Amalgamated Financial Corp.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Algamated Bank fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be open for questions with instructions to follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Drew Levin, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate your participation in our fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings call. With me today is Keith Mestrich, President and Chief Executive Officer. As a reminder, a telephonic replay of this call will be available on the investor section of our website for an extended period of time. Additionally, a slide deck to complement today's discussion is also available on the investor section of our website. Before we begin, Let me remind everyone that this call may contain certain statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. We caution investors that actual results may differ from the expectations indicated or implied by any such forward-looking information or statements. Investors should refer to Slide 2 of our earnings slide deck, as well as our 2019 10-K filed on March 13, 2020, and our other periodic filings that we file from time to time with the FDIC for a list of risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated or implied by such statements. Additionally, during today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP measures which we believe are useful in evaluating our performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with US GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measure can be found in our earnings release as well as on our website. At this point, I'll turn the call over to Keith.

Thank you, Drew, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate your time and attention today. This morning, I will discuss our current operations followed by the high-level results of the fourth quarter before turning the call back over to Drew to discuss our financial results in more detail. Today is the last time I'll be speaking with you as the CEO of Amalgamated, and I'd like to thank our employees, customers, shareholders, and research analysts for all of your support. This has been an amazing journey, and I'm so proud of what we have accomplished. Today, the bank is in a strong position, highlighted by a talented management team, an exceptional group of employees who are committed to our customers and the bank, a conservative credit culture which has served us well through the crisis, and a well-earned reputation as America's socially responsible bank. which continues to differentiate amalgamated in the market and positions the bank for success in the coming years. These attributes can be seen in our fourth quarter and full year 2020 results and there are five key highlights that I would like to focus on today. First, the pandemic created unprecedented challenges for all of us over the past year and our team executed flawlessly to ensure we could transition our employees to a work-from-home environment while seamlessly maintaining our operations. We executed very well under extremely difficult circumstances, which is a true credit to our entire team, who I would like to thank for their tireless efforts. Second, the steps that we have taken to improve the credit profile of our loan portfolio in the years leading up to the crisis positioned the bank to weather the challenging and uncertain economic environment that we currently face. Through the fourth quarter, our loan deferrals declined to 1% of our portfolio from 8% in the third quarter. As we will discuss, We took further actions in the quarter which positions our portfolio and the bank for continued improvement through the year ahead. Third, our deposit franchise continues to be a source of strength and a competitive advantage for the bank. In fact, we expanded our position in this election cycle as well as our share in our core markets with significant new account wins in Boston and D.C. I'm very pleased to see the new business momentum that our team has generated.