M&T Bank Corp. Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

Yeah. It is interesting. I might think about it, to say it a different way, which is that if you go back over time, I think that one of the biggest assets we had in history was this large ownership base. 20% to 25% of the shares were owned by Bob, by the board, and employees. And of course, Warren was in for 30 years. You had this ability and this desire to think about long-term decision-making. Even though it took a long time for anybody to realize that Bob was actually really not about banking, he was about building communities, and he thought it was one of the best seats you could have. All of that produced this, I would call it patience, but persistence, right? So that you could think about what the right thing was to do over a long time.

You repeat those behaviors over time, and even though we don't have that same ownership structure, that's what we're trying to actually do. The result is what you're talking about. You could almost make, and still have a desire to make countercyclical decisions. A great example would be when a recession comes, everybody's cutting staff, and we take our talent programs, and we say, "Okay, let's double them." Right? As Bob would say, "That's the only time we get anybody to move to Buffalo." That patience, I think, has allowed us to move through cycles, allowed us to be healthier than average when things aren't going well. We try to preserve that, and the best way for us to preserve that is through talent and our talent programs. We used to have one or two. Now they've sort of proliferated.

We have specific programs around credit, and we're basically just teaching the fundamentals. If you bring an employee in, they don't necessarily have to know a thing about banking. But if they're bright, smart, particularly if they have a liberal arts education, we can teach them banking, and we can teach them the fundamentals, and that's what allows us to endure.

Well, yeah. I think you sort of get there if you go to the tech world. I just mentioned talent. We had very specific talent programs. One of the things that helps us transform our tech and the way we think about tech over the last six or seven years has been started, again, with talent. One of the first things we did is start talent programs. So we have a management development program. We used to do a tech development program. We started hiring people from the outside. We changed the environment. We brought in our first set of engineers. Before Mike Wisler was with our company, there was not a single person in the company with the title of engineer. So it all kind of comes back to talent. So that's the thing that is the constant, right? But the question is where?

Where do you need it? That's evolving so fast. One of the biggest threats is simply anybody who doesn't think about tech as the center of their strategy is probably going to have a very difficult time in the future. So most of those things that you've talked about are enduring. Credit is enduring. I'll tell you a quick story. So it's like the Tuesday before the bad Wednesday and Thursday with Silicon Valley Bank. We're at the board meeting. We happen to have a board meeting, and we're going around, and we're talking about liquidity. Someone in the room says, "We've talked about this the last five meetings. Why are we talking about it?" So I left. Someone was presenting, so I was able to leave and go upstairs and grab a poster and brought the poster down.

The poster had all of the banks that have failed since 1850 and why. It passed around the boardroom table. We looked at it and said, "Okay, great." Then two days later, huh, liquidity. So tech changes, people change, but the fundamentals of an intermediary, I don't think really change. They may get more efficient, more effective, which is happening today, but the fundamentals are all the same.

Yeah. 2026 is very different from 2025. 2025, we were still peeling back on and being reserved on commercial real estate. Utilization was down. Most of the C&I loan growth you saw was NDFI, data centers, and things that we didn't do. So we looked like, when you look at the top line, like we were underperforming. Consumer stayed, has always been pretty steady. Was the only thing sort of really growing in 2025. Now everything you look at is growing in concert. It really strikes me. If I were to guess, year-over-year, we've probably had 6% loan growth, somewhere in that range. Most of my career, we've not had since you started banking. When you started banking, you always had high growth in the balance sheet and so forth because you were smaller.

Other than that, it's been one of the most robust markets that I think I've seen in a long time. If there's things that it was soft, maybe a little bit of softness in auto. But pretty much everything else is moving. Not just large corporate, like middle-market companies are spending money.

I think we keep talking about it, but I think it might be one of the most misunderstood things. I have to tell a story to do that. We write the letter every year, and I'm working with Brian Klock, who you know.