Blue Foundry Bancorp

Good morning and welcome to Blue Foundry Bancorp's second quarter 2024 earnings call.

Good morning and welcome to Blue Foundry Bancorp's second quarter 2024 earnings call. 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 circumstance. Blue Foundry encourages all participants to refer to the full disclaimer 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 earnings 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 the call over to President and CEO, Jim Nessie.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our second quarter earnings call. I am joined by our Chief Financial Officer, Kelly Pecoraro. will discuss the company's second quarter financial results in detail after I provide an update on our operations. We are pleased by the progress we made in the second quarter and thus far in 2024. Despite the competitive environment and inverted yield curve, deposit growth continued in the second quarter and net interest margin expanded for a second consecutive quarter. This, coupled with our expense discipline, helped to improve by $268,000 versus last quarter. Our focus on attracting the full banking relationship of small to medium-sized businesses has resulted in a 9% increase in commercial deposits this year. Additionally, our branch network has delivered a 6% increase in consumer deposits. These successes have allowed us to reduce our reliance on wholesale deposits by 4% this year. This deposit growth has improved our loan to deposits ratio. Given our strategy to become a more commercially oriented institution, we have been selective in originating real estate loans while building our commercial pipeline. We now have a healthy pipeline of commercial credits at attractive yield that will allow us to continue to expand our interest income and loan yield. We expect to continue to build this pipeline in the second half of the year. As always, We are disciplined in underwriting strong credits across all our loan product offerings. During the quarter, we repurchased 386,000 shares at a weighted average share price of $8.84. Repurchasing shares at these levels continues to improve shareholder value. Tangible book value per share increased by 9 cents to $14.69. Our bank and holding company remain well capitalized with capital levels that are among the highest in the banking industry. Tangible equity to tangible common assets was 16.9% at June 30th. BlueFactory continues to operate with robust liquidity and a low concentration risk to any single depositor. At the end of the second quarter, we had $394 million in untapped borrowing capacity and are unencumbered available for sale securities unrestricted cash provided another $298 million of liquidity. This liquidity is 4.8 times larger than our uninsured and uncollateralized deposits to customers. These deposits represent only 12% for our deposit balances. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Kelly, and then we'd be delighted to answer your questions. Kelly.