Eastern Bankshares, Inc. Common Stock Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

The Greater Boston market has always been very competitive. There are lots of smaller mutuals in the market. As a matter of fact, most of the mutuals in the country are in the New England region, so it's not unusual that we have a lot of competition. Yes, the larger organizations are there and have professed interest in coming into the region, if they're not already there. But we really like our position in the marketplace. We have $31 billion in banking assets. We're the number 4 in terms of deposit market share. We've a sizable and growing wealth and private banking business. The Eastern brand is so ingrained in the marketplace. It's our home turf. We work and live and make decisions right in that marketplace. The brand is very well-known, and we really like our position.

Not significant, with the possible exception of deposit pricing. Deposit pricing is elevated in the marketplace. We saw this trend in the back half of last year and continued into the first quarter. That's one area where we've definitely seen increase. The changes in competitive behavior would be in that segment.

Well, I look at our business pipelines as sort of a leading indicator of customer sentiment. In both our commercial and wealth businesses, we are seeing very good activity. Particularly commercial, we have had record pipelines now in each of the last two quarters and good loan closings, and the pipeline continues to fill back up. It is remarkable. So we think that our customers are very resilient. They have gone through a lot in the past few years in terms of tariffs and shocks to energy prices, but they remain resilient, and we would categorize them, I think, as sort of cautiously optimistic. Those pipelines, though, are very robust and give us a degree of confidence about the back half of the year and really what our customers are seeing and feeling that they continue to want to lend or to borrow, excuse me.

On the wealth side of the business, we are also seeing very good activity in terms of net flows. So those to us are good, really concrete manifestations of customer sentiment.

Sure. I will take that one, Jared. When we decided to defend and grow market share and started pricing for that, it in essence woke up our customer base. It solidified or showed us once again the value of that deposit franchise. It is 130 branches, very dense footprint. Southern Vermont now into a little bit of a presence in Rhode Island. It is a great deposit franchise, and we are continuing to leverage it, and we have confidence that it will continue growing.

There is a clear preference for liquidity. Customers are responding, and flows are supporting money market specials over CD pricing, for example. Our CDs have been relatively flat year to date. Money market is where most of the growth has been. Then in money markets, it's really across all the major businesses as well, whether that's retail or commercial or private banking. The challenge obviously with a little heightened deposit competition is maintenance of the margin. The backup in interest rates is helping fixed rate repricing story, whether that's securities portfolio or the fixed rate loan book. That's a multi-year story there. Some of that positive income is being offset on the deposit side. But net net, I think it's a small positive for us over the next couple of years.