Hello. Good morning, everyone. My name's Michael Rose. I'm one of the bank analysts here at Raymond James. Thank you so much for being here with us this morning. I'm very pleased to have First Horizon with us today. With roughly $84 billion in assets and a market cap of about $eleven and a half billion, First Horizon is a top 25 commercial bank with operations across the southeast and in several southwest markets. It also operates several specialty banking segments as well as provides a broad range of banking services for both corporate and retail investors. With us today from the company is CFO Hope Dmuchowski, Chief Credit Officer Thomas Hung, as well as Director of Investor Relations Tyler Craft in the audience.
Before I jump into questions, I just wanted to pass the mic to Hope for any opening remarks. Hope?
Thank you, Michael. Just wanna thank you all for being here and say it's been another unusual start to the year. I had all these prepared remarks over last week when Michael sent us the questions. Now it all seems completely different this morning. I think this is somewhat the new normal. Proud of First Horizon, where we've been the last couple years. As Tom and I were prepping for today and a lot of the questions you have, we just kept saying, "Well, First Horizon continues to form regardless of increasing rates, decreasing rates, closing an MOE in the middle of COVID, a deal that doesn't go through." We could not be more proud of where our company is, the strength and stability of our balance sheet, the strong client relationships we have.
It is a great time to be a southeast bank.
I would agree with that. Hope, maybe we can start at a macro level. You know, obviously, 2025, there was a lot of volatility. Seems like there's a lot of volatility now. We had some high-profile bankruptcies in the fall. Some of that resurfaced last week overseas. Just as we think about kind of, you know, as a recap, what are some of the milestones that the company achieved, you know, last year for the benefit of the audience? You know, what are some of the things that you're most proud of? What are a few things that you're working on that we should contemplate as we move through the year?
Yeah. The thing that we're proud of and what we achieved earlier than we had committed to investors is sustained 15% ROIC in both Q3 and Q4. We did an investor day in June of 2023. We said that we were targeting a return to mid-teens ROIC. We got there about a year earlier than we had told the streets. As soon as we saw that we were gonna print a mid-teens number, we were at another conference, not yours, but a different one. Sorry, yours was not at that time. We said we're gonna hit 15% ROIC was our next target. Soon as we hit 15%, we said 15% plus ROIC. We really focus on how do we return profitably to the shareholders.
Top line growth that erode shareholder value is not the way to grow a business, you know, for the long term. We've been here for almost 162 years, and we run the bank to be here another 162 years. I'm also really proud of our credit. As we look out at all of the different economic factors that we've faced since 2019 and 2020 when we closed an MOE in the middle of COVID, our credit has held up really well. We brought our Chief Credit Officer, Tom Hung, here today. I was gonna ask him to talk a little bit about our underwriting discipline that helps us through any economic scenario.
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for bringing up credit. You know, I think last year we... I'm also proud of the fact we reported close to 3% net loan growth while maintaining some of the strongest credit quality in the whole industries. I think it's one thing to grow. It's another thing to be able to grow, maintain your credit discipline, and continue to perform through all the twists and turns we saw last year.
Great. Maybe sticking along those lines, you know, deregulation was a big theme last year and will continue to be as we move through this year. You know, from your perspective, what are some of the developments you are most excited about, for both First Horizon and the industry, and then what actions does the company plan to take to optimize, you know, new regulatory frameworks? Obviously, it's a broad topic, but we'd appreciate your thoughts, you know, around things like Basel III endgame, asset thresholds, stress testing, and the like.
Yeah. The quick change we saw with the change in administration is the pace of new rules. There's been no new rules proposed by this administration. At the changeover, there was over 30 pending rules. It was exhausting for banks to constantly get a new rule, get a proposed rule, put in your commentary period, then get the final rule, then implement it. We were doing, you know, 20 or 30 at any given time for a few years. That pace was just really distracting to the organization having to put new guardrails up, new policies, procedures, new second line checks. It's been really great to be able to run under a set of rules that isn't changing.
As far as the rollbacks, we do continue to hear from Miki Bowman that we're gonna see some resetting of the threshold, hopefully that $100 billion would move up somewhere. We're hearing anywhere from $150-$200. Nobody's really said exactly where, at least it sounds like it'll be material. That gives us a lot of room to grow organically. We've talked before. We did our LFI preparedness. We were in the first year of getting ready. We have a roadmap, if that gets moved up, it gives us significantly more time to focus on organic growth, returning profitability to shareholders, and not having to put all those new LFI requirements in.
Yeah. I would just add, you know, I feel very, very good about where we are in our regulatory relationships. I have a very regular dialogue with our regulators and ultimately we all want the same thing, which is to build a safe and sound bank. The collaboration between regulators and ourselves, I'm very pleased with.
That's great. Thanks for sharing. Maybe just separately, I know it hasn't been too much of a topic here as of late, you know, there's still some discussion around the future of stablecoins in banking, given maybe some more of the recent debates around interest-bearing coins and criticism of the Dodd-Frank Act's efficiency. Maybe if you can just walk us through that.
Yeah, we're, you know, like everyone else, waiting for the rules to be finalized on the new Genius Act. I think it was announced last week or the week before by Bloomberg. We are one of the key banks that are part of the new Cary Network that Gene Ludwig's setting up that, I think, you know, I don't think they've announced how many exactly banks. I think in that article they said, you know, a dozen or two dozen have already signed up, and I know they have more in the wings, so that we can create a stablecoin that's made for and run by the banking system instead of each one of us trying to do our own. Being a part of that, being an early investor and adopter, I think is one of the ways that we're doing that.
We are also, our wealth platform converted to LPL at the end of last year. LPL is looking at how do they custodian that. We also have just about every vendor coming in to meet with me or the head of product or head of technology because they have every solution for the rule that hasn't been written yet. Constantly just looking at what they're doing, what are their different options. I think it's gonna move quickly once the rule's done, our goal is to be ready for it.
Can you discuss the Carry Network for the benefit of the people in the room? I'm not sure everyone's familiar with what was trying to be built.
Yeah. The Carry Network is a collection of banks that are looking at how do we issue and move stablecoin across the banking system in an efficient, safe way. I mean, that really comes down to it. A lot of the bigger banks are going to issue their own stablecoin. They have global infrastructure. For the regional banks and the smaller banks, being able to pool our intellectual property. There was just a meeting last week or the week before where all of our cybersecurity experts got on a call and talked about how to build the network. You're being able to use a larger, you know, group of specialists to help build something that benefits the banks that are part of it.
Great. Maybe just sticking with technology. I mean, there was obviously some noise last week in the past couple of weeks just around AI and what it could do to the banking system as a whole. Just I know you guys have a team in place. You talked about that on the past call. Maybe if you could just provide some of the objectives there and discuss when you estimate some of the cost savings could actually flow through and how meaningful they could be from a net perspective.
Yeah. I would say we're already starting to see the cost benefits come through. We have flat expense guidance this year, excluding our countercyclical businesses, and our flat expense guidance includes us hiring new bankers, investing more in technology this year than last year, opening new branches. While we're investing, we're able to maintain costs. Part of that is AI. What we're really seeing is the ability to add efficiency, quality, and scale. We have not had the, "Oh, we're gonna take out 20% of a team," but we're not having to hire up as we have 3% loan growth. I'll have Tom comment. We just had our top leaders together in Memphis. You were nice enough to join us at our leadership forum, I think it was a year ago.
We had that again last week, and we had a whole session on AI and technology, and our credit, our head of our credit analyst team presented a new AI tool to help make credit underwriting easier. I'll let Tom talk a little bit about that, but just a proof point of how we're continuing to iterate and find new ways to use it.
Yeah, would love to. I think, there's a lot of talk already about the efficiencies of AI, what it can do in terms of, making a financial analysis, financial spreading more efficient, faster, quicker, more accurate. you know, I wanna spotlight actually something a little bit different. What I'm even more excited about beyond just the efficiency is what it can do in terms of data analytics. You know, with a portfolio, the size of ours, of course, we're always trying to look at comparable data, operating comparables, across geographies, across industries. AI and what it can do not only makes that, a lot more faster, a lot more efficient, but also allows us to pull in a lot more data and beyond it. Not just within our own portfolio, but outside of that.
The wealth of information that are in public filings, everywhere, the information that can be pulled from the footnotes to public filings, that's a lot of great data we can use as well, to make better, faster decisions. That's what I'm really excited about.
We're also seeing AI really impact the client. You know, all of our partners where we have a software partner or provider are rolling out generative AI. Salesforce was an early adopter. We were one of the early banks on that, and we've seen great success. We have better, you know, next best action for our clients, better lists on who would be the right person to offer this to. In fact, our marketing budget has been a little over two quarters because it was so good that the take rate we were modeling the offers on, it's actually coming higher because it has such quality data algorithms within Salesforce using our client data to say, "Here are the clients you want to market to. Here's the clients you want to call." So we're seeing it penetrate everywhere.
I don't think it's this one and done or one way of doing it. It's got to be bottoms up where everybody's using it in the company. We've talked before, Michael, with you about how we built our own. Before Tyler Craft became the IR director, he was the head of AI, and he rolled out our own ChatGPT called ChatFHN that we all get reports on who the top users are. I'll tell you, last month I got my report on who the top user on my team was. I said, "Tyler, who is that person?" I didn't know him. Four levels down, incentive analyst who's doing the incentives. It's incentive season. He had maybe two or three times anybody else use the tool.
You're even able to see how some of the talent that may not be telling you they're using it is making their day so much quicker, so much more efficient.
That's great. It's gonna be interesting to see the way it evolves over the next, you know, decade or so. Maybe if we can move on from, you know, high level and maybe, you know, move into some of the client segment stuff. I know loan growth, you know, looking mid-single digits this year. Are we kind of at the point where, you're seeing broader signs of comfort from borrowers? I know this last week has probably thrown a wrench into some of that, but it, you know, certainly the environment I think was feeling better. You know, I think what we've generally heard around credit has been pretty stable. You know, borrowers are getting more comfortable borrowing.
Can you just talk to us about kind of the health of the borrower and the economy and what the prospect of potentially lower rates, although they're higher the last couple of days, what that could mean for loan growth?
Yeah, I'm gonna answer that question with a caveat, is I'm gonna tell you what I would have said last Friday because I don't have any newer data from our clients four days into this Iran conflict to know how it's behaved. Our clients have gotten comfortable with the tariff rules. They've gotten comfortable with some of the decreasing rate environments, the unknown of when the next rate cut may come or if it comes. They've gotten comfortable with that. We saw strong C&I growth at the beginning of the quarter. We're continuing to see C&I pull through. CRE is still paying down a lot of the construction CRE that we did stabilize and has been going into the secondary market. We don't want a 20 years. I mean, that's, that is how our professional CRE group works, is we do the fund up.
When it's stabilized, it goes into the secondary market. mortgage warehouse is behaving seasonally as we normally see, which is Q1 a little bit lower. lower-end consumers have been struggling for years. We haven't seen that get worse, so I don't think it's gonna get any better in the near term.
Yeah.
Anything you'd add?
I'm gonna start with the same caveat of it's too early to know really the effects of the events of the last several days. If I go back to last week, I think, the overall sentiment is certainly pretty good. We've come into the year with very strong pipelines. You know, Hope mentioned CRE. In Q4, we saw an increase in total CRE commitments as a bank, and so that just and when we do a lot of construction projects, so what I would reasonably expect from that is, you know, we'll start to see some good fund ups in our CRE. If I look at where the peak was relative to where we are in rates, it's been 175 basis points.
You know, that's significant enough, for there to be, for projects in both the CRE and the C&I side that may not have penciled out at the peak to really start to pencil out now. That's why I think we're seeing it in our momentum in our pipeline.
You know, maybe just a follow-up on the tariff question. You know, now that some of that's been struck down, I mean, could that actually spur some loan growth in your mind?
Yeah, we'd hope so. It was struck down, and then it was 10%, and then it was 15%. I'm not sure. I think we're still at 10% for 90 days. It hasn't hit the front of the Wall Street Journal with the conflict going on, so I'm not exactly sure where the executive order is now. Yes, tariffs being rolled back, I think would be very good. We continue to hear from our customers that the tariff cost is being pushed onto them. Their cost of goods is going up, and they're not able to increase the sales price anymore. They were able to do that when rates were rising. They were able to do that after COVID. The consumer has less discretionary spending and so rate increases for them.
It has been a pretty material impact to their margins last year.
Yeah, I would just add, I mean, in isolation, tariffs going away should certainly help. With the uncertainty of what's going on right now, we gotta figure out, which factor is gonna have a greater influence.
No, completely understand. maybe, you know, we've heard you talk about the importance of the relationship between your bankers and credit teams. Maybe, you know, how do you think about taking your model to market? Then what does this do to create differentiation for First Horizon in the marketplace?
Yeah. I think something we very intentionally do and something we're very proud of, is we do push credit decision-making as close to the customer as possible. For us, what that means is, my entire team of credit officers is literally dispersed throughout our footprints. They work close to the customers, close to the deal teams. The big advantage of that is the credit analysis and the work that we do goes far beyond just looking at the numbers and reading reports and discussing things in a conference room. Our credit officers are on-site at our customers, visiting with them, talking with management. I'm a big believer there is so much more to credit decision-making beyond just ratios and numbers on a piece of paper.
I believe that culture, touching and feeling our customers, being on-site, knowing their business, directly knowing the management team, staying updated, 'cause things don't always go according to plan. When you have that type of relationship, and you have that type of access, you're able to react a lot faster. When you add all of that up together, I think that's the biggest driver behind our consistently strong, credit performance, regardless of what's gone on in the economy.
What I really like about our model, we talk about this a lot, we run a decentralized model. Our credit analysts sit in the markets they're in. When they're meeting with a prospect or a client, your credit analyst is there. They didn't fly in from Memphis. They didn't fly in from New York. They're part of your community. They know your community. They know the economic factors. They know what's happening. We had a recent regional president tell us that they were in front of a client. They had their credit analyst with them. They had their relationship manager with them, and it was a great client. Everything looked great, and they're like, "Okay, well, who do you need to talk to in order to get this deal done?" She's like, "I can approve it now." They said, "What do you mean?
The credit analyst's here. We've already looked at it. We can approve it. You're approved for this at this rate. Let's just run some underwriting." They said, "That's it?" She said, "Yeah. The decision's made here with you." If that client hadn't been so good, obviously she would've said, "Well, let me go talk to my credit team." Poor Tom's team ends up being the bad guy that has to say no to the greatest client a banker's ever seen. It makes a difference, especially when you are in the southeast markets which really pride themselves on being a part of their community, investing back in their community, and it has been a differentiator. It comes with a cost, so we tell our bankers all the time, "There's value in you and your team." We don't have the lowest ...
You know, we have a great margin. One of the reasons we have one of the highest margins in the industry is we pay for that advice and counsel.
We've seen a lot of banks move away from the decentralized structure over the past 20 years, and you guys seem firmly committed to it. It may be a little bit more, you know, costly to do so, but how do you limit risk, by keeping a decentralized credit structure when others have moved the other direction?
Yeah. I'm very proud of what we do on the risk and analytics side, the data analytics side. You know, there's a lot of data that's always flowing between regions up and down the chains, and so that way we always have a very good view across our whole portfolio. I believe to be able to have the type of sustained credit performance we've been able to have, what that really shows is consistency. Despite operating across the entire Southeast, a lot of different, a lot of different markets and a lot of very different markets. As you can imagine, a Tennessee is very different from a Florida, which is very different from the Carolinas and elsewhere. What we have is a very ingrained credit culture. Officers have been doing this a long time.
We're constantly communicating with each other. There's a lot of knowledge sharing and data analytics going on behind the scenes, and that's why what you see has been consistency across the board.
Although it's a costly model on a personnel basis, if you look at our top-tier, top-quartile margin with our bottom-quartile charge-offs, I'll tell you that that pays back over time because you have credit selection, you have knowing your client, and you might be able to do it really cheaply from a call center in a centralized location, but they have no idea about the client. They have no idea about the market. They haven't driven the street to know that the building next door is being demolished, and all of a sudden, Main and Main is now gonna be 10 blocks up where the new Target's going. I really, as a CFO, say top-tier margin, lowest charge-offs. The model is really not as expensive as everyone else thinks it is.
No, I agree with that. Maybe we can just shift to deposits. You guys talked about deposit growth outpacing, you know, loan growth this year. I think you've talked a fair amount about your new treasury management platform coming online, and obviously you continue to open up branches. You know, how should we think about the intermediate to long-term deposit growth opportunity for the franchise? You know, particularly given we've seen a lot of dislocation in and around your markets and, you know, could you see that loan-to-deposit ratio, you know, coming down and the mix improving?
Yeah, we've said, we hope to have mid-single-digit loan growth and deposit growth. The H8 data isn't showing that quite in the economy yet. Hasn't been the booming start to the year that we were all hoping, somewhere, you know, below 1% in H8 data, year to date. The way we think about it is treasury management. It's knowing your clients. We've talked before about we hired a new head of our consumer retail business. We've broken that out from the regional president, so there's a singular focus on consumer versus commercial clients. As we've gotten bigger, that's really been needed. There's different product sets. There's different economic situations that hit. As we look at it, we're comfortable with where our loan-to-deposit ratio is, where we don't feel that we're, you know, we have an issue with it.
It's within our internal guardrails. The way we look at it is loans plus securities as a % of deposit, we're peer average. If we wanted to bring our loan-to-deposit ratio down, I always say we could take our next deposit and park it in a security, I'd rather take that next deposit and put it in a loan. When we internally have our benchmarks, we look at loans plus securities. you know, as much as I can grow the next dollar of deposit, I want to spend $0.75 of it, if not more, lending it to a client to continue shareholder value. The new Fed chair, it will be interesting to see if he shrinks the balance sheet, what happens to deposits. If deposits in the U.S. economy shrink, loans are gonna have to rationalize as well.
I think there's a lot of wait and see, but it is hand-to-hand combat for deposits. It's not just rate anymore. I think a lot of shoppers have gotten a little bit tired of the rate shopping and moving their money every 30 or 60 days unless they have a wealth advisor doing it for you. We had a top of market offer at the end of last year in consumer, and we didn't see the take rate we had seen two years before.
Have you seen those trends maybe accelerate here in the past, you know, month or so? It seems like other banks that we talked to have said competition seems a little bit firmer than it was maybe two or three months ago.
Competition, top of rate is back. We don't see the money moving as quickly as we have in past years. I'm not sure if it's the uncertainty of the economy. I don't know if it's fatigue. We definitely see it in the wealth business because somebody's managing that for them, and when you look at the outflows going to, you know, J.P. Morgan Wealth or Charles Schwab, but you see it come in and out, right? It's more of an arbitrage on what their deal is. The, you know, average consumer, we're really not seeing a lot of movement from them, even when we have rate offers.
We had some pretty nice rate offers that were, you know, equal to Fed funds at the end of Q3 last year in two of our growth markets, you know, we had a 10%-20% pickup, and that was it. Two years ago when we did that, we raised $6 billion in 30 days. I mean, we raised, you know, $10 million-$20 million in 30 days with a Fed, an equal to Fed funds rate. It was really a test in some of our growth markets to see how is rate playing out now, it just really didn't make a difference. They still are looking for stability. They're still looking for product quality. You know, what's fraud? The number one thing that we see for client accounts being closed or opened with us is fraud. Fraud on their account.
You know, the Trump administration's put a lot of time to start talking about fraud, how many elderly people are being hit by it specifically. We can't stay ahead of fraud. I'll go back to your AI question. The number one use case we have for AI right now is fraud, is trying to figure out when we get hit in a day and you start looking for those, you know, patterns of what are the things that we should be looking for. We had an issue with treasury management, I think in December. I start to lose track of what the months are, but we started to see it, and there were some really clear patterns of what bank they were clearing through, the first amount, the second amount, the third amount, and we were able to say, "Okay, anything that does this, stop it.
Send it to the banker. Have the banker call the client and say, 'Were you trying to wire this money out of your treasury management platform?'". We could have never done that with humans before. They programmed it instantaneously to look for these and then stop any payments going out of our treasury management system.
Very helpful. If we could just move on to capital and profitability. You mentioned earlier, Hope, about the mid-teens, you know, ROTCE target hitting it a year early. You've also talked about CET1 moving down. You know, it looks like you continue to buy back stock through the quarter if I look at the 10-K. You know, how do we think about the timing to hit the target, you know, barring any significant regulatory changes? Is this the right longer-term range to consider? You know, is there ability to maybe bring it down further over time?
Well, first, thanks for reading our 10-K. We put a lot of time and energy into writing that thing. I'm glad at least one person read it and found value in it.
Well, AI did, so.
All right. Well, I'm glad AI made it simpler for you because it's a long document to get through. When we are looking at our CET1, we're really looking out at where do we think the economy's gonna go, what do we think the risk factors are, and what do we second think loan growth's gonna be. We hold top-tier capital for loan growth. That is our goal first and foremost. Second, we look at how do we deploy it for shareholders. We've bought approximately $200 million of shares back this quarter. I wish it we weren't doing it, because had we had the 3%, 4%, 5% loan growth we were hoping for in the first quarter, we would have used it for that.
We are able to kind of flex in between is it loan growth or is it share buybacks right now. We announced a dividend increase in the first quarter as well as we're able to return excess capital to shareholders. We returned about $1.2 billion of capital last year to shareholders. We really look at the three in lockstep. We finished last quarter at 10.6 as loan growth has been, you know, pretty flat quarter-over-quarter with mortgage warehouse easily paying down. I expect we'll end around that this quarter. We do have a longer term or near-term target that our board approved to get down to 10.5 this year. That 10.5 is we want to get there with loan growth.
As we see loan growth pick up, you'll start to see more loan growth, less share buybacks, but trade one for the other in your model every quarter.
That said, you may get an opportunity to buy back some more today. We'll see. Maybe one for you, Tom. Can you just walk us through the kind of the puts and takes on credit? You know, maybe what has allowed you to post such, you know, great metrics, you know, kind of over time, despite a lot of volatility over the past five years. How should we kind of think about normalization, you know, versus historical trends? You know, we talked about AI and the customer diligence. Obviously the diversification of the loan book is something that I think is still underappreciated for First Horizon. Obviously the, you know, the underwriting has gotten better, I think, too.
Yeah, no, appreciate it. I think the puts and takes of credit at the end of the day for me, I'm gonna come back to, you know, the decentralized model that we have being close to our customers. Things don't always go according to plan and we all know that. When things may deviate from expectations, being close to our customers, having that type of relationship and the focus on relationship lending we have, what that means is we're aware of things sooner and the sooner you're aware of things, the better you can make course adjustments. On top of that, the other theme that I mentioned is consistency.
Regardless of what's happened in terms of all the twists and turns in the economy and unexpected events, we have always stayed very true to our underwriting principles that have proven out over time. I think between that and diversification we have, you know, that's how we've been able to consistently generate the results we have. You know, we've talked a few times about the events of the last several days and will that have an effect on credit? Depending on how long it lasts, I would say that's a fair estimate.
What gives me the confidence about our ability to perform through however this plays out is the fact that we also have that very well diversified book, as you mentioned, and that has served us well, regardless of whether it was tariffs, whether it was COVID, whether it was, you know, disruption in the banking industry, you know, through many different events. Since we're diversified and we're disciplined in what we do and we're very relationship-focused and not transaction-focused, regardless of what's come at us, we have performed through all of that and that's why I'm confident we'll do the same once again, however this current Middle East situation plays out.
You know, one request we've gotten from a few people, one of which is in the audience, is, you know, questions around data center exposure. I don't know if you guys have talked about that before, if that's something you could discuss. It is, we've gotten some requests from clients for screens and things like that, and it's hard data to get at.
Yeah. No, that's fair. I'll just say we have very minimal exposure to data centers, software, in that sector overall.
Okay. Perfect. Well, we only got about a minute and a half left, so I've saved the best for last. Hope maybe wanted to, you know, maybe talk now that we're about two-thirds of the way through the quarter. Just any updates to, you know, broadly speaking, any of your guidance for the year and anything that, you know, is maybe a little bit better or a little bit slower. I think you touched on a few of those things, but would just love any updates.
Yeah, I would say fee income's holding up as we anticipated. Loan growth and deposit growth is definitely lagging, coming into the year from where we thought the year would start. We've seen this many years before. We've seen it pick up. Their opportunity we have ahead of us is really a mortgage refi wave. We're sitting with a lot of arms on our books as well as the mortgage warehouse business benefiting from that. There was a small period last week where the 30-year dropped below 6%. I don't think it lasted very long. We didn't see many locks in that half a day. Depending on which way rates go, I do think one of the big upsides for us would be a refi, the opportunity for our clients to refi and mortgage warehouse to see that pick up.
I feel, you know, more and more confident every day that First Horizon is, you know, prepared for any economic situation that we will grow in line with what is, you know, healthy. Where can we continue to grow great long-term relationships that are profitable for us and shareholders long term? Great to have Tom along with me talk about our disciplined credit underwriting so that we have confidence regardless of the economic cycle that the clients that we've had, you know, client selection with, that we've chosen to put on our balance sheet are going to be there for the long term. We don't get them all right, but we are getting more of them right than most of our peers, which is the goal. You know, lending's not a zero risk business.
I feel, you know, a little uncertain the last four days, but I feel like we've lived this. It was the RBC conference last year we were at when the tariffs hit the middle of the conference coming into your conference. It's the Iran conflict. It seems like if there's gonna be an investment banking conference somewhere out there, then something unusual is gonna happen that we don't quite have the update for yet. A healthy U.S. economy will continue to move forward.
I swear it's always in March. Well, thank you Tom, Hope. I really appreciate it. Join me in thanking First Horizon.