is it just a function of the rates are in a better place?
I think it's a combination of a few things. One is, and I'll speak specifically to TD Bank. I would say historically, over the last number of years, part of our portfolio was the mix of the product, meaning we had a higher percentage of our mortgage portfolio in mortgages versus HELOCs, and so disproportionately higher, and so we are certainly rebalancing that with our clients, and so you'll find better margin on the HELOC portfolio versus the mortgage portfolio, and so you're seeing that. For us, we were over-concentrated a little bit too much on broker from a broker channel perspective, and as you move back to the proprietary channel, you're starting to see margin expansion on that piece of it, and yes, pricing matters, and so we've introduced much, much more sophistication using machine learning, but we've also made real-time pricing engines available for the broker channel.
And so as much as rate matters to a broker, speed matters incredibly. And so speeding up that entire RESL process, Darko, has had huge benefits to us, not just from a closing of deals, but from a profitability.
Okay, great. That's great insight. Maybe switching gears a little bit, thinking about commercial loan growth. I've heard mixed views on commercial going into 2026. Some people are saying, "Look, it's still uncertain, pens are down," but I'm hearing there's also some green shoots. How do you see it in Canada and in the U.S., and where do you see actually the better opportunity in 2026 for your franchises in Canada or the U.S.?
On commercial banking side, if you look at our Q4 numbers, you'd see that we actually had good momentum commercial banking on both sides. In Canada, you saw deposit and loan growth somewhere in that 5%-6% in Q4. What I would tell you in Canada, we are making significant investments in distribution expansion, and that's right across the board. And so remember, if you go back to the Investor Day presentation, what we've said is we're adding 1,200 wealth advisors in Canada, but we'll be adding 880, and that's over the next three years. We're going to add 880 business bankers, and that's a mix between small business bankers and commercial bankers in Canada. And we're going to add 1,000 specialists inside of our branches, the 500 mortgage specialists, but also 500 investment specialists inside of the Canadian.
On the U.S. side, we're going to add 500 wealth advisors in wealth, 200 commercial bankers in the United States. And so part of the accelerating our growth, where we underinvested potentially as a bank over the last number of years, is on our frontline distribution sales capabilities, and that's where we're actually redirecting some of our investments. And so if you think commercial bank specifically, if you go back again to Barb's Investor Day presentation, we were the fifth largest commercial bank 20 years ago. We've grown that business now to be the number two largest commercial bank in Canada. And that's in both commercial lending, also the small business lending. But we fundamentally believe that local leadership matters, and having feet on the ground in the local markets with the specialized skills in the local markets is a differentiator for TD Bank.
And so adding all of these bankers in local markets across the country where we've done the analysis, we have the demand. From a risk perspective and a risk appetite, risk curve, you'll see no change at TD Bank in all of our businesses across the organization when it comes to risk appetite or risk curve. But we need more bankers on the ground across all of our businesses, not just business banking. And that would be true both in Canada and the United States.
But which area do you think you're more optimistic on with respect to loan demand? Would it be Canada or the U.S.?
I think loan demand right now, Canada. I mean, the numbers that I'm seeing would predict that. But we are growing in the United States, and especially in our mid-market businesses in the United States, and our partnership between Leo's commercial banking business and Tim Wiggan's TD Securities business, we're seeing terrific opportunities to build volume in those areas. We haven't had that type of partnership in those two businesses ever before, and we're seeing that now between the commercial bank in the U.S., Darko, and TD Securities with the fully integrated client integration now complete.
Where are you on this journey of adding all of these frontline staff? I mean, it's just very early days, right?
Very early days, but I would say on the business banking side, we added 200 business bankers last year, and again, that's commercial banking, small business banking. On the wealth management side, we added 50, so we actually intentionally slowed the machine a little bit on the wealth. We're going to now accelerate that in Canada on a go-forward basis, and on the U.S. side, I'd say early days from a wealth management perspective, and about half of our growth in each of these areas will be sort of internal colleagues that are moving up inside the organization, so think about personal bankers or the investment specialists becoming financial planners. Think about financial planners becoming investment advisors and those types of things, so you see natural movement there, small business bankers becoming business bankers on that side of it, and that'd be true in the U.S.
And then the other half is external recruiting that we're seeing coming in from other organizations.
And that might be tough in this environment. Markets are up, it's expensive, it's.
You know what? Listen, it's competitive for sure, especially in the wealth management space. But I do think our value proposition that we're presenting to the street and the opportunities is resonating, and we're seeing actually good take-up.
Lots of frontline expansion brings you to costs, right? And one of the interesting things that we heard about at your Investor Day was a far more focused, I would say focused view on costs. You talk about structural costs. Maybe you can talk a little bit about where you are in that journey. And since Investor Day, have you unearthed more opportunities, and what can you say to us about the cost journey?
Absolutely. And I do think cost management, very, very important, as you saw what we said at Investor Day. I was clear that we're looking at cost management under six buckets, and it's structural costs. And so those buckets, distribution transformation, AI, automation, data technology, you're going to get moderation of our expenses spend overall. You've got the global resourcing strategies that we have. And what am I missing? I'm missing one, right? But if I look across those buckets, the biggest thing that I would say to everybody, and I'll give you a couple of examples, is moving to a unit cost management. And so procurement would be the last one. And so when you move to a unit cost management, it is fundamentally different how you're trying to take the real structural costs out of a company permanently.
And so historically, when you would have heard organizations talking about some sort of an expense management, cost management, you'd see project spends being cut, you'd see marketing spends being cut, you might see FTE hiring freezes. All of that, as I've said, is like a fad diet. It all comes back in time. And so what you got to do is say, how do you take the run rate cost of your business completely out? And let me give you a perfect example. On the mortgage side of the business, here's what we're doing. And you can replicate this into the top 20 processes across TD Bank. There's three buckets of costs when you look at mortgages. There's adjudication, there's funding, and then there's sort of end-of-life discharge. Those are the big buckets of costs.
And so if you look at TD Bank's unit cost on adjudication of a mortgage two years ago, that was CAD 514 per unit. Funding was CAD 124 per unit. Discharge was CAD 24 per unit. And through the use of AI, automation, modernizing, redoing our processes, policies, and what have you, you fast forward to 2025, Darko, that adjudication cost went from CAD 514 down to CAD 390. That's down 21% now. That is a fundamental restructuring cost that's permanent. If you look at our funding, it's gone from CAD 124 down to CAD 97. And for discharges, we've gone from CAD 24 down to CAD 19. That's 24% and 23% respectively. That's not the end of the journey. The exciting part actually starts in 2026 when we start to layer in agentic AI on top of that.
And so in the next two quarters, you're going to see agentic AI layered into each one of those buckets.
I give you an example on the discharge component. As you layer Agentic AI and you actually make the entire process where you don't involve people, we're going from the CAD 19 that we're at today, and we can take out another 50%, we'll be down to CAD 9 per unit on the discharge. So you go from CAD 24 two years ago down to CAD 9 on that. If you look at adjudication, that we're at CAD 390. The big part of adjudication is sort of that pre-adjudication. And then any of you that have purchased a home, you see, think about your down payment confirmation, income confirmation, purchase agreement validation. That's a lot of pre-work that needs to get done. Historically, that has taken a day and a half to two days. That is now down to minutes under our new process.
You just layer this stuff in, Darko, and these are permanent reductions, and we do a lot of these. Now, you can take what we just did in the discharge side of the agentic AI, and there's dozens of applications of that exact process of the agentic AI that you can apply to other things in the organization. An example that I've been giving people is to say, when I ran the insurance business, if you had a glass claim that came in, and we have tens of thousands of glass claims, today that's all done manually by people. Tomorrow, that same agentic AI process that we apply to discharges, you could apply to processing and paying out glass claims through an agentic AI process. Lots of opportunities.
And so the billion-dollar target that we set for AI, we've done 100, we did 75 use cases in 2025, netted us CAD 170 million of value. We have 20, sorry, 200 million booked of initiatives that's going to drive CAD 200 million of value for AI-related initiatives in 2026 and a billion overall over the medium term. And I actually think one of the things that I'm seeing is that there's more opportunity than even what I had thought initially back on Investor Day.
So that's great detail. I was busy writing down a bunch of numbers. But in addition to the structural work that you're just talking about, you took restructuring charges in 2025. And the way we measure it, restructuring charges is a percentage of your base, expense base, whatever. It was relatively high, right? So some of the feedback I've been getting is, wow, this is a bit of a left turn for TD. So focused on costs, Darko, is it too aggressive for TD? Is there friction? Or what do you say to those fears? Because I literally look back and I say, TD has the most aggressive cost targets. It just is what it is. But how do you allay those fears that it's?
On the restructuring piece, so we've said CAD 825 million of restructuring charge. We'll be finished that at the end of Q1. That will be the last sort of write-off treatment. Going forward, no more restructuring charges on that. That's going to net us CAD 750 million. That's going to generate CAD 750 million pre-tax annualized benefits from the CAD 825 million restructuring charge. That's that. What I would tell you is this. If you go across TD Bank, there is a real excitement. What I would tell people is usually when you talk about cost management or expense management, that doesn't naturally fit into excitement. What we're positioning inside the organization is to say, we are not reducing your project budgets. We are not reducing our hiring freeze or FTE. I'm not cutting marketing spend.
What we're going to do is restructure the waste that's in the organization and go to this unit cost. It allows us to invest and innovate. It allows us to add the distribution FTE that I just talked about. There is excitement across the organization that we're actually investing in the things that we need to invest in, Darko, while we bring this discipline. And the last part of our strategy was disciplined execution on cost management, capital management, and governance and control. And that has really resonated across the organization because it isn't just we're going to take it all and starve the businesses. Usually when you get into this expense management push, the worry is, are you starving the businesses? And then ultimately, from an innovation, competitiveness, growth, what happens there?
You saw in our commitment at the Investor Day from an MTO perspective, we are driving earnings growth throughout the MTO and have high confidence in our commitments and targets that we've set for the MTO.
Maybe just a final sort of touch on that is, I mean, I had thought that at Investor Day, I think in total was CAD 2 billion-CAD 2.5 billion of cost take-out, inclusive of the restructuring, but that a large part of that would fall to the bottom line. Is that still the case today?
It's still the case because what I've said to everybody externally, but also internally, we don't need more project spend. We have sufficient budget for what we need to get done on that piece of it. And so where we are going to take some of it is to invest in the areas that we think can accelerate our growth on a go-forward basis. But think about something like distribution transformation, everyone. That to me is TD Bank, probably in my opinion, certainly in Canada, probably just the same in the United States. We have more opportunity in the distribution transformation than any of the other Canadian banks.
Part of that is just the model that over time, TD Bank, and it's been a great model, and we're going to continue to be a leader from a branch perspective, but our longer hours, our comfort, convenience has driven more transactions into our branches to the tune of about 30 million more over-the-counter transactions happen today at TD Bank branches in Canada and the U.S. than our next closest competitor. And the vast, vast, vast majority of those transactions, everyone, can be done on the mobile device today without one more dollar of technology spend. That's bill payments, depositing a check, moving money, so on and so forth, setting up your direct deposit. And so we have a huge opportunity to migrate those transactions and move forward. In the contact center, we get 2 million calls a month in phone channel calls every single month.
And the vast majority of those calls are simple banking transactions that can be done through a mobile digital device today. And so if you look at all of that, that's just pure cost take-out that we can do and actually goes right down to the bottom line. And I believe it's a win for customers. I keep pushing to my team. Certainly in the middle of winter, I don't know how it is actually a good thing for clients to have to go into a TD branch in - 20 degrees Celsius and three inches of snow to deposit a check. We have that capability. So you will see a significant push in TD Bank to improve the experience for our clients, but also to educate our clients on how to use the digital mobile tools, the capabilities and channels that we have, Darko.
That will be a big benefit for clients, but it'll also be a good benefit from a shareholder perspective.
Okay. So one of the things that sort of has been helping the Canadian banks and certainly TD with a large deposit base has been tractoring improvement in mortgage spreads. And all that's positive. And I think a lot of that, the expectation is that a lot of that will continue into 2026. I think one thing that's different, though, is maybe the U.S. federal cut rates. So maybe you can talk about, because you have a big U.S. business, and you repositioned the balance sheet there. So maybe you can talk a little bit about how we should think about the environment in the U.S. with rates going down, how that might affect or not affect your net interest income and interest margin.
So on the NIM perspective, I would tell you, I mean, we have in TD Economics, we've called for two rate reductions in the United States, probably in the first half of the year. Let's see. But lots can change as the administration makes changes as we go forward. But that's what we have in our plan. In Canada, we have rates staying stable for 2026. And so I do think a little bit of a different environment. If you look at the U.S. from a NIM perspective, we do think our guidance on the NIM, at least certainly in the first quarter, but as we look forward, still moderate expansion of NIM in the U.S. And that's part of that is the bond investment portfolio that we executed. The benefits of that will continue to play through.
Again, we'll continue to manage the interest rate environment and the tractors on that side of it. In Canada, a little bit different guidance. It's sort of a first half, second half. In the first half, guidance around NIM has been more to that it's going to be stable, and then in the second half, you'll start to see some potential NIM expansion in Canada for TD Bank, talking TD specific.
The expansion is driven by?
Well, you've got a combination of expansion that you're seeing in our RESL margins. Our on-off tractors are still positive in both the U.S. and Canada. And so you're going to still see some tailwinds there. But there are still some headwinds that we're managing on the rates perspective. And again, I'll preface all of this by the USMCA is still the big uncertainty. And depending on where that lands, some of these obviously macro issues can change quite rapidly and quite significantly. But at least from the perspective that we would have is that that environment is better today than it was last year. And the Canadian government and Prime Minister Carney, I think, is doing all the right stuff right now to manage that. And we'll hopefully see where that lands.
And so that's NII. What about the fee side of the business? How should we think about fees?
We've been very clear. If I go back to the Investor Day, I think one of our biggest opportunities that TD Bank has is to increase our fee revenue. We are still too much from an interest rate perspective in NII. And so you're seeing that the businesses first and foremost that we are investing to accelerate is between TD Securities, Wealth Management, and TD Insurance. And so those three businesses, as you heard at Investor Day, have significant upside growth opportunities. And it's to drive the fee income side. And you're seeing that. So whether it's TD Securities, record revenues on a quarter, every quarter they're producing record revenues. We're still early in that journey. From a wealth management perspective, record earnings in 2025. And I think you're going to see that continue as we make investments in these 1,200 wealth advisors.
We're also launching new capability in direct investing, the next generation, what I call TD Easy Trade to go at the new to investing clients that sort of go toe to toe with Wealthsimple. You're going to see that play through. And then I think in the insurance business, we just fundamentally have, I believe, the winning model with a direct model that is a digital model. And when I ran the insurance business six years ago, everyone, and this is part of the structural cost reduction, that business was the number one direct investing business back then and it still is today. But we were a phone channel business exclusively. And so all sales would have been done through the phone channel. And so as we grew the TD Insurance business six years ago, what did you have to do?
You had to add more people in the contact center, more underwriters, more people in the back office operations. We made the decisions three, three and a half years ago to modernize the entire tech stack of the insurance business at TD Insurance. It is the most modern tech stack that is available in Canada for home and auto insurance. And last year, 50% of all policies underwritten in TD Insurance for home and auto insurance were done digitally with straight through processing, no human intervention. That goes from shopping to binding to all your servicing issues of your digital pink slips. So as you go forward, we've taken a massive variable expense business and we've made it into a fixed expense business at a marginal cost of pennies at the next policy level. That's not true for traditional brokers. You've got to pay large commissions for every single deal.
That gives us a significant cost advantage as we move forward in the insurance business. And that's why you saw the ROE that I know surprised a lot of you as to how much ROE the insurance business at TD generates on a go-forward basis. That will get even better, everybody. When I think about AI, TD Insurance is further down the AI journey than any other part inside of TD Bank. And so whether that's in pricing sophistication to fraud, to claims management, all of those areas will become significantly more efficient leveraging AI as we move forward. And they are the furthest down that journey.
Okay. At this point, I think I'm going to quickly rush over to the questions that are coming in.
Sure, sure.
First question, once your loan reduction efforts in the U.S. are complete, which loan categories do you think will have the highest growth potential in 2026 and 2027?
Yeah. So I think, again, for the most part, we have finished the balance sheet restructuring. So we've got the $52 billion of asset cap room. So we are definitely back into trying to drive the growth as per the question. I will say, everybody. I want to make sure that everybody understands the AML remediation in the United States. It is Leo and team have done a terrific job in making sure we get to the milestones and the commitments, but we are not at end of job. That is still number one priority in the United States and for TD Bank, to make sure in 2026 that we complete what we need to do and actually deliver on the commitments that are still required around AML remediation.
So I just want to make sure that even though the conversation today is more around growth, that is still the number one priority and has to be. And we won't be distracted from that. On the growth side, I do think from a middle commercial banking perspective and small business banking, we see significant opportunities, not just to grow, but to grow it more profitably. And so what you're seeing in the United States is a significant move towards ROE management. And so we have gone through and looked at every single client on our books, whether it's in TD Securities or whether it's in the commercial bank, both Canada and the United States, to make sure what do we need to do with each one of those clients to deepen the relationships to get to the ROE hurdles that we want to get to.
And so it's a combination of growing, but deepening the relationships that we have to actually be much more from an ROE. And we need those are the two businesses that I would say we said it at the Investor Day. From an ROE perspective, both of those targets are at 13%. And it's great to see for Leo and the U.S. Bank, this shift to an ROE focus last year. They improved ROE 180 basis points year-on-year. And you saw in the TD Securities business, another business that's heavily shifted towards an ROE focus. Q4, we ended the quarter at 12.6% ROE. And both of those have a medium-term target of 13%. And so again, two businesses that to me are ahead of the pace that we had thought we'd be at during Investor Day.
Okay. Interesting question. So digital banking and stablecoins looking to disrupt traditional branch banking. How do you defend against this? And how big a threat do you view these trends?
So if you look at stablecoin, and I think there's maybe two separate questions. There's the digital banking question, which I'll get to. And then there's the sort of digital assets, stablecoin. I think you've got to break that whole digital assets piece into three buckets, everyone. You've got tokenized deposits, you have stablecoin, and you have crypto. And so I would say the piece that I think has the highest opportunity and the one that certainly from a TD Bank perspective we'd be most focused on immediately is on tokenized deposits. I think there's huge benefits. It's regulated. The benefits from a P&L perspective, from a client perspective, it's an on-us transaction. So I think tokenized deposits is certainly real and it has terrific opportunities. The stablecoin piece, lots of obvious attention, and that's the one that certainly in the U.S., the GENIUS Act.
What you're seeing that played through in 2025 is sort of regulation around stablecoin, which is actually a good thing. You're seeing Canada quickly coming up behind that. And so the question that I think everybody needs to think their way through on stablecoin is you need interoperability. You can't have 200 different stablecoins out there. Otherwise, it's of very little value. And so what's the platform or what's the way in which the ecosystem will allow interoperability of stablecoin and at different currencies, whether it's a U.S. dollar stablecoin, Canadian dollar stablecoin. And so you're seeing lots of discussion in the industry around various different operating models as to how you might launch stablecoin. And it's different potentially in a country like Canada where you have a concentration of banks versus in the United States where you have over 4,000 banks.
And so, a lot more to be played out, but that's where the noise, a lot of attention. And then on crypto, that to me is much, much more of an investment and certainly on the direct investing side. And that's more of a sort of a different conversation, a retail conversation that I think about it. So that's the way I would think about that. On the digital transformation on banking, what I would say to everybody is listen, I think if you're going to win in the future, you have to be able to win on not even just digital, you have to win on mobile. And that's just the way we live our lives today. And I always say to people, it doesn't matter. There's only one thing that I drive back to my house in the morning if I forget, and that's my mobile phone.
And so we have to make sure that TD Bank creates mobile experiences that are simple, fast, and engaging. And it matters because if you think of all the new to Canada that's coming to Canada, where are they all coming from? They're all coming from countries that are much, much more advanced: Asia, Europe, India, Africa. These countries, they lead with mobile in many, many cases. And so I do think getting that mobile leadership matters, Darko, as you go forward.
So we're at the last few minutes. Over to you for some key takeaways for investors today.
I appreciate that. First of all, I think last year when I was here for my first time at this same point, I had sort of said, if I'm back next year, judge us on whether or not we delivered on sort of the four big critical initiatives that mattered to TD, and the first one was ensuring that from an AML, that we do what we say we're going to do and deliver from an AML perspective and rebuild our trust relationship with regulators, and I think Leo and team have done that. The second part I'd say is we need to restructure the United States from a balance sheet perspective, so we have the asset cap room. We had the investment bond portfolio that we needed to execute and then pivot the organization to be much, much more ROE focused, and I'd give them a checkmark on that.
The third part that we said is that we're in the midst of doing a strategic review. We'll roll that out at an Investor Day and be more transparent with all of you on guidance, targets, and what we plan to do as an organization as we go forward. And I think that's really, really resonated, not just externally, internally with our colleagues, the move to deepening relationships, building a simpler and faster bank, leveraging AI automation, and driving discipline around cost management, capital management, and governance and control has mattered. And we've simplified that.
I'd say finally, and probably the most important part that I thought for 2025 was making sure that we retain our best talent, that we create an environment that attracts top talent, and we start to rebuild the trust between our critical stakeholders and includes yourselves, our investors, our regulators, our clients, and of our colleagues. I would tell you today, not only is there excitement across TD Bank, the pride is back within TD Bank. This idea of winning at TD has really, really resonated. So I would say feel great about delivering on the things that we, Darko, that we said that we would deliver in 2025. That's part of what we want to be known as a management team is that what we say we will do.
And so as I think about 2026 and when I'm back here next year, I'm hopeful that there's probably three things. And the first thing I would say is hold us accountable to the targets that we set at Investor Day for 2026 on EPS, on ROE, on cost management, expense management, positive operating leverage that we deliver what we say we're going to deliver. I think you should hold us accountable. Number two is clear proof and evidence that we are building deeper relationships, a simpler and faster bank, and more discipline on how we run our organization. And I would say three is that we are fundamentally operating our capital differently as we go forward. And so we start with always organic capital, and we are more disciplined now around the organic capital. We are exiting non-core businesses, and you've seen us do that across 2025.
But even in the businesses that we are operating in, holding them to ROE standards and making sure that they have a roadmap on the organic side, investing in businesses organically that are accretive from an ROE perspective and add value to the shareholder. And then two, on the capital piece, what I've said very clearly and very publicly is if we do not have a need, if there is excess capital after the organic investments, that we will return consistently capital back to the shareholders on an ongoing basis. And so I think those are the three things that I would say will guide us in 2026 when I'm back here next year.
Excellent. Thank you very much.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.