Hello everyone and welcome to At Bairns. I'm Andy Surwer and welcome to our guest, Bruce Van Sons, CEO of Citizens Financial Group.

Bruce, great to see you.

Yeah, my pleasure.

So talk to us about CFG. It's one of the 20 largest banks in the United States, about 226 billion in assets.

What's the focus of your institution?

Well, I'd like to think of us as having a tripod in terms of our strategy.

So the main first element is a transformed consumer bank.

So we've got a big consumer bank with 1,200 branches, 6 million customers,

a big solid deposit base, provide advice to people on their life's journey.

The second element is a, we call it the best position commercial bank. So we have a really strong

corporate bank focusing on middle market companies, middle market sponsors, really well

positioned. And then the third element is fairly recent. We have, we're building out, we hope

to be the premier bank-owned private bank and private wealth manager. And that comes on the heels

of hiring a bunch of talent from the failed First Republic

Day.

Right.

A lot going on in the sector.

We'll get to that a little bit.

The stock has been a strong performer over the past 12 months before that lagged a bit

the S&P 500 along with the bank index.

So what explains both the underperformance with the index, to be fair, and the outperformance

subsequently?

...