Associated Banc-Corp Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

Thanks. Yeah. Thank you, Jared.

This was the first conference we ever did five years ago when I started, and it was during COVID, and it was remote, and we launched our first strat plan. The world's changed since then. Our bank has changed since then. We're wrapping up 2026. From a consumer standpoint, what's happened for us as a different bank is we've gone from shrinking customer base to growing kind of -2% to +2%, expanded product set, spent a lot of time and energy on digital segmentation, some specialty businesses on the consumer side. On the commercial side, we've grown roughly $6 billion on a $7 billion-plus portfolio in those five years, including $1.2 billion in C&I growth in the first half of this year and $1.2 billion last year.

We've made a lot of progress, but right now, how I'm thinking about the company is really three ways. One, we have to continue with organic growth, and we did in the first half of the year, whether that be customer growth, deposit growth, C&I growth. We're in a pretty good position there. We have the American National Bank integration that's right in front of us. Pleased with where we are to date. Finding the marks are coming right in where we expected. The cost saves are a little bit ahead of schedule, and we've gone through mock two conversion, so the final conversion should occur here in the next three weeks.

Excited about getting that, and then we'll roll out a new strat plan at the beginning of the year, which we're a couple passes into, and we think that we'll be able to continue to expand margin, expand ROTCE, and we think we'll be able to grow additionally on the household growth that we've had so far. That's our story. We're sticking with it.

Well, you think you know what it is, and every time there's a deal, people say the cultures align. What's really nice is when they do. What we've found is we've done surveys of our colleagues and their colleagues side by side, and using the three words to describe the companies, both sides use the same three words in the survey. Then you get in and you meet with folks, and the attention to detail with customer satisfaction, the attention to detail on credit, they're what we had hoped for when we were looking at it. We had held open some positions in some key areas and kind of done the best athlete wins. We have been able to fill a lot of positions with American National colleagues, particularly in the risk group.

Of course, we have people in the field finance, so we've actually gotten better from a colleague standpoint. That's been really encouraging to me. I think what you learn going through integration is it's a lot of work. I'm really pleased with the Associated colleagues on our side being able to continue to grow the bank, grow our funding base, grow the loan side of it while we get through the integration. That's what we've seen so far, and frankly, we're chomping at the bit to get this integrated and move forward.

Yeah. If you think about the fact that we've gone from negative 2% household growth to positive 2%, that is starting to create a tailwind really for the first time for our company. Then we think about Omaha, where they have 20 branches. We are going to be able to layer in our marketing acquisition tools, our consumer product set, which is quite strong on the deposit side. Now we are talking about as a company, how do we go from 2% growth to 3% growth? Well, that is a hard jump. We think Omaha is the fastest-growing major metropolitan market in our footprint. Then you pair on top of that the Twin Cities. That is the second fastest-growing, and we are getting branch networks in both of those. In Omaha, on the commercial side, the commercial team is strong. With American National, the leadership is very good.

We have capital markets, syndications capabilities that they just did not have. We have a little bit bigger balance sheet. When we look at consumer and commercial, there is opportunity on both sides. Then we run a pretty decent-sized private wealth business. They do not have that offering today. So we will launch a private wealth offering in Omaha right after systems conversion.

Yeah. The simple answer to that is we have had a lot of hires on the commercial side. We have had a lot of hires on the relationship manager side. We have also moved into some major metropolitan markets. The question for us is, we are headquartered in Green Bay, we are growing nicely in Milwaukee. Can we grow in Chicago, Twin Cities, Kansas City, now Dallas? The answer is yes. If you get the right people, you get experienced bankers that have been in the market for a long time, you have a process that makes sense, you can grow. Then we have launched a franchise vertical. We have expanded into Dallas and already are booking deals. We continue to benefit from, excuse me, asset-based lending, equipment finance. So we have launched multiple verticals at the same time, and we have gotten the right people in the right chairs.

We think it's a formula that works. What's kind of interesting, if you think about the go forward, is Kansas City, for example. When we rolled out the new team there, the question mark, can you hire a team of experienced bankers and grow in a responsible way? When we did that, another team immediately came available, and we doubled the size of that team and kept going. That model worked. We've carried that model to Dallas and hired our first relationship managers and leader there. They're already putting deals on the books.