Earnings call transcript: Bank of America beats Q1 2026 earnings estimates

Bank of America Corp (BAC) reported a robust performance for the first quarter of 2026, surpassing analysts’ expectations with an earnings per share (EPS) of $1.11 against a forecasted $1.01, marking a 9.9% surprise. The company also exceeded revenue projections, posting $30.3 billion compared to the anticipated $29.92 billion. This strong financial showing was reflected in the pre-market stock movement, with shares rising 1.97% to $54.40.

Key Takeaways

• Bank of America reported a 7% year-over-year revenue growth.
• EPS increased by 25% year-over-year, reaching $1.11.
• Pre-market trading saw a 1.97% increase in stock price.
• The company improved its efficiency ratio to 61%.
• Digital sales accounted for 71% of Consumer Banking sales.

Company Performance

Bank of America demonstrated solid growth across its business segments in Q1 2026. The company reported a 7% increase in total revenue year-over-year, driven by strong performances in investment banking and consumer banking. The earnings per share saw a substantial 25% rise, reflecting the bank’s operational efficiency and strategic investments in technology and innovation.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $30.3 billion, up 7% year-over-year
• Earnings per share: $1.11, up 25% year-over-year
• Net interest income: $15.9 billion, up 9% year-over-year
• Efficiency ratio: Improved to 61% from 63% a year ago

Earnings vs. Forecast

Bank of America’s Q1 2026 earnings per share of $1.11 exceeded the forecast of $1.01, resulting in a 9.9% positive surprise. Revenue also surpassed expectations, coming in at $30.3 billion against the projected $29.92 billion. This marks a continued trend of outperformance, as the company has consistently exceeded earnings estimates in recent quarters. The stock trades at a P/E ratio of 14.3 with a PEG ratio of 0.68, suggesting attractive valuation relative to its growth prospects. According to InvestingPro analysis, the stock appears undervalued at current levels, placing it among compelling opportunities on the most undervalued stocks list.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings announcement, Bank of America’s stock rose by 1.97% in pre-market trading, reaching $54.40. This increase reflects investor confidence in the company’s ability to deliver strong financial results amid challenging market conditions. The stock remains within its 52-week range, with a high of $57.55 and a low of $36.49. Notably, shares have delivered a strong 43.6% return over the past year, with InvestingPro data highlighting a particularly strong return over the last month. The platform offers 10 additional ProTips for BAC, including insights on analyst revisions and the company’s position as a prominent player in the Banks industry.

Outlook & Guidance

Bank of America raised its full-year 2026 net interest income growth guidance to 6%-8%, citing Q1 outperformance and favorable interest rate conditions. The company anticipates moderate growth in deposits and loans, supported by strategic investments in digital platforms and client-facing roles. Supporting its shareholder-friendly approach, the bank currently offers a 2.1% dividend yield and has raised its dividend for 12 consecutive years, according to InvestingPro Tips—underscoring management’s confidence in sustainable cash generation.

Executive Commentary

CEO Brian Moynihan stated, "Our first-quarter results reflect balanced growth across our business lines and the benefits of our investments in technology and innovation. We continue to focus on delivering value to our shareholders while enhancing our customer experience through digital transformation."

Risks and Challenges

• Inflationary pressures could impact consumer spending and operating costs.
• Geopolitical tensions may affect global markets and energy prices.
• Competitive pressures in the deposit market could influence funding costs.
• Regulatory changes could introduce new compliance requirements.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the company’s strategy for managing inflationary pressures and its plans for further digital transformation. Executives highlighted the importance of cost management and efficiency improvements, as well as ongoing investments in AI and cybersecurity to drive future growth.

For investors seeking deeper analysis, Bank of America is one of the 1,400+ US equities covered by comprehensive Pro Research Reports, which transform complex Wall Street data into clear, actionable intelligence through intuitive visuals and expert analysis.

Full transcript - Bank of America Corp (BAC) Q1 2026:

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Hello, and welcome everyone joining today’s Bank of America earnings announcement. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the question and answer session. To register to ask a question at any time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please note this call is being recorded. We are standing by if you should need any assistance. It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting over to Lee McEntire with Bank of America.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America0: Good morning. Thank you. Thanks for joining us to talk through our first quarter results. As always, the earnings release and presentation are posted on the investor relations section of bankofamerica.com. We’ll reference those materials during the call. Brian will start us off with a few opening thoughts, and then Alastair will walk through the quarter and provide more detail on the results. Before we begin, a quick reminder that during the call, we may make forward-looking statements and refer to non-GAAP financial measures. Those reflect management’s current views and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which are outlined along with the relevant GAAP reconciliations in our earnings material and the SEC filings on our website. With that, Brian, over to you.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Good morning, and thank you for joining all of us. It’s our earnings report for the first quarter of 2026. I’m going to begin on slide two. Bank of America delivered strong first quarter 2026 results. Revenue grew 7% year-over-year to $30.3 billion. Earnings per share were up 25% year-over-year to $1.11 per share. This performance was driven by balanced results across our businesses, continued operating leverage, solid client activity, and stable to modestly improved asset quality. We also saw solid year-over-year growth in both loans and deposits. Our capital and liquidity positions remain strong and well above current regulatory requirements. Along the bottom of slide two, you can see the progress against some of our most important operating metrics. We delivered operating leverage of 290 basis points this quarter. The efficiency ratio for our company improved 170 basis points year-over-year to 61%.

Importantly, we generated return on tangible common equity or ROTCE of 16%. The biggest highlight I can provide you is if you flip to slide three. There you can see that every segment of the company contributed to our year-over-year growth. Every segment grew revenue. Every segment grew earnings. Every segment grew average deposits, and every segment grew loans. Every segment drove strong returns. Now moving to slide four, let me talk about some of the primary drivers of results before Alastair takes you through additional details. First, net interest income performed better than expected. On an FTE basis, net interest income was $15.9 billion, up 9% year-over-year. Second, our fee-based markets-facing businesses performed well. Markets, Wealth, and Investment Banking all show good momentum.

Client activity remained healthy, and revenues in each of these areas grew at double-digit rates compared to the first quarter of 2025. Third, our team continued to manage expenses well. Reported non-interest expense of $18.5 billion in the first quarter, which was in line with a roughly 4% year-over-year increase we discussed on our last quarterly earnings call. Let me just spend a few moments on expense and how we think about them in the context of delivering growth and returns for our shareholders. As we said consistently, our focus is on delivering durable earnings and returns. Expense discipline is embedded in how we run our company. It’s also one of the reasons we’re able to convert scale, productivity, and macro tailwinds and operating leverage over time. In the first quarter, our expenses reflected deliberate choices we made.

First, we continued to invest in our revenue-producing capabilities, whether it’s relationship managers in all the businesses, new branches, technology of all types delivered throughout the platform, and product enhancements of all types. All those support the client activity, market share gains, and long-term earnings power of this company. These investments are return on investment driven. They’re tied to businesses where you see clear demand and attractive returns. The second thing we do is we continue to offset those investments through productivity and simplification. The continued digitization of activities by our clients and inside our company, the application of artificial intelligence, the detailed process re-engineering all help reduce manual work, lowered unit cost, limited increase in our base cost structure. That’s why even as we’ve invested, we continue to deliver positive operating leverage. It’s simply put that our revenue growth rate is faster than our expense growth rate.

Third, we remained highly disciplined in non-strategic spend. We are conscious not to add complexity, layers, or fixed costs that don’t support the clients and what they need from us. That discipline is part of our responsible growth culture, has been going on for many years. If you think about that in terms of headcount, we are down about 1,070 people from year-end 2025 through attrition, and we’ll continue to drive that. We continue to heavily extend the franchise, deepen the client relations, and deliver attractive returns. We’re doing it while reducing those FTEs and absorbing costs and inflationary cost out in the market. Turning briefly to asset quality, we saw improvement from last year. Net charge-offs, card delinquencies, reservable criticized assets, and non-performing loans all declined versus the first quarter of 2025. Provision expense was $1.3 billion compared to $1.5 billion last year, reflecting continued benign credit results.

Finally, capital generation remained strong. We continue to deploy excess capital to support our RWA growth across all the businesses while returning capital to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. We ended the quarter with a strong capital position, including $200 billion+ of CET1 capital. We also continue to benefit from the many quarters of organic growth across our businesses. We include our standard organic growth view beginning on Slide 19 and following in the appendix. I commend you to look at those across all the different business lines. All the activity and all the digital activity are there. All that activity remains a key differentiator for us, driving continued growth in deposits, investment assets, lending balances, and trading counterparties. This combines with that strong engagement across our digital platforms. We believe driving ongoing share gains in targeted markets and products.

Overall results again demonstrate the value of our diversified earnings stream, the growth and durability of all our businesses across different environments. In the end, it’s a strong performance by our team here at Bank of America, and I thank them for another great quarter. Before I turn to Alastair to go through a few observations, go through the quarter, I’m going to give you a few observations we see about the economy beginning on slide five. We have two things at Bank of America that help us view the economy. First is our very strong research team, and they provide great data to us based on their view of the world. You can see that on the left-hand side of slide five.

We also couple that with our internal data, what our customers really do, both on the consumer side, corporate side, small business side, et cetera, and you can see that on the consumer expressed on the right-hand side of the slide. Our research team continues to see the economy that is resilient, that the core activity of the economy continue to push along, even with all the uncertainty that you’ve all written about out there. We see the forward look of GDP growth rates in the U.S. in the 2% range, and we see a faster growth rate around the world. When you look at the inflation, you can see in the lower left that the projection is for it to remain elevated in 2026 and into 2027, and both at the U.S. basis and the global basis.

When you look on the right, you can see where the resilience comes from in the U.S. The U.S. consumer continues to spend through all its different platforms here at Bank of America. To put that in context of total spending by consumers across all the ways they move money into the U.S. economy at Bank of America, it’s $4.5 trillion a year. For 2025, you can see that was up 5% from 2024, and that 5% growth has been consistent in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the first quarter of 2025. During that quarter, customers moved $1 trillion+ into the economy. As you look on the lower right, you can see the debit and credit card spending was up 6% year-over-year. This total is about 25% of the ways consumers spend money at Bank of America.

If you look within the categories, you can see it’s up in entertainment and services, in travel and retail. Yes, it’s up in gas prices, and we note that in March, it was up 16% year-over-year. At the same time, we look at this data and see what it tells us. We also are mindful of all the risk out there, the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, including implications for the energy market, inflation, and growth. We look at global trade flows and broader financial conditions. To date, these impacts have been measured and absorbed by the economies here and around the world, and we continue to watch them carefully. Looking ahead, our research team expects moderate U.S. and global growth over the next several years, and our data supports that view.

In this environment, I’m asked if the capital markets activity has really inflected or is this just the volatility produced in the results that our markets team produced or our investment banking team? What we’re seeing is improved breadth in our global businesses, not just episodic activity. Trading has benefited from volatility. In fact, this is the 15th quarter we have year-over-year revenue growth. More importantly, investment banking pipelines are building and engagement is up across all products. Our corporate clients are strong. While they wonder about all the things I spoke about earlier, they continue to conduct strong activity. That activity is healthier than a year ago and supports a continued constructive fee environment.

In our view, while those risks are out there, the macro backdrop remains constructive, and a diversified business model positions us well to continue to deliver for you across a range of economic scenarios. With that context, I’ll turn it over to Alastair for a few more details.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Thanks, Brian. I’m going to begin with the balance sheet starting on Slide 6. You can see total assets ended the quarter at approximately $3.5 trillion, up 2% linked-quarter, reflecting loan growth, deposit growth, and balance sheet to support our clients’ increased activity in Global Markets. Deposits increased to more than $2 trillion, driven by continued strength in both commercial and consumer client engagement. Common shareholders’ equity was approximately $276 billion and relatively stable quarter-over-quarter, as earnings generation was more than offset by the capital we returned to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. This quarter, we paid $2 billion in common dividends, and we bought back $7.2 billion of common shares.

From a regulatory perspective, the CET1 capital ratio declined 14 basis points to 11.2%. That decline primarily reflects the capital return to shareholders above earnings generation, as well as balance sheet growth and mix change in support of our clients. Our ratio remains well above regulatory requirements. Looking ahead, we don’t have any meaningful updates to report on the recently proposed Basel III endgame or G-SIB capital changes. As proposed, Basel III would result in modestly higher capital requirements. However, the proposed changes to the G-SIB surcharge are expected to more than offset the Basel III endgame impact for U.S. G-SIBs. Taken together, if Basel III endgame and G-SIB frameworks are adopted as proposed, we believe Bank of America is likely to see some reduction in overall capital requirements relative to the current regime in future periods.

The public comment period concludes in mid-June, and we look forward to the finalization of the rules. Liquidity remains strong, with global liquidity sources of more than $960 billion, well above regulatory requirements. Now as we go a little deeper on the balance sheet, we’ll focus on loans and deposits. We start with deposits on slide seven, where our franchise continues to demonstrate strength, stability, and discipline. Average deposits remained solid during the quarter, increasing approximately $59 billion year-over-year or 3%, reflecting the depth of our client relationships and the value customers place on safety, liquidity, and convenience, particularly in an environment where rates and market conditions remain dynamic. It’s notable that both interest-bearing and non-interest-bearing deposits grew 3%. Growth was led by commercial clients, while Consumer Banking grew more modestly, marking its fourth consecutive quarter now of year-over-year growth.

Composition of our deposits remains a key differentiator. We benefit from a high-quality mix with a meaningful portion in low-cost operational balances and strong engagement across consumer, wealth, and commercial clients. That mix has continued to benefit our funding costs, even as pricing competition persists across the industry. The total rate paid on our deposits declined 16 basis points to 1.47%, and this allows us to maintain one of the lowest cost funding profiles among the large U.S. banks. Turning to loans on slide eight, average balances grew nearly 9% year-over-year, driven primarily by client demand in our commercial portfolios. That growth was broad-based, and it reflects good core operating client activity. As always, we remain disciplined in how we deploy our capital, prioritizing returns, credit quality, and relationship depth over volume. Consumer loan balances were up about 4% year-over-year, including 3% credit card growth.

Wealth Management contributed nicely to Consumer loan growth through strong securities-based lending. Across both Consumer and Commercial portfolios, the credit performance remained consistent with our expectations, and we’ve not changed our risk posture. We remain highly liquid. We’re focused on protecting our margin and preserving flexibility while continuing to support our clients. Let’s turn to Net Interest Income on slide 9. In the first quarter, Net Interest Income on a fully taxable equivalent basis was $15.9 billion. On a year-over-year, NII increased by $1.3 billion or 9%, driven by growth in average loans and deposits, the ongoing benefit of fixed-rate asset repricing, and higher Global Markets client-related activity. Those tailwinds were partially offset by the impact of lower average rates in the quarter.

Compared to Q4, NII was materially flat and reflected similar underlying benefits that were nearly enough to offset the negative impact of two fewer days of interest accrual in Q1. Net interest yield for the quarter was 2.07%, up eight basis points year-over-year, reflecting disciplined balance sheet management, funding optimization, and the continued benefit of repricing dynamics, even as rates declined across the curve. Regarding interest rate sensitivity, we continue to provide a 12-month dynamic deposit-based sensitivity relative to the forward curve. On that basis, an additional 100-basis-point decline in rates beyond the forward curve would reduce NII over the next 12 months by $2 billion, while a 100-basis-point increase would benefit NII by a little less than $500 million.

Looking ahead, while the rate environment remains dynamic, we continue to see multiple levers supporting NII, including balance growth, funding optimization, and the ongoing roll-off of lower-yielding assets. Given our outperformance against expectations of NII in Q1 and based on the most recent interest rate curve, which has now shifted from two rate cuts expected to having none currently, we’re raising our full-year NII growth guidance range for 2026 versus 2025 to be up 6%-8%, and that outlook continues to assume moderate deposit and loan growth. Turning to expenses on slide 10. In the first quarter, non-interest expense was $18.5 billion. That was up 4% and consistent with the guidance we provided on our Q4 earnings call. We generated 290 basis points of operating leverage, and that translated into measurable improvement in both our efficiency ratio from 63%-61% and an increase in the ROTCE to 16%.

We continue to manage our cost base with discipline while investing selectively to support client activity and long-term growth. The year-over-year increase in expense largely reflects double-digit revenue growth in investment banking, asset management fees, and sales and trading, and the associated higher revenue-related incentives and transaction expenses. Stepping back, our approach here remains unchanged. We’re investing where returns are clear. We tightly manage the discretionary spend, and we maintain our sharp focus on operating leverage, including expanding our use of technology and AI to improve operational efficiency and sales effectiveness. Looking ahead, we continue to expect more than 200 basis points of positive operating leverage for the year, consistent with our prior guidance, and we also have levers that preserve our flexibility to help navigate changing market conditions as required. Let’s turn to slide 11 for a discussion of asset quality. Credit performance remains stable and consistent with our expectations.

Net charge-offs were approximately $1.4 billion, with a net loss rate of 48 basis points. Both of those were down from Q1 2025 and modestly up from Q4, primarily reflecting the normal seasonality in our card portfolio, with continued stability across the commercial portfolio and improved results in CRE office loans. Provision expense was approximately $1.3 billion, including a modest net reserve release driven by improvements in card and commercial real estate, and partially offset by growth-related and targeted builds supporting corporate and commercial lending portfolios. Overall, as you can see, our credit results remain benign, and we continue to feel good about the quality of our portfolio. Turning to slide 12 for some other credit metrics and a couple of comments here. Commercial reservable criticized exposure declined to roughly $24 billion, while non-performing loans were flat quarter-over-quarter.

It’s also worth noting that this was the first quarter in more than three years with no new inflows of non-performing assets into office exposures, which is another sign of improvement in that portfolio. For perspective, we’ve now been in a benign credit environment for some time, and our performance reflects the benefit of decades-long underwriting practices and responsible growth culture. We expect that approach to serve us well across a range of potential economic cycles. We’ve updated the more detailed credit disclosures in the appendix beginning on slide 19. In addition, on slides 24 and 25, we’ve chosen to include updated disclosure around our Global Markets loan portfolio. Let me start by saying we’ve not experienced any material losses in Global Markets loans, and we feel good about the underwriting and the secured positions that we have here.

We acknowledge the potential for underwriting dispersion in the portion that’s considered the private credit market, particularly in the faster growth vintages, and we know that that risk sits first with sponsor equity and fund investors. Bank of America’s exposure has structural insulation from those first loss positions. For losses to reach us, we believe operating company equity and a substantial portion of fund investor capital would need to be impaired before we would experience losses. We don’t rely on sponsor marks. We re-underwrite collateral continuously for borrowing base purposes, and our exposure is governed by independently determined borrowing bases with ongoing performance tests. That means where credits deteriorate, the borrowing base contracts before the losses migrate. We see the market activity as largely a repricing of liquidity and growth expectations for alternative asset managers, not evidence of systemic credit impairment. We continue to monitor the market closely.

We’re comfortable with our positioning, and we’re also glad to see the return of more traditional C&I loan growth in the first quarter. Turning to Slide 13, let’s shift our focus to the lines of business, and we’ll start with consumer, where you can see Consumer Banking delivered a strong first quarter as customers continued to place their trust in Bank of America for their personal finances. Net income was $3.1 billion, up 21% year-over-year, driven by higher net interest income that led to 5% revenue growth, and we managed expense well. That resulted in over 500 basis points of operating leverage and a 53% efficiency ratio. We saw our fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year deposit growth with average deposits of $951 billion, while maintaining a high-quality mix with over half of balances in low and no interest checking. Client engagement remained a clear strength.

We ended the quarter with a record 38.5 million Consumer checking accounts, adding over 100,000 net new checking accounts this quarter. More than 90% of these relationships remain primary. Digital adoption remains strong, with 79% of households digitally active and 71% of sales coming through the digital channels, compared to 65% a year ago. Finally, credit performance in Consumer remains solid and in line with expectations. On Slide 14, we turn to Global Wealth and Investment Management, who also delivered a strong first quarter, benefiting from solid flows over the past four quarters, favorable market conditions, and disciplined expense management, which together drove margin improvement and valuable operating leverage. Net income was $1.3 billion, up 32% year-over-year on record first quarter revenue of $6.7 billion, driven by higher asset management fees and solid client flows.

Pre-tax margin was 26%, reflecting the operating leverage achieved through disciplined expense management. Client balances increased to $4.6 trillion, up 10% year-over-year, supported by favorable market conditions and net client flows during the quarter. Asset management flows remained solid at $20 billion, and lending momentum continued with average loans up 13% year-over-year, led by custom lending and securities-based lending. We remained focused on pricing discipline, advisor productivity, and long-term client relationships. We’re driving productivity higher on both newer and existing members of our financial advisors team, and we continue to attract talent across both new and experienced advisors. Now we move to commercial and corporate client-facing businesses and Global Banking on Slide 15, where Global Banking delivered solid results in the first quarter, reflecting strong client activity and continued balance sheet growth. Revenues were $6.3 billion, up 5% year-over-year, driven by higher net interest income and improved non-interest income.

When combined with well-controlled expense, which rose only one%, the business generated more than 350 basis points of operating leverage. Net income was $2.1 billion, up eight% from last year, as the higher revenue was partially offset by continued investment in the business and a higher provision for credit losses through builds of reserves that were primarily for loan growth. Investment banking fees of $1.8 billion were up 21% year-over-year and were a clear positive in the quarter. Investment banking fees’ strong momentum was led by M&A, with equity capital markets also up very nicely in the quarter. The year-over-year investment banking performance is particularly notable given our prior year first quarter included gains related to leveraged finance positions that didn’t repeat this year. Balance sheet growth remained a strength, and you can see average loans increased five% year-over-year with all lines of business contributing.

Deposits increased 13% year-over-year, reflecting continued client engagement across the franchise, and rates paid was down linked quarter and year-over-year. Returns remained strong with return on capital of 16%, which was higher year-over-year. Turning to Global Markets on slide 16, I’ll focus my remarks as usual ex DVA. Global Markets’ strong first quarter was driven by robust client activity and disciplined risk management in a volatile trading environment heightened by geopolitical uncertainty. Revenues ex DVA were $7 billion, up 7% year-over-year, where Sales and Trading had its strongest performance in a decade, increasing 12% to $6.3 billion, led primarily by Equities performance. Despite the noted volatility, we had no trading loss days during the quarter. Equities had their best quarter ever, with revenues up 30% year-over-year, reflecting increased client activity and capital extended to the business for growth.

The increase was driven by client financing activity, particularly in Asia, as well as strong trading performance in derivatives. FICC results remained strong and were modestly higher, with strength in commodities partially offset by lower revenue in FX and interest rate products. Net income was $2 billion, which was up modestly from strong results in Q1 2025 that also included roughly $230 million in gains related to leveraged finance positions. Higher revenues were offset by increased expenses on higher activity levels, increased people costs, and our continued investment in this business. Average assets grew 14% year-over-year to $1.1 trillion, reflecting higher inventory levels and strong client balances. Returns remained solid with a 15% return on capital. Overall, Global Markets continues to deliver for our clients, producing consistent profitability, continued revenue momentum, and it reinforces the durability of the franchise across different and challenging market environments.

On slide 17, All Other shows a modest profit of roughly $100 million in Q1 with very little to cover here. As I wrap up, I’ll just note the Q1 effective tax rate was 17.5%. That was seasonally lower, reflecting the annual vesting of employee share-based awards. As a reminder, for the full year 2026, we expect an effective tax rate of just a little more than 20%. In closing, first quarter of 2026 reflected continued revenue momentum, disciplined execution, and improved efficiency in returns. Our diversified business model, strong balance sheet, and prudent risk management position us well for the remainder of the year. With that, we’ll open up the line for questions. Please, Leo.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. If you’d like to ask a question, press star one on your keypad. To leave the queue at any time, press star two. Once again, that is star one to ask a question, and we’ll pause for just a moment to allow everyone a chance to join the queue. Thank you. Our first question comes from Manan Gosalia with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America1: Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. First up, just on the expense side, the stronger NII guide was great to see, and you’re keeping the expense guide, but you’re also keeping the operating leverage guide. I know there’s some level of rounding in here, but how do you think about dropping the benefit of the better NII to the bottom line?

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Manan, thanks for the question. We did this quarter, and we expect that the NII will drop to bottom line. If it goes up, you’d expect us to see a higher end of the operating leverage range like we did this quarter.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America1: Got it. Perfect. Maybe on the ROTCE side, I guess you’ve already delivered on a 16% ROTCE within the 16%-18% target. How do you think about staying within that range in the near term as you deliver on the operating leverage? Are there any one-timers, anything else we should be considering for this quarter?

Manan, I don’t think there’s any one-timers to consider here. We provided that guidance of a medium-term range for ROTCE over the course of the medium term. Look, every quarter is going to be different. We’re obviously gratified with 16% based on the strong operating leverage performance. The key for us as a management team is just keep moving up the ladder. A couple of years ago, it was 13%, then 14%. Every quarter will be different. We just got to keep making progress towards our goal, and that remains our focus as a management team.

Great. Thank you.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. We’ll now move on to Glenn Schorr with Evercore. Please go ahead.

Glenn Schorr, Analyst, Evercore: Hi. Thanks so much. Maybe an easy high-level one on the consumer. I think your spending is so good. Employment and wages have been strong. The easy question is, why do you think loan and deposit growth in the consumer side is slow, sluggish? It’s not like you’re not opening new checking accounts, new credit card accounts. Just curious on the high level there.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Well, Glenn, I think if we look back over time on the deposit side, what’s been interesting, we talked about three or four years ago, at some point after the deposits were seeking higher yield, consumer would begin to find its floor. When you look at what’s happening right now, you can see now four quarters in a row of year-over-year deposit growth. It looks like we’re finding that floor and beginning to grow out of it. You can also see, if you look at our numbers, growth in non-interest-bearing, and a little bit more this quarter than we’ve seen in the prior quarters, the elements that are sort of saying it’s beginning to pick up. Now, obviously, there’s an interest rate environment, and there’s a spend environment that go against deposits.

It feels to us like the consumer part, which is so powerful, is beginning to turn and grow and at the beginnings of accelerating. That’s kind of where we are in the longer arc. On the lending side, we’re in a period right now where unemployment is good, home prices are good, asset prices are good, savings remain elevated. The lending is pretty broad-based within consumer, but you’re getting 3% or 4% growth there. Can we see more over time? Yes. At this point, I think relative to how the consumer is performing, we’re in a good place. Only final thing I’ll just say is we’ve talked about the fact that we’ve got to focus on our own balance sheet efficiency. We’ve talked about the fact that we’ve got the ability over time just to allow some of the retail and the institutional CDs to pay off.

We’ve sort of done that. We don’t have to chase CDs at this point. That in turn has meant that we’ve been very disciplined on rate paid. We could put up more deposit growth if we wanted to, but we’re really choosing at this point to just maximize the core operating client account activity. That’s what we’re focused on.

Glenn Schorr, Analyst, Evercore: Well, I think it’s working. That’s cool. I appreciate that. It’s interesting, you guys mentioned that headcount’s down over 1,000 this year. If I look over the last five years, it’s kind of flattish. There’s a lot underneath the covers. You’re adding in growth areas, you’re subtracting some other areas, and I think your attrition rate is more like 7%. Maybe can you talk about some of the puts and takes where you’re adding, where you’re shrinking, and obviously the question of where are you in the AI journey in terms of how that might bring a little bit larger headcount reduction or not replacing all the attrition going forward? Thanks.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Glenn, the long arc, if you look in 2007, before we bought Merrill and Countrywide, to give you a sense, we had more employees at Bank of America than we have today. The application of technology to process and the customer utilization of our technology has let us basically run the company 19 years later on less people. This is not a new trend. What you’re seeing now is the continuation of those trends. You’re right. As we showed you Investor Day, we showed you shorter term. We showed headcount down 80,000. We showed up 50,000 out of the Consumer set of businesses, 25,000 out of ops. During that time, we made massive investments in technologists, in cybersecurity, from a few hundred people to 3,000 people, et cetera. New branches. We continue to shift investment.

That went on again this quarter, where you saw headcount drift down out of operational process and managers and things like that. That investment goes into developing more headcount in the relationship manager businesses across the board. We’ll continue to do that to support the growth of the businesses. We’re doing it through attrition.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Hire 1,300 people, round numbers, to stay neutral in the company. You can adjust the headcount by just being careful on hiring and let attrition be your friend, as we call it. That’s how we got down 1,000 people. It comes from eliminating work and applying technology, and Consumer and Commercial customers using those technologies. AI gives us places to go we haven’t gone, and we’ve got 90 installations working. All 200,000 teammates have access to AI or can use it every day. Erica is more understood out there, but it’s been brought across lots of platforms that now the models. We’re still in the early stages of what all this will do, but we’re seeing real benefits out of it today.

Glenn Schorr, Analyst, Evercore: Thanks, Brian.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. We’ll now move on to John McDonald with Truist Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

John McDonald, Analyst, Truist Securities: Thank you. Good morning. Hey, guys. In terms of capital, with a peek at the new proposals, how are you thinking about a capital target as you strive towards your ROTCE goals? Just kind of wondering, do you have some more incremental comfort in narrowing that management buffer that you have today, which is over 100 basis points to the reg minimums? Thank you.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Thanks, John. Well, I think as we’re getting more and more clarity, you’ve seen us take advantage of that by just allowing the capital ratios to drift down. We’ll wait ultimately to see what the final rules all look like. It’s pretty clear to us at this point that, yes, Basel III endgame RWAs will be a little higher. Yes, it appears GSIB inflation indexing is going to give us some relief, particularly as you move forward into future periods. That’s allowed us to do a little bit more buyback. It’s allowed us to put out a little bit more balance sheet, so we’re gaining a little more confidence. At the end of the day, we’re in a good place right now. We have plenty of capital, plenty of flexibility. We’re earning well. Now we just got to wait for the final rules.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: John, I think your point about operating closer to the minimums, leave aside everything Alastair talked about and the shifts across time, the new rules, the old rules, and the transition. The reality is, as we have studied this, the volatility in our earnings stream under all the stress scenarios that we run every quarter is how we start to think about the cushion we have to maintain. That cushion could be tighter to the reg minimum without having the same threats because of stability in the earnings streams and the capabilities of the company. We brought it from a broader range to a narrower range. You expect us to keep it in the 50 basis points, as we said. If the underlying requirement goes down, the whole number goes down, if not, et cetera. Let it play out a little bit.

There’s no philosophical change in maintaining a decent cushion, but not an overly big cushion. Our fine-tuning of that across the last three or four years really is based on the capabilities of this company to earn through different things like the COVID, the regional bank crisis, et cetera. You can see that the volatility is just not there.

John McDonald, Analyst, Truist Securities: Right. What you’re saying, Brian, is the 50 basis point kind of management buffer is over time, what you’d expect to gravitate to.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Yeah. We were moving there, but we’re taking all earned capital out through dividends and buybacks. That then leaves the nominal amount the same, and we’re growing the company into it. We’ve got all these rules and how they’ll be implemented. Remember, there’s step-ups and steps down, and that we’ve got to sort of see play out here. You’ve got it right. Just think in the long term, 50 basis points over the minimum is more what we’re shooting for.

John McDonald, Analyst, Truist Securities: Okay. Alastair, could you give a little more color on the drivers of the change, the tweak in the NII outlook, and more specifically, what you’re assuming within the modest loan and deposit growth inside of that guide?

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Yeah. We’re not really changing anything in terms of the loan and deposit growth. We’ve been pretty encouraged with the way that started out the year. It’s more a continuation of what we’ve seen, but we’ve seen pretty good organic growth, so that’s been good. The rotation is slowing from non-interest-bearing into interest-bearing. In fact, non-interest-bearing picked up a little bit this quarter, so we’re happy to see that. For as long as the loan growth stays there, deposit growth looks good. We lost a couple of rate cuts. Those might have hurt us at the back end of the year. They’re not going to hurt us in the same way. All those things, you add them up, it’s a little bit of all of them. Put a little bit more balance sheet into Global Markets.

You add it up, that all feels good. Final thing, John, is if you take a look at the loan growth disclosure that we put out, I think it’s on page eight of our release. You’ll see pretty broad-based now from each of the lines of business, pretty broad-based by each of the products. We’re not reliant on any one thing. That gives us a little more confidence around durability.

John McDonald, Analyst, Truist Securities: Okay. Thank you.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. We’ll now move on to Jim Mitchell with Seaport Global. Your line is open.

Jim Mitchell, Analyst, Seaport Global: Hey, good morning. Alastair, can you expand on the funding optimization point a little bit? It seems like you had a significant drop in rates paid on non-U.S. deposits. Overall, how much can you do on that fund optimization point, and how do we think about balance sheet growth in that context?

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Yeah. This is something we’ve talked about in prior earnings calls, Jim. No change to what we’ve been thinking about over the course of the past couple of years. We had some, I’ll call it balance sheet puffiness around some of the longer-dated CDs and some of the repo activity. As we go through the course of time, what we believe we can continue to do is just allow those to drift lower, which in turn is good for NIM. It probably doesn’t impact NII particularly, but we can fund the core growth of the clients while allowing some of that balance sheet puff to come out. That’s what we’re doing. We’re just sticking to that. You can see the CDs coming down quietly, slowly over time, taking some of the repo down quietly, slowly over time, while still giving more balance sheet to the business for clients.

Jim Mitchell, Analyst, Seaport Global: Can you quantify how much you think is left of that?

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: I think last time we got together, we said probably somewhere around $100 billion or so.

Jim Mitchell, Analyst, Seaport Global: Right.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: It could be a little more, could be a little less, but it’s in that kind of a number.

Jim Mitchell, Analyst, Seaport Global: Yeah.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Jim, be careful about nominal. In other words, we grow core loans within the balance sheet and let other stuff go off. The total footings are one point, but it’s what you’re holding within those footings that’s the key point, and what liabilities you have within those footings. I think it was pointed out by one of your colleagues earlier, if you think about deposits in our company, and you look at slide seven and look at the rate drop across the board, we are clearly at the core of core deposits in all the businesses. They have different aspects, obviously, wealth management business. Core deposit is different than a mass market consumer business or even a small business versus a large corporation.

Look at that page and just think about, we’re sitting with $2 trillion of deposits and $1.2 trillion-ish of loans, and we’re only going to take the deposits we need. We take the deposits from the customers in line with their core operating capabilities and the core business. That’s what we’re focused on.

Jim Mitchell, Analyst, Seaport Global: Yeah. No, absolutely. On the C&I side, Alastair, you mentioned that more traditional C&I growth has picked up. Is that an early read on taking some share from private credit given disruptions there? Is it simply just broadly improving demand and an improvement in credit line utilization?

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: It’s mostly credit line utilization this quarter.

Jim Mitchell, Analyst, Seaport Global: Yeah.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: At the end of Q4, we saw a little bit of revolver paydown, which probably took our loan balances down. We still grew loans in Q4, but the growth wasn’t quite as high because the revolver utilization came down. It just came back and a little bit more in Q1. We probably picked up $5 billion-$10 billion of loan growth just from revolver draws. It’s sort of core middle market activity, building working capital across Corporate America and internationally. That’s where we saw the growth.

Jim Mitchell, Analyst, Seaport Global: Okay, great. Thank you.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. We’ll now move on to Mike Mayo with Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America2: Hi. What a difference a quarter makes. I think what I hear you saying is that you feel better about the short term, and you can correct that, but you got the 16% ROTCE. You’re guiding NII higher. You have 290 basis points of year-over-year operating leverage. I think you’re saying the short term is better, but since the last earnings report, there’s been concerns about the long term, right? That AI agents will come and take your deposits, that AI bad actors will commit cyber crimes against you, that AI spend will not bear fruit. I know you guys have Erica and CashPro and Gen AI and over 4,000 patents, and as you brought up, less employees since 2007, and also some other advantages there.

As you think about that debate, the long-term debate about AI, you being a victim or you being a beneficiary, why is Bank of America an AI beneficiary? If you could just frame it in some way. I know the question was asked already, but revenues per employee, how much would you expect that to increase, or something around that? Thank you.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Mike, I think in your question you gave the answer, which is we are a beneficiary of the impacts of all technology, including AI. We’ve applied it and we’ll continue to apply it. We’ve got catalyst efforts going on on a corporate-wide basis to bring all the ideas to bear. Our team’s job is to benefit from the technology. It creates issues about cybersecurity and things like that you’re reading about in the paper, and we take those extremely seriously and invested heavily to do it and work with our industry colleagues and colleagues in other industries to ensure the safety and security of our architecture. There’ll always be positive pressure on the earnings due to the application of technology, and AI gives us a lot of efforts there. There’s nothing new and different about the ability to move deposits.

We can move them in our company instantaneously to other off-balance sheet, on-balance sheet rates. The question is, what are the deposits for? I think what gets lost in all this discussion is a little bit the reflection of the earlier discussion on deposit rate paid is we have the deposits because people have their transaction accounts with us. They’re moving money. The CD and at-the-market deposit practice in our company is a small part of what we do to drive the economic value, and our job is to stay with our customers to be the core depository institution and transactional bank with them, as well as their lending bank. We feel very strongly that we will not only take advantage of AI, it will help us drive even greater market share and capabilities in the future.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America2: I guess as a follow-up to that, I guess you remind me, like, the primary checking account, I think is what you’re saying, is very sticky. How can you use AI to improve the trust of customers, whether it’s with a cyber risk? I’m not sure if you or one of the CEOs went down to D.C. or just trust with data and identity and the relationships. Thanks.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Sure. The customer scores in our institution are all-time highs, and the trust they see in the way we use data and the way we use information, frankly, some of the gates on our adoption of some of these technologies are we’re protecting customer data where other people are not. That’s been a constant struggle from cloud computing into this. We keep our data out of the models so that our customer data, et cetera, and take advantage of the models coming into us, but not feeding them. That’s what we owe our customers. We feel we’re in a great trusted position.

We’ve spent a lot of time, effort, and money over the years making sure we get to what we call Never Down and continue to deploy hot backups and systems that will step in for each other. We work with the industry to ensure that goes throughout the other platforms, the FMUs and things like that. If you ask our customers, our digital capabilities, our technology capabilities, and the trust in us is as high as it’s ever been. As a matter of fact, it’s higher than it’s ever been, and it’s growing literally month after month after month. We feel good about that.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America2: Last follow-up, just in five years from now, when we look back and say, okay, AI, tech, where should we see the benefits? Is it just the stickiness of the relationships, or is it efficiency, or where should that show up?

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: If you think about today, just on the consumer side, Mike, because two things. One, you said the core deposit account. There’s a core deposit account, there’s a core investment account, it’s a core corporate transactional account. It’s a core borrowing home. Each of these core is what you’re seeking, not just growth overall. I just want to make sure it’s broader. If you say five years from now and think about it, I think you’ll see the same elements. We should continue to see more and more digital or AI-generated interfaces to the client. I think AI really helps us internally. Just to make it straightforward, 99% round numbers of all the interactions we have with our consumers are digital already. There’s no person involved.

So as you start to think about that, you go the inverse, the cost of that 1% is a pretty high number, and we’re working on that with all this technology, and we’re working on the efficiency even of the 99% in-house delivered. Example of that is Erica versus alerts. Alerts are basically, instead of doing prompts and asking questions, we’re reusing the same technology to deliver to you a constant flow of information. That saves the interface on the prompts and things, and also allows it to be more interactive with the customer. So in the AI intelligence, the technology intelligence is not different. So it’ll be more of it.

I think at the end of the day, if you think about from 2007 till now, the same number of people, we’ll be plowing into the front end where relationship managers matter, the high-touch piece, which is critically important delivery. You’ll see us keep adding there, and you’ll see us keep taking out of the activities that are not directly facing the customer. Even on the customer-facing with 90,000 Salesforce moving to Agentforce and AI and prompt, we’ll get more efficient on that too. I’m not going to give you exactly because you know that’s fraught with error because it never quite works out that way. The trends will be more technology, more intimacy with the customers, more agentic versus prompt, more build into the process rather than have it be delivered by teammates doing something, i.e., it’s part of the process.

More customers doing more with us and expense, the operating leverage will be there.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America2: All right. Thank you.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. We’ll now move on to Erika Najarian with UBS. Your line is open.

Erika Najarian, Analyst, UBS: Hi. Good morning. Just two quick follow-up questions from me. First, on the net interest income outlook, as we think about the possibility of no rate cuts, how should we think about how BofA is going to handle deposit costs in that scenario? Could deposit costs be contained, particularly given sort of the loan growth in the Markets balance sheet if the Fed doesn’t cut?

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Erika, I think so. If the rates aren’t moving, I don’t see a great deal of impetus for us to be changing what we’re paying in the interest-bearing side. It’ll just be a question of which of the two categories grows faster, interest-bearing or non-interest-bearing. As I pointed out, right now we’ve got a little bit of growth in both, so that’s helpful. We’ll have to watch that over the course of the year. Even with two rate cuts no longer in the period in the second half, it doesn’t make a great deal of difference because you’re really talking about one cut for six months, one for three months in the old version. We’ll be a slight beneficiary of that, but the main thing going on is just organic growth of the company.

Erika Najarian, Analyst, UBS: Got it. Just a very technical question on some of the capital reform proposals, and this sort of came to everyone’s attention when one of your peers reported yesterday. Fully appreciate that the regulators are trying to address retrospective inflation with the coefficient changes. Companies like Bank of America, in theory, based on your 2025 GSIB score, are set to go up by January 1st, 2028. Now, clearly, a lot of that growth was related to the economy, and your risk density continues to go down. As you think about the comment period, is that something you would address? Because obviously, there’s 90 days and there’s a lot of dialogue, I’m sure, going on between the industry. I thought that was particularly notable in terms of that 2025 score, potentially bringing your GSIB up by January 2028, despite the positive revision on the surcharge.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Yeah. There are two worlds right now, Erika. There’s the current rules and there’s the proposed rules. We don’t have the proposed rules finalized yet. I’d just say the main thing you’re talking about, which is GSIB numbers going higher over time, the new proposal addresses that because there’s inflation indexing. What might look like a raise in the future may not be a rise in the GSIB. That’s why we believe in the course of this, that’s one of the most important things done here. We expect to be a beneficiary of that because we’re an organic growth company, as will all the large GSIBs, one would think.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Erika, one thing to think about is, in the words of the old song, you can’t always get what you want, but you can get what you need. At the end of the day, we needed a concept of indexing because it was in the original rule that after the 2012 data, that it was supposed to be indexed. We needed that in there. What we would have wanted was a longer-term perspective than we are getting on it. At least it’s in the concept and we baked in a rule, then we can go to work on how that impact, because it was just we in the industry are not going to get everything we want in these proposals because in the end of the day, there’s some negotiation going on.

On the other hand, we’re getting what we need, which is the concept of indexing, because it was meant to be an original rule. It wasn’t put in. With a gross growth in the economy from 2019 to now, we all had an increase in capital 15%-20% with no major risk. We got the concept in. Let them finalize the rules. We’re never going to get everything the industry should get or desires to get, or actually, we believe we should get. At the end of the day, we got to get moving along here so we can get this implemented and then fine-tune the models around it.

Erika Najarian, Analyst, UBS: Got it. Brian, fantastic job on addressing the efficiency questions very clearly earlier in the call. Thank you.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. We’ll now move on to Ken Usdin with Autonomous Research. Your line is now open.

Ken Usdin, Analyst, Autonomous Research: Thanks a lot. Just one follow-up. With the great start on the 9% growth in NII, and you took up the range to 6%-8%, I’m just wondering, Alastair, just as you look through the year, why couldn’t the first-year growth rate stay there? Are there any either comp things or shifts in kind of the expectations around markets related to NII, from NII to fees, given the higher for longer, or any other point that we should just be mindful of? Is it just a we’ll see because it’s early in the year and there’s a lot that could still play out? Thanks.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Well, it’s a little bit of that. It’s early in the year. We’ll see how it plays out. It’s also a little bit of recognition that last year we had a bigger second half just because of the shape of the fixed rate asset repricing that took place. We just got a little bit less of fixed rate asset repricing taking place in the second half of this year. It’s really a year-over-year comps thing that we’re looking at. Now, by the way, the organic growth continues to pick up. Can we do better? Of course. That’s why we give you as much guidance as we can each quarter based on what we actually see.

Ken Usdin, Analyst, Autonomous Research: That’s fair. On Brian’s point about the great start to operating leverage 290 and same kind of question, you did great in holding the line on cost, and I know you’re trying to not focus us on a cost guide per se, but is the demonstration of that flexibility going to be the ultimate driver of the incremental to get you from one side of the 200-300 to potentially the higher side? I just kind of wonder, can you keep this range reasonably tight on the expense growth trajectory? Thanks.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Yeah. We provided a guidance on operating leverage looking forward over a three-year-five-year period and said we’re aiming for 200 basis points-300 basis points. If we can do more, we will. Every quarter is going to look different because your comparable versus last year will look different. The growth will look different. We recognize we have to have a range because it’s not going to be the same every single quarter. That’s one point. Second, the main thing that we have to do on the expense side is just be really disciplined on headcount because that remains 60%-70% of the cost base when you really think about it. You’re going to look at the headcount. That’s going to give you a pretty good idea as to whether or not we’re really focused on the core operating expense and being disciplined there.

You’ve got revenue-related expense. Many of those are good. Those are good expenses. We don’t want to have to apologize for that. That’s why we focus people on the operating leverage, because when the assets under management fees are going up 15%, when the investment banking’s going up 20%, when the sales and trading’s going up 12%, those are good things, and with them come good costs. That’s what we’re managing on the operating leverage. We had a good quarter this quarter. We’re on to the next. We’re figuring out how we can do 200 and higher this next quarter.

Ken Usdin, Analyst, Autonomous Research: Got it. Thanks, Alastair.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. We’ll now move on to Chris McGratty with KBW. Your line is now open.

Chris McGratty, Analyst, KBW: Good morning, everyone. I’m interested in an update on the wealth strategy relative to the NNA targets laid out in November. Any recruiting or retention commentary would be great. Thanks.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Two things. We’ll update those targets not every quarter just because they’re longer-term targets, medium-term, long-term targets on net new growth. On recruiting, I think the team’s doing a very good job, and we’re getting in, I think, double the amount of advisors this year, first quarter as we did last year, something like that. Importantly, the attrition of the advisors is down to low level, and it’s a net benefit of that. We feel that Lindsay and Eric and Katie in the Private Bank are all well on the way to driving those metrics to where they should go. The business had nice operating profit, which it will do when market’s year-over-year up. It’s a nice pickup, and the margin continues to improve year-over-year up a couple of hundred basis points. They’re doing a good job.

Importantly, you can look on the organic growth pages. You’ll see some pieces in there about checking accounts and rounding out the relationship. The loan growth in Wealth Management has been very strong for the last year or so. We feel very good about it. We’ll update you on those when we do more of a general update for the company, and we feel good.

Chris McGratty, Analyst, KBW: Okay, great. Thanks, Brian. The popular question this quarter has been durability of trading revenues. I’m interested in how you see the potential of the firm to grow trading revenues in the mix within trading over the next near to intermediate term. Thanks.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Well, we still feel good about it. I mean, this is another quarter where we allocated a little bit more in the way of resources to the team. They delivered with another 15% return on allocated capital. At the end of the day, we’ve got a big global diversified set of businesses in Global Markets. Equities did very well this quarter. Commodities did well this quarter. Our international businesses came through this quarter. This is what you have when you’ve got a nice portfolio of businesses. Activity can move from one to another. We still end up with 12% sales and trading increases year-over-year. We’ve obviously invested a lot. We’ll continue to invest in this business. The client activity remains robust. There’s a lot going on in the world, and people have to think about then their financing and their risk management and repositioning.

We’ve clearly been beneficiary of our client activity as well, but we feel good about the business and we’ll keep investing.

Chris McGratty, Analyst, KBW: Great. Thanks, Alastair.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. We’ll move next to Gerard Cassidy with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Gerard Cassidy, Analyst, RBC Capital Markets: Thank you. Hi, Brian. Hi, Alastair.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Hi there. How are you?

Gerard Cassidy, Analyst, RBC Capital Markets: Good, thank you. Alastair, you talked about the loan growth and how the utilization rates have come up a bit. You also mentioned about the consumer growth in the quarter, or maybe Brian, at about 4%. The question I have is, we’re starting to hear from a few banks that the underwriting standards might be getting stretched, and I know you guys emphasize you’re sticking to your discipline on underwriting standards. Are you guys seeing that in any areas, particularly in the Global Markets lending area? Are people pushing it, and you guys are just walking away from stuff maybe more often today than maybe 12 months ago?

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Well, we’ve not seen any of that here, and we haven’t detected that elsewhere at this stage.

Gerard Cassidy, Analyst, RBC Capital Markets: Very good. As a follow-up, Brian, you talked about the growth of the consumer. You talked about the debit card growth and the credit growth. I think it was slide five. We often hear about this K-shaped recovery in the lower end, struggling with inflation, the higher end better off because of the affluence. What are the risks that may prop up or crop up for the higher end six or 12 months from now? Everybody’s always focused on that lower end concern. Should there be some concerns at the higher end, or what could they be?

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: I think at the end of the day, whether you talk about credit quality or the ability to spend money, it’s always going to come back to the broad base of American population that’s critical to the economy. They’re working. Are the unemployment levels staying in the four and a half range and et cetera? Is wage growth there? I think wage growth has been solid among all the different parts of the earning spectrum. The question will be, will wage growth continue? Up until this quarter, you’re seeing spending grow among all those parts of the economy just at a faster rate. If we look at a third in the lower income strata, middle income, high, and you look at, it’s growing everywhere at a faster rate than middle and high.

The wage growth has been solid across all those populations, and so the spending ought to be there. I would just keep watching the unemployment new claims are up around 200,000 change, continuing claims 1.8. They’re levels that they were on a bigger workforce than they were in pre-pandemic. Until those move, I don’t see anything that interrupts the actual spending capability of all the consumers. I know often people say you’re optimistic. I’m giving what we see today in the spending, even in early April here. That’s the critical thing, what they do, not what they say they’re going to do. That’s going to be dictated more, am I employed? Do I have a job? Are my wages growing, and I feel that my money is being well spent?

That’s where inflation can make them shift money around, but not necessarily stop it.

Gerard Cassidy, Analyst, RBC Capital Markets: Very good. I assume you guys are watching the tax refunds, which are coming in better than expected, which obviously will bolster consumer spending as well. Thank you. I appreciate it, Brian and Alastair.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Thank you.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. We’ll now move on to David Chiaverini with Jefferies. Your line is open.

David Chiaverini, Analyst, Jefferies: Hi. Thanks for taking the questions. Follow-up on loan pipelines and borrower sentiment on the commercial side. Are you observing any change in borrower behavior given the Middle East tensions? Were the line utilization drawdowns defensive or normal course of business type of drawdowns?

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: These were not panic draws. This has generally been BAU working capital type of activity at this stage.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Great, David. I think when you talk to commercial customers, and you think about where they were last year with Liberation Day in the middle of that. You come a year forward, and a lot of things have been figured out with trade tariff policy, immigration policy, tax reform was in, and deregulation was coming. The major principles of the Trump administration were flowing through. Obviously, the Middle East and the trade tariff and all that stuff has got them thinking, but they’re still seeing solid demand. They’re all trying to figure out what happens next. The borrowings right now are because they see opportunities. We’ll see what happens with the resolution of the Middle East conflict and other things, and what the terms are, what the duration of the inflation is. That could impact them, but you’re not seeing it now.

David Chiaverini, Analyst, Jefferies: Great to hear. Shifting over to fixed asset repricing, that’s been a nice tailwind for you guys. At what point does the repricing tailwind begin to moderate, and if you happen to have at your fingertips the dollar volume of fixed assets that are expected to reprice in coming quarters?

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: When we got together at Investor Day, we laid out, number one, the magnitude, number two, the time period. You can think about it, David, as five years. It’s not going to be one quarter. It’s going to be every quarter for the course of the next five years, assuming rates stay where they are. We laid out pretty good disclosure there. I would encourage you just to take a look at that. What you’ll see is we put it in three different buckets. One was the residential mortgage, the auto loans that come off our balance sheet with clients every quarter, and new ones that come on. We laid it out in terms of treasuries and mortgage-backed securities in our securities portfolio that will mature, and we reprice every quarter.

We laid it out in terms of the cash flow swaps and the hedging activities we do. There’s pretty good disclosure there. It’s a five-year thing. It’s a little bit longer than that, but the vast majority is in the next five years. We laid out the numbers. That might be helpful. Okay.

David Chiaverini, Analyst, Jefferies: Very helpful. Thank you.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. We’ll move on now to Saul Martinez with HSBC. Your line is open.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America4: Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I want to ask about reserving. I was a little bit surprised that you saw the slight reserve release this quarter given the macro uncertainties. I guess how are you factoring in macro volatility downside case scenarios into reserving, because it does seem like you take a different approach to reserving than maybe some of your peers? I fully agree that your track record on credit is comparatively strong. Loss content has been lower than your peers. You see that in the stress test as you guys have highlighted a number of times. If I look at your reserve ratios by segment, but also things like reserve coverage of charge-offs, reserve coverage of delinquent loans, it tends to be lower than your peers. I guess why not be a little bit more conservative in your reserving?

I’m curious if you agree or disagree with my assessment that maybe you’re, I don’t want to call it more aggressive in reserving, but maybe more realistic in your reserving than some of your peers. I’m curious just philosophically your approach here on reserving, and why not be a little bit more conservative in terms of your reserving?

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Okay. First, I don’t think we have any difference in the way we think about reserving relative to anyone else. We all operate under the same CECL methodology. We all operate in the same way. Second, I’d say in terms of whether we have lower reserves or allowance, tends for most banks to be reflective of the quality of their lending portfolio, the risk they take, and their client selection. When we show you on slides 20, 21, and 22 how we have transformed the company over the course of the past 15 years, we have a very different risk profile of our lending than many of our peers. When you look at, for example, on page 20 of the earnings, you’ll see we’ve got a lot less of consumer unsecured, a lot less of credit card, a lot less of home equity lines.

We have a lot more of wealth loans. When you look at the Federal Reserve stress test loss rate, we’ve been the lowest 13 of the last 14 years, which would tell you we probably should have a lower reserve because we have a more conservative approach to our client selection and the type of risk that we take. We don’t think we’re any different than other people. We just think we’ve got a higher quality client base and a higher quality loan portfolio. The final thing I’ll just say is, in the course of any given quarter, you might take, like for example, this quarter, we took 5% out of the upside case.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America4: Mm-hmm.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: We put it in the baseline. We’re pretty heavily skewed at this point towards a downside case plus baseline. The only thing that happened to offset that was we had some release from the continued improvement in CRE office where we had built reserve pretty significantly. As that portfolio has gotten smaller, as we’ve got less and less in the way of NPLs and criticized there, we’ve been able to take some of the reserve back out. That’s all that’s going on this particular quarter.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America4: Okay. No, that’s helpful. Maybe just a follow-up then on NII. Obviously encouraging to see the guidance increased. NII ex markets up about 5% year-on-year, which is a good number. Obviously lower than the 9%, but a good number. How should we think about what the 6%-8% means for growth in NII ex markets? Should we be thinking that Global Markets NII kind of stabilizes at current levels given that it’s benefited from lower rates, and if we see the Fed on hold here, maybe it kind of sticks around these levels? Also just remind us what proportion of Global Markets NII is revenue earnings neutral, because my understanding is that some part of it is not, but it does flow to the bottom line. Is it predominantly offset by higher Global Markets NII offset by lower Global Markets non-interest revenue?

Just any color you can give there, that would be helpful.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Yeah. The Global Markets business NII has benefited over the course of the past couple of years from, number one, rates coming lower, and number two, continued balance sheet growth.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America4: Yeah.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: If rates don’t go lower, that engine for Global Markets NII growth won’t be there.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America4: Right.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: You can almost think that going forward, more and more of the NII growth is going to come from Global Banking, Consumer, and Global Wealth, and less of it is probably coming from Global Markets.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America4: Yeah.

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: In terms of the NII, there will be quarters where a little bit of the NII is offset in MMSA. Last quarter happened to be one where I noted we got about $100 million or so of NII benefit that was offset in MMSA, but I don’t anticipate that being a big story for us going forward. We’ve talked about the fact that the NII that we’re generating is going to drop to the bottom line. That continues to be our position.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America4: Okay, that’s true in markets as well?

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Yes, generally speaking, it just depends on the client activity in markets because sometimes they can.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America4: Yeah

Alastair Borthwick, Chief Financial Officer, Bank of America: Change from on balance sheet to off balance sheet. It sometimes changes the NII composition. If it ever came up where it was a large impact, I would share that.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America4: Okay, got it. That’s really helpful. Thank you.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I’m happy to return the call to Brian Moynihan for closing comments.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America: Thank you for joining us. It was a good quarter at Bank of America, the first quarter of 2026, strong NII growth, strong overall revenue growth, great operating leverage, and good returns. We look forward to delivering for that in the future. Thank you.

Brian Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America3: Thank you. This brings us to the end of today’s meeting. We appreciate your time and participation. You may now disconnect.

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