Good day everyone, welcome to today's Bank of America fourth quarter earnings announcements conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions during the question and answer session. You may register to ask a question anytime by pressing star and one on your touch-tone phone. Please note today's call is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Lee McEntire. Please go ahead. Good morning. Welcome, and thank you for joining the call to review our fourth quarter results. I hope by now you've all had a chance to review the earnings release documents. As usual, they're available, including the earnings presentation that we'll be referring to during the call, on the investor relations section of bankofamerica.com's website. I'm going to first turn the call over to our CEO, Brian Moynihan, for some opening comments, and then ask Paul Donofrio, our CFO, to cover the details of the quarter. Before I turn the call over to Brian and Paul, just let me remind you that we may make forward-looking statements and refer to non-GAAP financial measures during the call that regards various elements of our financial results. Forward-looking statements are based on our management's current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties, and particularly as we continue to operate during this pandemic period. Factors that may cause actual results to materially differ from expectations are detailed in our earnings materials and SEC filings that are available on the website. Information about our non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations to U.S. GAAP, can also be found in those materials. With that, I am happy to turn the call over to Brian. Take away, Brian. Thank you, Lee, and good morning to all of you, and thank you for joining us today. Before I pass the call to Paul to review the fourth quarter, I wanted to hit a few points. First, I wanted to provide some brief commentary on 2020 for the full year, then talk about what we see in the economy as we enter 2021, and then highlight some areas where I believe we made strong strategic progress that'll drive momentum into 2021 and beyond. Starting on slide 2. 2020 was a tough operating environment, as you all know. In that period, we generated net income of nearly $18 billion, or $1.87 in EPS, and earned a return above our cost of capital. Our EPS was down 32% compared to 2019, driven by the impacts of coronavirus pandemic on the company and the economy. As you know, the Fed dropped rates to nearly zero. Longer rates also fell to historic lows. Loan demand surged and then waned as the panic subsided. That reduced net interest income. As we told you last quarter, that we believe NII had likely bottomed in the third quarter of 2019. In fact, we saw a modest improvement this quarter, which Paul will cover later, despite the challenges from lower loans. Non-interest revenue declined slightly, but included some interesting dynamics, highlighting diversity of Bank of America's model. Consumer fees declined, driven by the activity levels of clients, but also by higher account balances in customer accounts. That's a good thing for the economy going forward. Our business mix allowed us to benefit from more market-related activities in sales and trading, investment banking, and investment brokerage in the Wealth Management businesses. Our full-year revenue of $15 billion from sales and trading rose 17%. We generated more than $7 billion of investment banking revenues this year, an increase of 27% over last year. Investment brokerage revenue grew 5% to nearly $15 billion. Our expenses were higher as a result of the many costs associated with COVID and the support for our teams, our clients, and our communities we serve. For a comparison of 2019 and 2020, 2019, 2020 included the third quarter addition of merchant service costs following dissolution of joint venture in the third quarter of 2019. These costs were always incurred as a net revenue deduction under joint venture accounting. Now, come through our expense line. Setting aside the elevated net elevated COVID-related expense and a change in accounting for merchant services, our teams continue to do a good job managing costs, and you'll see that later, and Paul will talk about it, and maintain a focus on using productivity gains to fund all the investments we're making across the franchise, and including increasing client flows. Expenses remain relatively flat year-over-year. We expect them to be flat for 2021 versus 2020. Provision was higher as a result of reserves built given the macroeconomic deterioration experienced in the first part of the year. This also reflects the new CECL accounting rules, which were adopted as of January 1st of 2020. As the macroeconomic outlook improved, we released some reserves in the fourth quarter. As we look at share count, it declined 7%, driven by the amount of the shares bought as we moved into the second half of 2019, in the first quarter of 2020, prior to the time of suspending share repurchases. With $36 billion of excess capital above our common CET1 minimum requirements, excess capital above SLR reverting back to its normal calculation, and completion of the CCAR exam, we'll once again begin repurchasing shares starting today. As you know, our first priority for use of all our capital is to grow our business organically. We have funded growth in many areas. We have funded expanded minimum wages to $20 an hour for all our teammates. We expanded the increased COVID benefits. We've taken care of all that. Now, we're looking to return as much capital to our shareholders as we're allowed and as our board deems prudent. You saw this morning the beginning of that in a separate press release, that our board has approved share repurchase in the first quarter of up to $3.2 billion, including shares issued to employees. This is in addition to maintaining our quarterly dividend of $0.18 per quarter, and that accounts for net return of another $1.6 billion of capital. This is the maximum allowed on the Fed's guidelines established for the first quarter 2021. Beyond the first quarter, when we find out what the rules are, we'll continue to change our authorizations to reflect those rules. In summary, it was a good year given the circumstance of the health crisis and the impact on the economy in the markets around the world. I want to thank my teammates for the hard work they did to serve our clients, to serve our communities, and to help each other. As we begin the new year, let's turn to the economy. What we see is a continuing recovery occurring. Consumer spending by our clients and asset quality continue to improve. Our companies are highly liquid and generally in pretty good shape, except of course, for those industries that are most hard hit by COVID. As the economy continues to push ahead, these companies that are operating well will need operating capital. We saw early signs of loan demand stabilizing as we went through the fourth quarter. As we all know, there's one priority, and that's to get everyone vaccinated so the healthcare crisis is behind us, and therefore, the economy can regain its strength. Our research team just this past week has upgraded the 2021 forecast, and their view is that U.S. GDP growth will be around 5%, and global forecasts for growth are 5.4%. Let me give you a snapshot of what we see in our customer data that supports some of our views for growth. On slide 5, excuse me, slide 3, you can see the consumer payments. With 66 million consumer and small business clients making payments across all our channels, we have a rich data set that provides a deep view of the U.S. consumer payment trends and small business trends. You can see this on slide 3. This chart shows solid lines reflecting cumulative change for the year in spending. The dotted line shows the year-over-year change for each month during the year in total spending. Consumer payment activity began and ended the year very strong. In the first two months of the year, payments were up high single digits year-over-year. By April, given the early spread of the pandemic and the full across-the-board economic lockdowns, which is different in the status we are now, payments dropped and were down 26%. By early summer, payments snapped back, and you can see that here with the reopening of the economies in many areas, the impact of government stimulus, and increased unemployment. As some of those funds were depleted or ran off, and the volumes in fact grew back to normal levels, we saw a slowdown in the rate of the recovery. But still spending managed to grow at a level consistent with pre-pandemic prior year periods. And as we entered the holiday period which was lengthened this year by the difference in activity of retail purchasing, the trends continued to strengthen. Total payments in the month of December hit a high of $304 billion, up 8% year-over-year, driven by a record volume of holiday spending. Full year payments reached a new high of $3.1 trillion, up 2% year-over-year. One of the things we have done here is provide a pie chart on the lower left-hand side of this page for an important reason. When we think about consumer spending, we think about all the ways consumers take money and consume and spend it to do things. This is outside of just debit and credit spending habits, which tend to get all the discussion because they're easy to track, quite frankly. They represent 75% of the transaction volume, but only about 20% of the dollar volume of transactions. You can see that they make up that smaller amount on the lower left-hand side. Especially as travel and entertainment spending has shifted away, you've actually even seen debit spending outgrow credit spending. 80% of the dollar volume of payments made by our consumers happens through person-to-person payments, person-to-business payments, ACH, wires, and many other means, including cash taken out of the ATMs and spent, and checks written. In terms of transaction, you can see at the bottom right of this chart how the physical payments of cash and checks have moved to more digital forms, which creates operational efficiencies for us and has been a strategic initiative for many years, and one that was moved forward by the crisis. Full year 2020 cash and check transactions volume fell to the lowest on record, down 21%, as COVID accelerated the migration to digital card-based payments. 2021 has begun as a strong year for payments. The new stimulus checks started hitting customers' accounts in the first weeks of January. More than 11 million of those payments have hit our accounts, about $11 billion. They flowed into the accounts mostly from digital transfers to IRS. How have payments performed in the first half of January? The first half of January across all these payment types is up 6.7% from 2020. In good news, debit and credit is up 5.6%. Growth rates in total exceed pre-COVID levels of growth rates. There are larger dollar amounts. Bigger dollars and faster growth rates. That is with about 30% of the $600 payments being spent by our primary checking customers. 70% more to be spent. As we move to slide 4, we can see the activity on the commercial side. In the closing weeks of 2020, we continued to see some stabilization, mainly driven by our middle market auto finance clients as inventories have gotten low and they rebuilt them. The chart on the top of slide 5 reflects the total Global Banking loans across all segments, Business Banking, Global Commercial Banking, Global Corporate Investment Banking. As you recall, in the first quarter of the year, we experienced a heightened level of client draws on commitments as the panic borrowing set in with the crisis. That was about three years of normalized commercial loan growth in a single month. As you know, driven by capital markets for the GCIB clients, and soft loan demand as people gathered their wits about them in the crisis moved a different stage, we saw significant paydowns in loan balances. During the last two months of the year, we've seen more stable results that we hope can continue to turn into increased demand and growth as we look forward. In the chart on the bottom of the page, you can see that middle market and business banking, that core part of American economy, has started to tip up, but the larger corporate loans continue to be affected by the markets and the clients of the period. A decade of operating under a responsible growth principle has prepared us well for this crisis. It allowed us to remain focused on our customer and our well-understood risk framework and support them in the communities they live in. In fact, we have basically reopened all the credit underwriting to the standards we had before the crisis. We are well-positioned against this improving economic backdrop because of progress we made in respect of our strategic initiatives over the many years. Let's go to the next slide 5, and we'll talk about the strategic process. We can start with Consumer Banking in the upper left. As you know, we retain the number one deposit share position for retail deposits. That's $800 billion+, and coupled with our Wealth Management deposits for American consumers, we have $1 trillion of deposits now. We grew average consumer deposits to $166 billion or 23%. $108 billion of that 166 was low-cost checking accounts. Customer satisfaction ended the year at a new all-time high. In 25 of the top 30 markets across America, representing over half the U.S. population, we now hold the number one, two or three leadership position, including in 14 of those markets, the number one position, which is twice as many markets as our closest peer. Another important consumer objective has been the focus on digital banking. Digital engagement expanded throughout all our businesses through the year. 69% of our Consumer Wealth Management households are now digitally active, not just enrolled, but active. That's up a couple of hundred basis points in this deep penetration of customer base. These clients signed in 9 billion times this year, representing double-digit growth. They aren't just signing in for transactions or looking at their balances. They are also buying things. 42% of the sales this year were digital sales. It expanded in areas of checking account sales, auto sales, and mortgage loan sales. Erica, our digital assistant, group users grew 67% to 17 million. They spent 1.4 million hours, those clients did, talking to Erica, interacting with it. In Zelle, the P2P payment form also, is up 80% year-over-year. Remember those earlier payments charts on the early pages. There's a lot of growth ahead here. It helps us move from higher cost to lower cost means. What's interesting about the Zelle customers is the depth of the relationship they have with us. On average, they have three accounts with Bank of America, an average checking balance of more than $9,000, and an average investment balances of $400,000 when they have investment balances. Now, switching more broadly, consumer investment balances, these are investment balances in mass affluent in our consumer business, surpassed a major milestone and moved over $300 billion with 3 million accounts. We added 537 new funded accounts in 2020 in that mass affluent segment. That's up 27% year-over-year. In September, we rolled out Life Plan, our financial planning that helps people prioritize their financial goals. We've had 2 million+ plans created already, one of the fastest roll-outs of a product we've ever had. As we move to the Wealth Management group, we saw record client balances of $3.3 trillion through both market appreciation and flows. Product integration continued to improve as Merrill clients utilized our checking services, and their checking balances at Bank of America were up 28% year-over-year. Digital adoption by Merrill clients increased as 43% of the checks deposited by Merrill clients were done digitally. The Private Bank clients continued a strong adoption with 70% of the checks they deposited were deposited digitally. Despite the virtual environment, the inability to have face-to-face meetings, and inherently the Wealth Management business is a face-to-face business. Household growth accelerated through the second half of the year, with Merrill adding 22,000 net new households and a Private Bank adding 1,800. Indeed, we had a record year for $10 million+ with new relationships across the two businesses. When we turned to our commercial businesses and Global Banking, we focused on virtual services for clients through the COVID crisis. Increased our calling effort 60% this year in terms of the numbers of engagements with clients. We saw a significant gain in our investment banking market share. Overall, in all areas, but particularly in our middle-market clients, we've achieved a strong position this year. This has been a multi-year effort of hiring more and dedicating more investment bankers to partner with the commercial banking relationship managers across the country. Given the nature of clients and staff working from home, the digital capabilities we had allowed our client development to continue. We saw record sign-ons for our CashPro app. This is the way a commercial customer accesses that app in the commercial cash management businesses. In December alone, 14 of the 22 business days, there were over $1 billion moved on that app. This shows our clients' growing comfort level with the system. We reported record investment banking fees with three of our strongest quarters in the company's history this year. We improved our overall fee ranking to number three as market share grew 70 basis points. It was up for two consecutive years in a row. These market share improvements include our highest-ever shares in equity capital markets and M&A advice. In fixed income trading and markets business, the trading side of the house, we continue to enhance our e-trading capabilities, increase our systems speed, and ability to process customer trades even faster. In the equities trading side of the house, we had our best year since 2009, when the merger of Merrill and Bank of America took place, and we gained market share even while the market was growing in cash equities. We estimate we picked up 200 basis points in cash equities in the fourth quarter of 2020 compared to the fourth quarter last year. The last point I want to mention is all the work we continue to do with our clients around our activities in environmental, social, and governance, including our award-winning proprietary research from the number one research platform in the world, as well as the sustainable financing initiatives, including green bonds, sustainable bonds, and COVID-related bonds. Our team also committed $1 billion to further economic opportunities to address racial justice in the middle of the COVID pandemic. We've made significant progress and made announcements over the last six months on the strong work done there. With that, let me turn it over to Paul for the quarter. Thanks, Brian. Hello, everyone. I'm starting on slide 6 and 7 together. As I did last quarter, I will mostly compare our results relative to Q3, as most investors we speak with are more interested in our progress as we traverse the pandemic, rather than comparison to pre-pandemic periods. In Q4, we earned $5.5 billion or $0.59 per share, which compares to $4.9 billion or $0.51 a share in Q3. Compared to Q3, the earnings improvement was driven by lower provision expense as we released $828 million in reserves, nearly offsetting net charge-offs, which also declined. Also benefiting earnings, expenses declined $474 million from Q3 on lower litigation costs. NII moved from the Q3 trough. Non-interest income declined from Q3, results across individual line items were mixed. First, the decline in other income was driven by seasonal client activity with respect to ESG investments, which created higher partnership losses, but benefited our annual tax rate, as I have described in previous discussions. Our tax rate for the year was 6%. If we adjust for the tax benefit of our portfolio of ESG investments, our tax rate would've been roughly 21%. I point this out to emphasize that the full-year tax benefits of these socially responsible investments more than offset the portion of losses recorded in other income throughout the year. Relative to Q3, non-interest income was also impacted by lower sales in trading, which typically slows from Q3 to Q4. While sales and trading revenue was down linked quarter, year-over-year, it was up 7%. On the positive side, non-interest income benefited from higher asset management fees as the market improved, and we grew net new households again this year. Finally, we had another good quarter of investment banking revenue, which increased from both the strong Q3 levels and year-over-year. When comparing net income to Q3, remember the Q3 tax expense benefited by $700 million from the revaluation of our U.K. deferred tax asset. Finally, with respect to returns, note that our ROTCE was 11.7%, and our ROA approached 80 basis points. Moving to slide 8. The balance sheet expanded $81 billion versus Q3 to $2.8 trillion in total assets. The main point is that deposits are driving and funding substantially all of this growth. Deposits grew $93 billion in the quarter and are up $361 billion from Q4 2019. On the other hand, loans declined from Q3. With deposits up, loans down, excess liquidity is piling up in our cash and securities portfolios. Global liquidity sources are up $367 billion year-over-year, and $84 billion just from Q3. In fact, global liquidity is up so much that it now exceeds total loans. With respect to regulatory ratios, the standardized approach remains binding at 11.9%, consistent with Q3. Shareholders' equity increased $4 billion, as earnings were more than three times the amount of common dividends paid. Plus, we issued preferred stock totaling $1.1 billion, but this was offset by higher RWA as we invested more cash in securities. At 11.9%, our CET1 ratio is 240 basis points above our minimum requirement, which equates to a $36 billion capital cushion. Our TLAC ratio also increased and remains comfortably above our requirements. Before leaving the balance sheet, as usual, we provide the charts on slide 9 and 10 to show the historical trends with respect to average loans and deposits. For reference, we included these same charts on an end-of-period basis in the appendix. Overall, year-over-year, total loans are down 4%, and in the lines of business, they are down 2%. The decline year-over-year was driven by lower revolver utilization and other paydowns in commercial, and by pullback in credit card activity. On slide 10, we provide the same trends by line of business for deposits. Brian already made a number of points on deposits, and you can see the tremendous year-over-year growth in every line of business that led to 23% growth in deposits for the company. At $1.7 trillion in deposits, far surpasses any previous record for deposits. We believe our strong deposit growth reflects our customers' overall experience with us as we continue to innovate around digital capabilities, as well as enhance our nationwide physical footprint of financial centers and ATMs, which have continued to prove important to customers and clients. I will just add that given historically low interest rates, our rate paid on deposits declined modestly linked quarter, and we are now lower than the rate paid to customers in 2015 before the Fed began raising rates. I will point out that our interest cost on $1.7 trillion of deposits this quarter was only $159 million. Turning to slide 11 in net interest income. On a GAAP, non-FTE basis, NII in Q4 was $10.25 billion, $10.37 billion on an FTE basis. While net interest income declined million from Q3. The improvement from Q3 was driven by the increased deployment of excess deposits into securities. Lower loan balances, lower reinvestment rates, and modestly higher mortgage-backed securities premium write-offs mitigated the improvement in NII. The net interest yield was relatively stable, declining only one basis point from the Q3 level. Note that given all the deposit growth plus the low starting point with respect to interest rates, our asset sensitivity to rising rates remains quite large and is a good reminder of the value of these deposit relationships. Now, with respect to NII, as we move into 2021, we offer the following perspectives. Our perspectives on NII assume that net interest rates follow the forward curve and do not move lower than current levels, and that the economy does not take a meaningful step backwards as a result of recent negative COVID developments. With that said, first, I would remind everyone that Q1 will be impacted by two less days of interest, which is a headwind of nearly $200 million. Also, seasonally, we would expect to see payments related to holiday spending result in lower card balances. We also have the continuing impact of higher-yielding assets maturing or paying off and being replaced with lower-yielding ones. Offsetting these headwinds, we currently intend to again invest a portion of our excess deposits, which continue to grow in Q4 into securities. Having listed those specific Q1 impacts, NII improvement more generally will depend on all the factors we are all focused on, such as loan growth, PPP loan forgiveness and PPP new originations and mortgage refinancings, as well as mortgage-backed security payment speeds, which impact the write-off of bond premiums. Should those trends develop in a positive way, our NII and earnings will benefit. One final note on NII. We added a slide in the appendix that shows the difference between 2015, when short-term rates were last this low, and today. The important difference between then and now is the growth in our balance sheet, which improved NII and decline in expenses since then. Speaking of expenses and turning to slide 12. Q4 expenses were $13.9 billion, $474 million lower than Q3. The decline was driven by a reduction in litigation expense. We also saw a reduction in COVID-related expenses, primarily those associated with processing claims for unemployment insurance. Higher planned marketing costs across the firm and revenue-related processing and incentives mitigated the reductions. As we move into 2021, remember, Q1 will include seasonally higher payroll tax expense, which we estimate at roughly $350 million. Given the resurgence of COVID cases across the U.S. and in Europe, we estimate that $300 million-$400 million of net COVID-related expense remained in our Q4 expenses. We continue to work hard to lower these types of expense, but not at the expense of the safety of our employees and customers. Outside of these COVID costs, we continue to manage expense tightly using gains in productivity and digital activity to mitigate other increases. Turning to asset quality on slide 13. Our total net charge-offs this quarter were $881 million or 38 basis points of average loans. Net charge-offs continued to benefit from years of responsible growth as well as government stimulus and loan deferral programs. A $91 million decline in net charge-offs was driven by lower credit card losses. The loss rate on credit card declined to a 20-year low of 206 basis points of average loans. Provision expense was $53 million, which not only reflected an improvement in macroeconomic projections, but also incorporated uncertainties that remain in the economy due to the health crisis. These considerations resulted in an $838 million reserve release this quarter. Reducing consumer loan reserves by $621 million and commercial by $207 million. Our allowance as a percentage of loans and leases ended the year at 2.04%, which is well above the 1.27% where we began the year following our day one adoption of the CECL accounting standards. With respect to key variables used in setting our reserve, as done in previous quarters, we continued to include a number of downside scenarios. Based on our Q4 2020 weighting of those scenarios, GDP is forecasted to return to its Q4 2019 level in the early part of 2022. This improved by a couple of quarters relative to Q3. The weighting scenario also resulted in an unemployment rate at the end of 2021, consistent where it is today, just north of 6.5%. On slide 14, breakout credit quality metrics for both our consumer and commercial portfolios. On the consumer front, COVID's effects on net charge-offs continued to remain benign. Overall, consumer net charge-offs declined $82 million, driven by card losses, and remained near historic lows. We experienced modest increases in delinquency and NPL levels, but they remained low and were expected given the deferral activity of customers. While expired deferrals drove consumer 30-day delinquency modestly higher compared to Q3, importantly, they remained 22% below the year-ago level. Consumer deferral balances continued to decline in Q4, ending the year at $8 billion. Moreover, balances are now mostly consumer real estate related, with strong underlying collateral values. We added a slide in our appendix which further highlights delinquency trends for credit card. It shows a modest bulge of the expected deferral-related delinquencies moving their way through time and into the 90+ bucket at year-end. As the bulge of deferrals-related delinquencies passed through time periods, delinquencies receded. As an example, in Q4, five-day delinquencies were down more than 30% year-over-year, which shows that after deferrals passed through this time period, delinquencies fell and stayed lower. Assuming net losses follow their historical relationship to delinquencies in the 90+ day bucket and no other changes in card payment trends, we would expect card losses to be higher in Q1 but then decline in Q2. Moving to commercial, net charge-offs were relatively flat to Q3, even as we sold some loans in affected industries, crystallizing losses but reducing risk. Overall, given the environment, the asset quality of our commercial loan book remained solid, and 89% of exposures were either investment grade or collateralized. Our reservable criticized exposure metric continued to be the most heavily impacted by COVID and increased this quarter by $3 billion from Q3, led by downgraded exposures in commercial real estate, primarily hotels. Importantly, commercial NPLs, while up modestly, remained low at only 45 basis points of loans. Turning to the business segments and starting with Consumer Banking on slide 15. Consumer Banking throughout 2020 has been the segment most heavily impacted by COVID. It bore the brunt of revenue disruptions from interest rates, customer activity, and fee waivers. Reserve building impacted provision expense, and expenses increased for PPP programs and protection of associates and customers. In Q4 compared to Q3, revenue, expenses, and provision all improved. We earned $2.6 billion in Consumer Banking in Q4 versus $2.1 billion in Q3. With earnings still below prior year pre-pandemic levels, we know we still have plenty of room for improvement. Client momentum in this business continued to show strength around deposits and investment flows, while near-term loan growth has been impacted by the decline in mortgage balances from heightened refinance activity. Looking at the components of the P&L linked quarter, revenue growth included both higher NII and fees. Consumer fees reflected an increased level of holiday spending as well as higher investment account activity. Even as revenue moved higher, expenses moved modestly lower as we had a reduction in pandemic costs and continued to realize the benefits of a more digitally engaged customer base. As Brian noted, and as you can see on slide 17, we saw an improvement in digital enrollment. Most importantly, customer use of our digital capabilities increased with not only more sign-ons and higher digital sales, but also more service fulfillment through digital channels, as reflected by volume growth in both Erica and Zelle. Note also that both our rate paid and cost of deposits declined. Cost of deposits is now 135 basis points. In the past year, we added over 500,000 net new checking accounts, grew deposits 23%, and dropped our cost of deposits 17 basis points, even with the increase in costs associated with the pandemic. Let's skip to Wealth Management on slide 18 and 19. I will refer to both slides as I speak. Okay. Here again, the impact of lower rates on a large deposit book pressured NII, impacting an otherwise solid quarter with positive AUM flows, market appreciation, and solid deposit and loan growth. Net income of $836 million improved 12% from Q3 as revenue growth and improvement in provision exceeded a modest increase in expense. With respect to revenue, NII grew, driven by solid growth of both loans and deposits, and asset management fees grew to a new record on higher market valuations and solid flows. Expenses increased, driven by revenue-related expense and investments in our sales force. Merrill Lynch and the Private Bank both continue to grow households as we remain a provider of choice for affluent clients. Client balances rose to a record of more than $3.3 trillion, up $302 billion year-over-year, driven by higher market levels as well as positive client flows. Let's move to our Global Banking results on slide 20. COVID has also heavily impacted Global Banking through lower interest rates, softer loan demand, and higher credit costs, but here again, we saw improvement. The business earned nearly $1.7 billion in Q4, improving $751 million from Q3, driven by lower provision expense and improved revenue. On a year-over-year basis, earnings were $341 million lower, driven by NII. Looking at revenue and comparing to Q3, revenue improvement was driven by higher investment banking fees, as well as more leasing activity associated with our clients' ESG investments. Investment banking fees for the company of nearly $1.9 billion grew 5% from Q3 and were up 26% year-over-year. As Brian noted, this performance led to improved market share overall and in a number of key products. Provision expense reflected a reserve release of $266 million in Q4 compared to a build in reserves of $555 million in Q3. Non-interest expense was higher compared to the linked quarter and year-over-year, primarily reflecting investments in the platform as well as support for the PPP program, and also reflecting the recording of merchant services expense given the change in accounting versus the year-ago quarter. As Brian noted earlier, customers continued to appreciate the ease, safety, and convenience of our digital banking capabilities, and usage continued to grow, helping defray other costs. We present some digital highlights on slide 22. As noted earlier, loans declined but saw stabilization late in the quarter. Continuing the trend since Q2, the spread of the loan portfolio continued to tick higher as spreads on new originations on average exceeded the average spread of the portfolio. Average deposits increased 26% relative to Q3 as businesses remained highly liquid. Okay. Switching to Global Markets on slide 23. Results reflect solid year-over-year improvement in revenue from sales and trading, but a decline from the robust levels of Q3. As I usually do, I will talk about segment results excluding DVA. This quarter net DVA was a small loss of $56 million. On that basis, Global Markets produced $834 million of earnings in Q4, a decline from the more robust trading in Q3, but up markedly from Q4 2019. Focusing on year-over-year, revenue was up 13% on higher sales and trading. The year-over-year expense increase was driven by higher activity-based costs for both trading and unemployment claims processing. Sales and trading contributed $3.1 billion to revenue, increasing 7% year-over-year, driven by a 30% improvement in equities and a 5% decline in FICC. The strength in equities was driven by market volatility and investment repositioning, which drove client activity higher. The decline in FICC reflected strong credit trading performance, which was more than offset by declines across most macro products and mortgage trading. As Brian noted, the year-over-year performance of this business has been strong in every quarter of 2020. You can see that on slide 24. That produced strong segment returns of 15% on allocated capital for the year. Okay. Finally, on slide 25, we show All Other, which reported a loss of $425 million. Compared to Q3, the decline in net income was driven primarily by the prior quarter's tax benefit of $700 million associated with our U.K. deferred tax asset. Revenue declined from Q3, driven by the accounting for wind and solar and other ESG investments. We also experienced some modest equity investment losses. Expenses declined from Q3 on lower litigation expense but were partially offset by higher marketing costs. For 2021, absent any changes in the current tax laws or unusual items, we would expect the effective tax rate to be in the low double digits, driven by the level of ESG client activity relative to pre-tax earnings. With that, I'll turn it back to Lee and Brian for Q&A. At this time, if you'd like to ask a question, please press the star and one on your touchtone phone. That's star and one on your touchtone phone. We'll take our first question today from John McDonald with Autonomous Research. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. I wanted to ask a question on expenses. Brian mentioned expecting the cost number to be flattish in 2021 versus 2020. Just kind of wondering, is that all-in expenses, Paul, or some kind of core metric? If you could give an outlook for the expenses that you expect and the trend for COVID expenses this year. Thanks. John, that's all in, given the around $55 billion both years. We feel good about the ability to keep bringing down COVID. It came out a little slower this quarter, largely due to the fact that if you go back and think where we were in October on case counts, the need to continue to provide strong benefits to our teammates, including the childcare in their homes so they could be effective. That's why we get those customer scores and why the growth in checking sales was 70%, 80% of a normal year given 40% of the branches closed. Yeah, flat year-over-year all-in number, and then we're working the dynamics underneath it. Importantly, remember, we are investing. $3.5 billion in technology next year, new financial centers, expansion, employees to help sell more, and we'll continue to drive it through. You'll see sort of a change in the COVID cost coming down hopefully as we move through the year. We got some work to do, but flat over year-over-year overall. Okay. Longer term, Brian, you've talked about getting back to a low $54 billion as kind of a run rate ex-COVID. Is that still how you're thinking about things? We should start to work down. Again, as we said many years ago, as we get in the out years and get more and more efficient, the day-to-day, the quotidian cost of rent increases and pay increases work at you. The idea is to have the net expense growth sort of at 1% a year. 3% up from just day-to-day costs to manage a couple percent out. We'll continue to work that down in the future. We've got work to do on getting these COVID expenses out of here. Okay, thanks. Our next question comes from Mike Mayo with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead. Hi. I also wanted to follow up on the efficiency. You're making big strides with digital banking in so many ways, with 39 million digital households are engaged. When you go through all those metrics, you see efficiency ratio for the quarter of 69%. If you take out your $400 million of COVID costs, maybe it would be 67%. That's still a far cry from the 57%-59% where you had been. Now, I know low rates hurt a little bit, but either you're investing more than you've disclosed, or there's some other COVID costs in there, or you're not becoming more efficient, as you said in your opening comments, Brian. Help me kind of reconcile your current efficiency or my adjusted efficiency ratio with a more normal level. Mike, I take you back to page 11 on the net interest yield and the net interest income, and realize that basically in the four quarters of last year, we lost $2 billion of revenue per quarter, which is a lot of that bridge. As we work that back up, and ultimately as rates rise, that $2 billion, that's per quarter, so $8 billion in revenue with really no cost. That'll go up. We continue to get more efficient in the branches. The cost of operating over the deposit base is now at 135. We added 700,000 new checking accounts. You're right. It's more affected by the revenue impact NII than it is by anything else in terms of expenses. Remember, we're saying net COVID cost of $300 or $400. That includes offsetting against that all the savings of travel and stuff. The gross COVID costs are obviously much higher than that. We opened up PPP today. We've got 5,000 employees ready to go to complete the next round of PPP and the forgiveness process. As that finishes off, that stuff will come out of the system. We've got you. The follow-up to that is going to NII. I'm not sure if you gave a specific outlook or not, Paul, when you went through that. As you said, liquidity is now greater than loans. Your loan-to-deposit ratio at close to 50%. I think it's the lowest in history, like ever, right now. There's a lot of dry powder there. Did you give guidance for NII for this year, assuming the forward yield curve stays where it is? Do you think you can somehow pull out positive operating leverage this year, or is that too tough given the rate environment? We didn't give specific guidance. I can give you a little more color on our perspective on 2021. I do think as you think about how you want to estimate and model NII, and how it may unfold in 2021, I think it's really sort of helpful to kind of review the progress we made in 2020. There's a lot of clues there. Remember, in Q1 of 2020, interest rates fell to historically low levels. Short rates were down 150, and long rates were down 100 basis points, plus loans declined significantly beginning in Q2. As demand weakened and larger companies assessed the capital markets, paid down debt, and built liquidity. In the past, when we've had situations like this where interest rates and/or loans have declined, it's always taken sort of several quarters to reach a point where renewed balance sheet growth was significant enough to compensate. We believe we found that NII bottom in Q3. NII indeed moved higher in Q4. All else equal, day count, et cetera, it should become easier from here to grow NII. I think what helped us to start to grow again quickly in this crisis was the tremendous influx of deposits and our relatively recent confidence to invest the excess in securities instead of holding that excess in cash. Our continued investment of that cash in Q4 leads us to believe that we can offset the headwinds of low loan demand in the near term, recent reinvestment yields, and two less days of NII in Q1, leaving NII relatively flat in Q1 versus Q4 before moving up through the balance of the year. Remember, in Q2 and Q3, we pick back up those days of interest we lost in Q1. As Brian reviewed, we also saw commercial loans stabilize at the end of Q4, providing hope that increased loan demand will soon follow. Given that we expect some loan demand through the year and using the existing rate curve, which has steepened over the past 90 days, we would expect NII in Q4 2021, for example, to be much higher than Q1 2021. When we get to the second half of 2021, year-over-year quarterly comparisons to 2020, as well as the second half of 2021 compared to the first half of 2020 should be quite favorable. Okay. That's helpful. When you say a lot higher in Q4 than Q1?