Chairman and Chief Executive Officer — William Rogers Chief Financial Officer — Michael Maguire Head of Investor Relations — Brad Bender Head of Investor Relations — Bradley Milsaps William Rogers: Thanks, Brad, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call today. Before we discuss our first quarter 2026 results, let's begin, as we always do, with purpose on Slide 4. At Truist, our purpose is to inspire and build better lives and communities.
And one way we bring that to life is through the work we do every day for our clients. One example of this is our project finance business, which is a client-focused platform that provides financial advice and capital to help develop essential infrastructure that drives long-term economic growth, job creation and stronger and better communities throughout our footprint in the United States. Our relationships with these clients have led to broad-based franchise engagement, which includes deposits, payments and lead roles and capital market transactions.
From a financial perspective, there are aspects of this business that generate returns somewhat differently than our other businesses. A meaningful portion of this benefit is realized through reductions to our tax provision rather than reported revenue. Mike is going to walk you through the impact of that later in the call, but this dynamic contributed to our lower tax provision in the first quarter and is a factor in our expected lower tax rate for 2026 compared to 2025.
This, though, is a great example of how serving our clients and communities is true to our purpose and also drives strong financial outcomes for our shareholders. Now turning to our results on Slide 5. Before I get into the details of our first quarter, I want to spend a moment on the quality of what we're delivering across the company and how we're executing against our strategic priorities.
What I'm most excited about this quarter is the underlying momentum we're seeing. New client pipelines are growing. Activity levels remain healthy, and we're continuing to add talent and execute in the areas that matter most to our strategy of driving improvement in our profitability.
During the quarter, we once again added new clients, deepened existing relationships and grew profitably in the business and products where we've chosen to focus with loan growth coming from priority segments, fee growth driven by core client activity and stronger referrals and connectivity across the company. I can clearly say that we're focused, we're aligned, and we're executing well, which is evident in our first quarter results. As you can see on Slide 5, we delivered net income available to common shareholders of $1.4 billion or $1.09 per diluted share for the first quarter, which represents a 25% increase over the first quarter of last year earnings of $0.87 a share.
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