Sorry, we're a minute or two late. We won't lose it on the back end. We're pleased to have Capital One joining us once again. It's been a busy year for Cap One, highlighted by the closing of the Discover acquisition in May. In addition, the company has continued to see improving credit despite an uncertain macro and more recently began returning excess capital to shareholders. Here to tell us more about the story is Chairman and CEO, Rich Fairbank. Rich, welcome. Thank you very much, Ryan. Oh, Jeff Norris is going to join us here as well. Chairman, Chairperson, or Chair as the head of the board of directors. It's defined by. My phone's AI picking up what you're saying. Your AI defined what a chairman is. I've always been wondering. So, Rich. Yeah. So I think this is our 16th straight year doing this, and I think each year we've started a similar way. I didn't have hair when we started. Let's maybe just start with the state of the consumer. Can you talk about what you're seeing from the consumer and how they're positioned as we move into 2016? Okay. Yeah, thank you, Ryan. And thanks, everybody, for being here. And thanks for those joining in on the webcast. It's always a highlight here, and I don't think I've missed one of these ever. So the state of the consumer. You know, I think the consumer is a source of strength in the economy. So let's kind of just tally up when we look at some of the economic metrics. Unemployment rate is inching up a little bit, but is still relatively low. New unemployment claims are low and stable. The consumer debt burden is stable and only slightly above. In other words, sort of a debt servicing ratio, let's call it, is stable and just slightly higher than it was pre-pandemic. And by the way, real wages continue to be positive. Now, sort of on the other hand, I think it's striking, new job growth is low and sort of declining. The inflation recently, the upward pressures there. So I think that there are things in different directions, but I think basically still the consumer is in a pretty stable place, and relative to sort of the entire economy, I think is a source of strength. A couple of things we'll just have to keep a lookout for. This is more of a credit point, but the Affordable Care Act, to the extent there is not a renewing of some of the subsidies there, I think you could see some pockets of pressure there. On the other hand, the tax bill should probably bring some relief, both in number of people and amount, sort of in the tax refund season. So that's probably a good guy on the other side. If we pull way back, it's obvious there's quite a bit of uncertainty, though, in the economy, so we are struck by the still sort of strength of the consumer, but the narrative is certainly surrounded by uncertainty in the economy. Maybe just to bring that back to Capital One credit, you noted earnings that credit card performance was consistent with seasonality in the recent month. Maybe just talk about how you're thinking about overall credit in Capital One and maybe bifurcate between prime and subprime customers. Okay. Thanks, Ryan, so you think about credit, let's go back a number of years. During the pandemic, credit performance for Capital One and other banking institutions was at like world record low charge-offs. Then there was the sort of the normalization we all expected, and it took charge-off levels to above pre-pandemic levels, and everyone was watching to see where things would start to settle out. In October of last year, that was the first month that our delinquencies actually started to improve, and from October all the way through July, every single month, delinquencies improved, and then since then, the delinquencies, which are the one we watch the most because that's the early predictor of charge-offs, the delinquencies have been more or less in line with seasonality since then. So I think the great improvement is probably more now turning into sort of the stabilization at where we are. Charge-offs continue to improve at Capital One, but that's typically because charge-offs are three months, three-plus months lagged relative to delinquencies. So we should expect those to settle out following the pattern of delinquencies. Just a few other comments. Charge-offs have been benefited by some pretty sizable recovery dollars. So the strength in recoveries has helped the numbers over time. But we see, again, this is another indication sort of of the strength that we see with the consumer. Let me talk a little bit about you asked about how does the upper end versus sort of lower end from income or FICO scores or how are they performing relatively. When we look at our credit card business ranked in deciles or quintiles by income or by FICO score, we don't see really any significant effects, and I think that's striking given that everything one sees in the media is talking about a narrative of the lower end consumer understandably facing a number of challenges from inflation, higher interest rates, and some of those things. One thing I really a caution that I want to make with respect to our observation is that what we are observing may not be indicative fully of what's happening out there in the marketplace only because Capital One has over the last number of years intervened on our own credit policy to a significant extent in anticipation of some of the drivers of worsening that could be happening out there. So just, for example, some years ago, Ryan, you'll remember this. We were flagging a lot of concern about credit score inflation basically from all of the stimulus and the forbearance from financial product payments that consumers enjoyed during the pandemic. We believe that was going to cause an artificial increase in people's credit scores. And so we flagged this issue and in fact intervened in our own models to put an overlay in to try to offset that, which of course caused us to pull back on some of our originations. And we also were concerned about inflation pressures and other things on the consumer. In the auto finance business, we even more dialed back because we looked at what was happening with rising vehicle prices and the issues of affordability related to vehicle prices and interest rates. We looked at the pressure on margins that were coming from rising interest rates. And so we dialed back quite a bit in the auto finance business as well. So these have been beneficial choices relative to Capital One's credit performance, but I think it may not be as good an indicator of where the economy is. So Rich, let's shift gears now. We're seven months post the Discover acquisition closing. What are your impressions of what you purchased? What's going better? Where have there been challenges? And have there been any changes to your thoughts on the economics of the deal? So we continue to be very pleased with the Discover acquisition. I think that what we have found, if I pull way up, is very consistent with what we expected to find. And headlining it for me is the wonderful customer franchise Discover has had. They have a reverence for the customer. We always noticed back before we did the acquisition over the years when we would do industry league tables of customer advocacy or customer satisfaction, lots of things, we were always so struck at how great Discover would come out in those things. And I've now seen on the inside, really, it's a culture that everything that they did worked backwards from how do you delight customers. And it's a great thing to be a part of in an acquisition because if you bought a company that didn't have that, it'd be very hard to inculcate that. So that's been a great thing. And because we've had such a premium on that as well inside Capital One, culturally, I really put a high mark there. We all know and their regulatory issues are indicative of that. Discover needs quite a bit of work relative to investment in risk management across the company, and we're leaning into that. That would be consistent, Ryan, with our expectations, and we got a lot of progress going on there. The network is what we hoped it would be. We're amazed at the acceptance that they've been able to build with the low scale that they have, but there's still more work internationally. I'm sure you'll probably come back to that. The one thing I want to flag is what we called the brownout of Discover credit card growth. That growth has kind of stalled there for a number of reasons we've talked about, and so that's a bit below the expectations, but pulling way up, we love this acquisition, and we're happy that what we've seen on the inside is consistent with what we hoped on the outside. With respect to the deal economics, we continue to say we're still on track to achieve the synergies. Yeah. Sorry. Thank you for that most important point. So maybe let's dig a little bit. See why I brought Jeff up too. Thank you. He takes the easy ones. So, Rich, maybe let's dig into the brownout a little bit. I think it's my third brownout over the years. I think the last one was recoveries. I think you mentioned on the earnings call it could take several years to work through. So, maybe can you talk about what are you trimming? Maybe size, how big the book that you're looking at may be, and does this prevent the broader card business from growing knowing that you don't set growth targets within the company? Yeah. So let me start by saying it does not prevent the broader card business from growing. We have a lot of really good traction on the legacy Capital One side. Let me talk a little bit about what is behind this quote-unquote "brownout" that I call it with Discover growth. So I think there are three important factors that are driving this. First one is Discover, when they ran into credit losses that were a lot higher than what they expected in the 2023, 2024 time period, really pulled back on originations. And they actually kept that tight reins on that all the way and even past when we announced the deal. And that's been, by the way, a very beneficial thing with respect to Discover's credit losses. What happened is there were just a number of quarterly vintages really over a few years where just the volumes were less. Over time, as those vintages become a bigger part of the portfolio, the math of growth suffered as a result. The second factor is we knew from the outside but didn't have any way to sort of calibrate the magnitude of an effective little bit of a difference of credit philosophy that Discover has had versus ourselves. Discover, I mean, we're very impressed with their business and the credit quality of what they book, but they've always had more of an emphasis on leaning into the revolver side of the business and more comfortable with what we would call higher balance revolvers where revolvers and their balances across their entire consumers and individual consumers' portfolio across all the cards that they have. They've had a higher level of comfort with that, probably than Capital One has. We've been vocal over the years that we try to stay away from what we call the higher balance revolvers. We've had more of a spend-first philosophy. So we knew when we went into this deal that we probably had to bring a little bit of a different philosophy. As we've gotten inside, sure enough, we find some of the choices that they make at the margin on originations and line increases, probably we would take a notch more conservative. So we have put those choices into place, and that slows down growth. Now, we also knew when we did the acquisition, we were really looking forward to being able to take their origination machine with their branded cards and be able to grow. And if you think about it, Discover has had a very focused strategy in the prime part of the market, and Capital One has been a very broad-based player significantly north and south in a sense of where they focus. So we always said if we can take the Discover franchise and bring all the things in Capital One that enabled us to expand up and down from that target, we believe there's a lot of growth opportunity with the Discover franchise. The only issue is in order to pull off that expansion, we need Discover to be on our platform with our decision engines, our data machines, and all of that. And that's the thing that's going to come in the latter part of the integration. So if you put it all together, the things that slowing happen now and the growth is going to happen later, hence the brownout. And I wanted to just make sure that investors could see that. And as you know, I always give it the colorful names. Hence, this is not my first brownout that I've flagged. I'm not sure if this is going to be a question for you or Jeff, but maybe just talk a little bit about how revenue and expense synergies are progressing and when do you expect them to be in the run rate and any changes to expectations? Yeah. So we continue to be on track for the synergies, $2.5 billion of synergies, and a significant part was revenue synergies and the rest cost synergies. Things continue on track there. We're working very hard. The revenue synergies are coming first because they are coming from the conversion of our debit portfolio onto the Discover Network, and so that conversion started in August of this year and will be completed early next year. So those revenue synergies will show up earlier. The cost synergies, a majority of them really come from conversion of technology platforms, which is really very back-end loaded in the whole integration process. Hence, most of the cost synergies will be late, but overall, we're on track for the $2.5 billion of synergies. I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about the network and broader investment and efficiency. If you look over the last 12 plus years, you've redone the entire tech stack of the company. I remember when you introduced it here in 2013. You have real-time data, best-in-class technology. Before you begin to build out the international acceptance, which is a big thing that you've talked about, do you need to invest in the physical infrastructure of the network and was that at all factored into the deal upfront? So the international acceptance is mostly not a technology issue. That's a boots-on-the-ground issue of just building one merchant at a time, one merchant acquirer at a time, one local network at a time, and one local issuer at a time to build partnerships to drive greater acceptance. At the same time, in parallel, we will be working to modernize the Discover Network, which is mostly like all networks around the world that we know of are in data centers with some specific applications that are in the cloud. So we expect over time to take that network on the modernization journey that we've taken the rest of Capital One. But that journey will not be required in order to continue to build the acceptance that we've been talking about. So they could be done in isolation of each other. So I think as a big part of the acquisition, you noted that you intended to bring, I think it was $175 billion of volume onto the Discover Network in terms of both debit and credit. You talked before debit is happening right now, and I would assume credit obviously has a little bit of a longer tail. Can you maybe talk about the process of bringing over credit volume and what is the end goal for you in terms of volume and issuing partners on your network? Yeah. So almost all businesses in the modern world and in banking are very scale-driven. The network business is more than very scale-driven. It's extremely scale-driven because the fixed costs of running a network are really that. They are fixed. And so therefore, all the marginal volume is just very, very beneficial. It is also a flywheel kind of thing where the more acceptance one gets, the more acceptance that drives. And the better relationships with merchants, the better negotiating position one's in with respect to merchants. All benefits come, it's just very clear. There's a scale-driven flywheel with respect to Discover. And it's extraordinary that they actually, from way back in 1985 when they launched the Discover Network, to think that they with the little scale that they've had have been able to build the network that they have. But it's crying out for more scale. So for us to move the debit card business, that was kind of an easy decision. And it involved customers that were mostly not international travelers. And we get the benefits of vertical integration, the power of the PULSE network, which is a global ATM network on the debit side. So a lot of that was an easy decision. On the credit card side, here's what we have to confront on the way to being able to move more volume. And so there's sort of the economics on the one hand, and the other is the customer reaction. So on the economic side, what we will do is compare for every segment of the business what is the economics that we get today from Visa and Mastercard, who, by the way, have been great partners with Capital One. We have attractive rates that we get with them. To compare, on the other hand, what does Discover charge merchants? But it's not just a comparison of how much merchants are charged, but also the fact that we get the vertical integration benefit of the network margin that is available to us. And so that's a big sort of economic analysis by different segments and products comparing the option set we have of very attractive deals with Visa and Mastercard and a compelling case to move business over to the Discover Network. Then we move to the other side where on the customer reaction side of things. Here's just a few things that I would say. First of all, the reality of acceptance. Discover's acceptance domestically is just remarkably strong. And when we ask in research Discover customers, “Do you feel that this network is accepted at the places that you shop?” It scores incredibly high right there with the customers of the major network, and that's a wonderful thing, but what's clear is that for people that are not Discover customers, there is a gap in the perception. The perception versus the reality has a significant gap. Now, I always say from a branding point of view, what I really care about is starting with a good reality because you can build the brand if the reality is good, so I think Discover's in a very good place there. The other thing, of course, is the longer journey on the international side where the acceptance is amazing to me, given how small Discover is, but still has more work to do, so what we will do, so pulling way up, we announced we're going to move $175 billion of volume between debit and credit as part of the deal. Synergy calculations, all that is on its way, and then what we're going to do is invest further in the reality of acceptance and then very much lean into the brand acceptance story, and then the other thing we're going to do is a lot of testing. The debit conversion was a straightforward thing we could do right away, but we need to be the credit card by mid next year, we will be able to originate Capital One credit cards on the Discover Network, and in 2027, we'll be able to move some existing credit cards to the Discover Network. Over that period of time, we're going to massively lean into tests, different ways to do the conversion, customer reaction, and that will inform the journey. But if we pull way up, this is a network that needs a lot of scale, and we're looking to find opportunities and plow the ground to be able to keep moving more volume over time. So Rich, on the earnings call, you spent a lot of time talking about investments. You did mention a lot of them are not new, but they're accelerating: marketing, technology, AI. We've gone through investment cycles before, the tech investment cycle from 2013 to 2016, technology costs coming out of the pandemic. Maybe just think about you guys have been investing all along, but maybe just contextualize the pace or amount of investment this time relative to past investing cycles. Thank you for that question. I think when you mentioned our tech investment, I'll put words in your mouth. Were you saying our tech transformation from 2013 to 2016? That was the start in terms of the increase of the operating expenses. Exactly. Because that, yes, I would say that in some ways, that's always a lifetime journey because the world keeps modernizing, but Capital One in 2013 launched a massive transformation of the technology of our company from the bottom of the tech stack up, and that's a journey that still continues today, but we've had amazing traction, so let me pull up on why it was over the last couple of quarterly earnings calls when I have said we are really going to lean in even more so to investments, and so there are three drivers to why for a company that always invests a lot, and we built our company to be an organic growth company. Ironic that I'm saying it on the heels of the biggest acquisition in banking since the global financial crisis, but it's still very much, we built this to be an organic growth company. The three drivers behind the sort of especially large investment agenda we have right now are, one, the Discover Network and all the things that we just talked about. Two, the reward for our transformation from the bottom of the tech stack up getting to the top of the tech stack. Because just as we had hoped, the opportunities are expanding significantly for things that we can do now that we have the technology foundation to be able to pull it off. And so all across our company, I'm just struck. I'm in meetings, and just the opportunities, the demonstrated opportunities people have across our businesses are exciting, but they require investment in order to capitalize on that. The third driver of why the investment is really the world's moment. I believe the magnitude of the AI revolution we're talking about. This is right there on par with harnessing fire and the biggest things that have happened in the history of the world, and I really, really believe this is, maybe, there's some hype around the edges, but I believe that AI is absolutely going to transform not only our lives, but absolutely transform what banking can be in terms of customer experiences as well as how banking works, so those are why we're leaning into investments. So you talked about on the call that we should expect some near-term pressure on efficiency. Maybe you or Jeff just contextualize how we should expect the pressure as you make these investments. And once we're down the road through the integration, what do you see as sort of destination efficiency for the company? It's interesting. We have been, since the start of our technology transformation, on a journey that is actually since we started leaning in massively on the technology journey, our operating efficiency ratio has improved by a lot over that period of time, even as we have invested more. And sort of like, well, how is that possible? Well, even as we invested, one of the great beneficiaries of all the tech investment is the ability to actually reduce costs along the way, including a lot of the legacy tech costs. The other most important driver for Capital One of efficiency is growth. We're not a company that just looks everywhere to see how we could cut our way to greatness in terms of cutting costs. We really want to grow our way to greatness in terms of creating growth opportunities and then efficiently trying to manage our expenses so that they create operating leverage along the way. But so generally, that journey has been a productive one. What we've kind of said at this point, when we look at the investments that we have across this wide agenda of Capital One, that will pressure operating efficiency and overall efficiency in the nearer term. But we believe that the outcome of all of that, that's in service of continuing the journey across Capital One to create more efficiency through growth, through automation, and through a very large-scale financial institution where we've embedded our business model into the technology itself, the risk management in the technology itself. And so on the other side of this, we think one of the beneficiaries is efficiency, but we just wanted to flag that along the way there's going to be some pressure on that. Maybe one last question because we started a little bit late here. You announced the $16 billion buyback, the biggest one you've announced in a while. How should we think about both using the $16 billion and also how do we think about the pace to getting towards that 11% capital target? Do you expect to run at a higher level during the integration period? I'll take that one, Ryan. The $16 billion authorization is not time-bound. So there's no clear-cut way to think of that. We re-articulated our long-term capital need at around 11% CET1 ratio. This is a little bit parsing words. It's not a target. It's not a level we expect to get to and run at. If you look at our history, we've viewed that with a little bit of conservatism. All that said, during the approval period, being on a fairly minimum pace of share repurchases, we ramped it up to about $1 billion last quarter, and I think it's reasonable to assume that it's going to go up again. Then, as always, we'll manage our capital. We're in a very strong capital position. It's not going to be a race as fast as our feet can carry us to get to some specific target. We'll manage capital the way we always do with a little bit of a conservative bent, but we'll be generating significant capital along the way, and I think there's room for some buybacks as well. Awesome. Well, unfortunately, we're out of time, but please join me in thanking Rich and Jeff. Thank you. Thank you.