Stifel Financial Corp. (NYSE:SF) Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call April 24, 2024 9:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Joel Jeffrey - Head of Investor Relations
Ronald Kruszewski - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
James Marischen - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Devin Ryan - Citizens JMP
William Katz - TD Cowen
Michael Anagnostakis - Wolfe Research, LLC
Brennan Hawken - UBS
Alexander Blostein - Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
Christopher Allen - Citigroup Inc.

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Stifel Financial First Quarter 2024 Conference Call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded.

At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Mr. Joel Jeffrey, Head of Investor Relations at Stifel Financial. Please go ahead.

Joel Jeffrey

Thanks, operator. I'd like to welcome everyone to Stifel Financial's first quarter 2024 conference call. I'm joined on the call today by our Chairman and CEO, Ron Kruszewski; our Co-Presidents, Victor Nesi and Jim Zemlyak; and our CFO, Jim Marischen.

Earlier this morning, we issued an earnings release and posted a slide deck and financial supplement to our website, which can be found on the Investor Relations page at www.stifel.com.

I would note that some of the numbers that we state throughout our presentation are presented on a non-GAAP basis and I would refer to our reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP as disclosed in our press release.

I would also remind listeners to refer to our earnings release, financial supplement and our slide presentation for information on forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures. This audio cast is copyrighted material of Stifel Financial and may not be duplicated, reproduced or rebroadcast without the consent of Stifel Financial Corp.

I will now turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Ron Kruszewski.

Ronald Kruszewski

Thanks, Joel. To our guests, good morning, and thank you for taking the time to listen to our first quarter 2024 conference call. The momentum we had exiting 2023 continued as we generated the second highest quarterly revenues in our history. We benefited from market conditions that included strong equity markets, recovering capital markets and an improving U.S. economy.

Total net revenue of more than $1.16 billion was driven by record global wealth management revenue as well as the continued improvement in our institutional group. As revenues improved, we maintained a focus on expense discipline and this approach resulted in a 20% pretax margin, operating earnings per share of $1.49, which was a 6% increase year-on-year as well as a return on tangible common equity of 21%.