Brookline Bancorp, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Brookline Bancorp second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Marissa Martin, General Counsel. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you, Rocco, and good afternoon, everyone. Yesterday, we issued our earnings release and presentation, which is available on the investor relations page of our website, brooklinebankcorp.com, and has been filed with the SEC. This afternoon's call will be hosted by Paul A. Peralt and Carl M. Carlson. This call may contain forward-looking statements with respect to the financial condition, results of operations, and business of Brookline Bancorp. Please refer to page 2 of our earnings presentation for our forward-looking statement disclaimer. Also, please refer to our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which contain risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Any references made during this presentation to non-GAAP measures are only made to assist you in understanding Proclaimed Bancorp's results and performance trends and should not be relied on as financial measures of actual results or future predictions. For a comparison and reconciliation to GAAP earnings, please see our earnings release. If you can join us on page three of the earnings presentation, I'm pleased to introduce Proclaimed Bancorp's Chairman and CEO, Paul Peralta.

Thanks, Marissa, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's earnings call. I'm pleased to report we had record quarterly earnings of $31.6 million, or 40 cents per share, as our credit quality has remained stable, our net interest margin and fee income improved, and our stable expense base benefited from a $2.1 million gain sale of a piece of other real estate owned. We continue to work with a small segment of our customers who are still working through the financial challenges. As of June 30th, we had $96 million remaining in modified loans under the CARES Act. The company recorded a negative provision for credit losses of $3.3 million, and our reserve for loan losses declined five basis points to 160 basis points on outstanding non-PPP loans. In Q2, we experienced another quarter of significant PPP originations and forgiveness activity. We facilitated $22 million in new PPP loans before the program ended on May 31st, and $279 million of PPP loans were satisfied during the second quarter. Excluding PPP, our core loan portfolio remained flat, growing $9 million for the quarter. It may be too early to tell if this marks the turning point, but our pipelines continue to be very strong, trends continue to improve, and we remain optimistic. I am pleased to report the Board approved another quarterly dividend of $0.12 per share. I will now turn you over to Carl, who will review the company's second quarter.