“Finally, by investing in our operations and branches, we expect not only to improve the customer experience, but also improve efficiency, reduce operational risk, and drive and account growth.”

In context

“- continue to invest in our story, on Slide 19, we provide details on our primary areas of focus for 2023. As we've highlighted, continuing to build the right risk and control of infrastructure remains our top priority, and we will continue to invest in this important work. Charlie discussed many of the investments we started to make in digital payments, and we plan to continue to invest in these areas this year to make improvements for both our consumer and commercial customers. We also plan to continue to invest to expand our client coverage and investment banking, Commercial Banking, and Wealth and Investment Management and to continue to transform our technology platforms, including moving more applications to cloud, consolidating our data centers, and increasing investments in cyber. Finally, by investing in our operations and branches, we expect not only to improve the customer experience, but also improve efficiency, reduce operational risk, and drive and account growth. As we show on Slide 20, in the fourth quarter, we reported an 8% ROTCE. But as I highlighted at the start of the call, our fourth-quarter results were impacted by several notable items, including higher operating losses, elevated impairments of equity securities, severance, and discrete tax benefits. As we show on this slide, you will -- if you exclude these notable items, our fourth-quarter ROTCE would have been approximately 16%. However, we don't believe this accurately reflects our longer-term expectations for the following reasons. Net interest income was higher than our long-term expectations due to interest rates, funding, penalties, mix, and pricing, Also, net loan charge-offs were at historically low levels. If rates, funding balances, mix, and pricing were closer to our long-ter”