Forward look: <\/b>Truist revised its share buyback plans for this year, saying it now expects to repurchase $5 billion of common shares this year, up from the $4 billion it projected in January.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nUPDATE<\/i><\/b>: This article has been updated to include information from Truist’s first-quarter earnings call and remarks from an analyst’s note.<\/i> <\/p>\n
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Truist Financial<\/ps-link> <\/span> <\/span> <\/span> established a new, higher profitability target Friday, citing the strength of its performance and confidence in management’s ability to achieve the company’s strategic priorities.<\/p>\nThe $549 billion-asset regional bank said it would aim to achieve a return on tangible common equity of 16% to 18% over the next three to five years. Truist’s<\/ps-link> higher target is in line with the profitability goals at other regional banks, such as U.S. Bancorp and Citizens Financial Group.<\/p>\nThe heightened profitability expectations come less than two years after Charlotte, North Carolina-based Truist<\/ps-link> lowered its outlook for return on tangible common equity, a metric that helps measure a bank’s overall financial performance.<\/p>\nFacing mounting pressure<\/u><\/ps-link> for missing the low-20s percentage target it established when the bank was formed by a merger of equals in 2019, management in September 2024 reduced its goal to the mid-teens<\/u><\/ps-link> over approximately three years. <\/p>\nRecent growth in loans and deposits, higher fee income and “prudent” capital allocation are some of the factors giving the bank confidence that it can aim higher than the 14% return on tangible common equity that it expects to achieve this year and the 15% it anticipates reaching for all of 2027, Truist<\/ps-link> CEO Bill Rogers said Friday during the bank’s first-quarter earnings call.<\/p>\nThe latest Basel III endgame proposal<\/u><\/ps-link> is also a factor, Rogers said. That proposal would reduce Truist’s<\/ps-link> risk-weighted assets by approximately 9%, Chief Financial Officer Mike Maguire said.<\/p>\n“We feel confident where we’re going,” Rogers responded when an analyst asked him to explain why the bank established a new profitability target now. “We felt it was important to start putting a stake in the ground. \u2026 We just feel really good about the momentum we’re building.”<\/p>\n
Investors seemed to appreciate Truist’s<\/ps-link> performance and its improved outlook. Its stock price was up more than 3% as of midday Friday. Shares are up about 2.9% year to date.<\/p>\nFor the first quarter, Truist<\/ps-link> reported a return on tangible common equity of 13.8%. That’s up from 12.7% in the prior quarter and an improvement from 12.3% in the same quarter last year.<\/p>\nThe new, higher target “is important because it puts [Truist<\/ps-link>] into the same league as peers,” Scott Siefers, an analyst at Piper Sandler, wrote Friday in a research note. It should also help Truist’s<\/ps-link> argument that its valuation is too low, he said. The bank’s current market capitalization is $61.3 billion, an improvement from $53.9 billion in the year-ago quarter, according to Yahoo! Finance.<\/p>\nDuring the call Friday, Rogers addressed a question about the bank’s interest in doing mergers and acquisitions, either as a seller or a buyer. A Bloomberg article in March included Truist<\/ps-link> and PNC Financial Services Group as two large regionals that could be acquisition targets for Citi<\/u><\/ps-link>.<\/p>\n“Let’s just, like, set that aside,” Rogers said. “We’ve set forth a plan that achieves mid-teens [earnings per share] growth over an extended period of time and under a really good risk posture \u2026 that provides an advantaged return to our shareholders. And that’s always going to be the goal, [to] make sure we have a plan that gives an advantage return to our shareholders.”<\/p>\n
Facing a similar question earlier this week, Citi CEO Jane Fraser brushed off the notion that Citi will buy a bank<\/u><\/ps-link>, saying the New York-based company is “focused on organic growth, period, end of story.”<\/p>\nEarnings beat<\/h2>\n
The first quarter was largely positive for Truist<\/ps-link>, which reported a boost in net income, reflecting an increase in average loans and a pickup in fee income, including a surge in investment banking activity. Net income totaled $1.48 billion for the period ending March 31.<\/p>\nThat’s an increase of 17.5% from the same quarter last year. Earnings per diluted share were $1.09, beating analysts’ predictions by nine cents, according to S&P Capital IQ.<\/p>\n
For the quarter, Truist<\/ps-link> delivered firmwide revenues of $5.15 billion, up about 5% compared with the same quarter in 2025. Average total loans grew 7% year over year to $329 billion, driven by a 4% year-over-year increase in average loans in the consumer and small-business banking segment and a 9% year-over-year hike in average loans in the wholesale banking segment.<\/p>\nNet interest income totaled $3.6 billion for the quarter, up 2.6% from the year-ago quarter. <\/p>\n
Fee income of $1.6 billion rose 11.6% year over year. Investment banking and trading income was a major driver, improving 36.3% during the quarter. Lending-related fees surged 24.2% year over year, while mortgage banking income increased by 23.1%. <\/p>\n
Noninterest expenses of $3 billion were up 2.6% year over year, due to higher personnel costs such as increased salaries, incentives and employee benefits related to hiring, the bank said.<\/p>\n
During the quarter, Truist<\/ps-link> repurchased $1.1 billion shares of common stock. In December 2025, its board authorized the repurchase of up to $10 billion of common stock with no expiration date.<\/p>\nIt expects to buy back $5 billion shares of common stock throughout all of 2026, it said Friday. That’s up from January, when management said it would buy around $4 billion for the year.<\/p>\n
Truist<\/ps-link> said it will buy back around $1.2 billion of shares during the second quarter.<\/p>\nAlso during the quarter, Truist’s<\/ps-link> private wealth business announced that financial advisors for Truist<\/ps-link> Investment Services are now able to offer two federally regulated spot bitcoin exchange\u2011traded funds, sponsored by Fidelity and BlackRock. The ETFs are also available through Truist<\/ps-link> Trade, an offering for clients interested in self-directed real-time trading, the bank said in a press release. <\/p>\nTruist<\/ps-link> also announced several new hires during the three-month period, including the hiring of Matthew Miller as managing director and head of mergers and acquisitions for Truist<\/ps-link> Securities. Miller most recently worked at Jefferies, where he was global head of health M&A, Truist<\/ps-link> said.<\/p>\nIn March, Truist<\/ps-link> announced a data access partnership<\/u><\/ps-link> with the data aggregator Plaid. The agreement offers Truist<\/ps-link> a way to expand its open banking capabilities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Key insight: Truist rolled out a new, higher profitability target, citing increased confidence in its ability to execute on strategic priorities, as well as the revised Basel III endgame proposal. What’s at stake: The bank’s new long-term target for return on tangible common equity, which measures banks’ overall financial performance, puts it more in line<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27703,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[218],"tags":[2720,1280,2107,1687,3754,733,2876],"class_list":{"0":"post-27702","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-banking","8":"tag-growing","9":"tag-higher","10":"tag-momentum","11":"tag-profit","12":"tag-sets","13":"tag-target","14":"tag-truist"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/finderica.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}