Blue Foundry Bancorp

Good morning and welcome to Blue Foundry Bancorp's second quarter 2022 earnings call. My name is Melissa and I'll be your conference operator today. Comments made during today's call may include forward-looking statements which are based on management's current expectations and are subject to uncertainty and changes in circumstances. Blue Foundry encourages all participants to refer to the full disclaimers contained in this morning's earnings release. which has been posted to the investor relations page on bluefoundrybank.com. During the call, management will refer to non-GAAP measures which exclude certain items from reported results. Please refer to today's earning release for reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures. As a reminder, this event is being recorded. Your line will be muted for the duration of the call. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I will now turn over the call to President and CEO Jim Nessie.

Thank you, operator.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. Today, I'm joined for the first time by our newly appointed Chief Financial Officer, Kelly Pecoraro. Kelly comes to us from Investors Bank, where she was Executive Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer. Since Kelly's arrival in early May, We have benefited from her leadership, and we are excited to leverage her experiences and knowledge to help guide Blue Foundry. After a few opening remarks, Kelly will share the company's financial results. I am encouraged by the progress we have made in our core operating results. Earlier this morning, we reported second quarter net income of $40,000 and a pre-provisioned net revenue of $529,000. During the quarter, we had significant growth in both our lending and retail franchises. At June 30th, we reported total loans of $1.42 billion, up $88 million from the prior quarter. This represents loan growth of 6.6% quarter over quarter. This is the second consecutive quarter we grew our loan portfolio by more than 4%. Our lending team onboarded $175 million of new loans during the quarter. Organic originations totaled $147 million. the largest quarterly originations achieved in BlueFoundry's history. This record growth came from strong production in multifamily and commercial real estate. Our loan pipeline remains robust in the near term, totaling $223 million, with a weighted rate of 4.4 percent as of June 30th. We expect to continue with healthy originations in the third quarter, but given economic uncertainties later this year, our longer-term outlook is more conservative. Deposit growth remains strong, especially with our business customers. Our retail team grew core deposits by $28 million during the quarter. Business accounts drove $25 million of that growth. To attract and retain customers, our retail team is constantly exploring new initiatives to best serve our clients. During the quarter, We relaunched our mobile application with a simplified, modern, user-friendly interface. We partnered with a financial services technology company to initiate the implementation of an online channel for opening business accounts, and we enhanced our cash management product suite to allow business customers to initiate foreign wires. We opened our 18th branch in Hoboken's historic district in May. This branch exemplifies our vision to open inviting environmentally conscious and architecturally efficient branches located in the center of town. The second quarter evidenced the positive impact that the successful execution of our strategy has already had on our franchise. Additionally, July 15th marked the one-year anniversary of our initial public offering, and last week, our board of directors authorized a share repurchase program of 10 percent, or up to 2.8 million shares. We feel strongly that a repurchase program allows us to return capital to shareholders in an economically rational manner, and we plan to begin execution of this plan once our blackout period concludes. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Kelly, and then we'd be delighted to answer your questions.