“But more importantly, the growth and efficiency improvements that we have seen over the past several years are now broader based and it is these trends that give us confidence in reaching our goal of a sustainable ROTE of 17% to 18%.”

In context

“e strong environment we see today. We returned over $9.8 billion of capital to shareholders in the first half of this year, including repurchasing $7 billion of common stock while continuing to maintain the significant amount of excess capital. As we previously announced, we expect to increase our third quarter common stock dividend by 11% to $0.50 per share subject to approval by our Board of Directors at its meeting later this month. Our continued focus on improving returns was evident with RoTCE increasing from 15.2% a year ago to 17.7% in the second quarter and 16.1% in the first half of 26. While outsized venture capital equity gains favorably affected our returns this quarter, we have said that they can be lumpy, but that we do expect strong returns from these investments over time. But more importantly, the growth and efficiency improvements that we have seen over the past several years are now broader based and it is these trends that give us confidence in reaching our goal of a sustainable ROTE of 17% to 18%. We are often asked about the timing of achieving this goal, and I know you all understand that interest rates, markets, and credit impact us, and are hard to predict, making it difficult to give a definitive answer. But assuming favorable conditions continue to exist, we remain confident that our favorable trends will allow us to achieve this goal in a reasonable time frame and then reset the bar higher for the future. As we show on Slide 3, our strategy is driving growth across all of our businesses. Let me start with consumer banking and lending, with 6% revenue growth from a year ago. After years of little to no growth in checking accounts, our investments in marketing and digital account openings are paying off. And we have grown consumer primary checking accounts year over year for 1”