ConnectOne Bancorp, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to ConnectOne Bancorp Inc. First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Ms. Sia Vansia, Vice President of Marketing. Thank you and over to you.

Good morning and welcome to today's conference call to review Connect One's results for the first quarter of 2022 and to update you on recent developments. On today's conference call will be Frank Sorrentino, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Bill Burns, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. These results as well as notice of this conference call on a listen-only basis over the internet were distributed this morning in a press release that has been covered by the financial media. At this time, let me remind you that certain statements and assumptions in this conference call contain or based upon forward-looking information that are being made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements are subject to numerous assumptions, uncertainties, and known or unknown risks which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. These risk factors are more fully discussed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this conference call are only made as of the date of this call and the company is not obligated to publicly update or revise them. In addition, certain terms used in this call are non-GAAP financial measures, reconciliations of which are provided in the company's earnings release and accompanying tables or schedules, which have been filed today on Form 8K with the SEC and may also be accessed through the company's website at ir.connect1bank.com. Each listener is encouraged to review those reconciliations provided in the earnings release together with all other information. I will now turn the call over to Frank Sorrentino. Frank, please go ahead.

Thank you, Sarah, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. We're very pleased to report another strong quarter delivering solid financial performance, significant organic balance sheet growth, and strong performance metrics here at Connect One. While Bill will discuss our financial highlights in some more detail, I'd like to highlight that our PPNR as a percentage of assets again exceeded 2 percent for the seventh consecutive quarter. Return on assets was again above 1.5 percent, and our return on tangible equity was greater than 15 percent, all while our efficiency ratio remained below 40 percent. Our tangible book value per share was up again this quarter, increasing by 2% since the beginning of the year. And that's in an interest rate environment where others have experienced significant dilution from reduction in fair value of their securities portfolios. However, these, once again, impressive financial results really don't tell the whole story of what we're building here at Connect One. So first, we continue to invest in and strengthen our origination franchise. By leveraging our strong franchise and client-centric culture, we're gaining new clients as well as hiring experienced bankers, from revenue generators to tech talent. We're a destination of choice for some of the best business generating talent in the industry, and a lot of that is stemming from the marketplace disruption created by M&A. We've also taken proactive measures to retain our top talent with attractive compensation packages. So as we sit here today, we clearly see those efforts have enhanced an already stellar team and are paying dividends with yet another quarter of annualized sequential growth in loans exceeding 10% and nearly 15% growth in deposits. Secondly, our pipeline remains near historic levels with strong demand and favorable pricing characteristics across all business lines in our markets. The important part of the success is attributable to expanding our presence and proactively following our clients into new and growing markets. As you know, we recently hired a great team to lead our Florida office, and already at this early stage, we're seeing very promising results. Traction is exceeding our initial expectations, and the factors that made it successful in the New York metropolitan area translate very well to the growing Florida market and our culture with a client-based focus is a clear differentiator. We've already originated approximately 150 million in new commercial loans, some from our existing Connect One clients with business opportunities in Florida and some from new clients based in Florida. Deal structures and opportunities are both favorable and in line with the lending to which we have extensive experience and expertise. So with that, let's move on to some other initiatives Connect One has been focused on. We're continuing to successfully adopt and expand our utilization of technology to remain competitive, to create efficiencies, and to provide real-time solutions. This includes improvements to internal workflows to support our hybrid work environment and support scale, along with our investments to enhance our data infrastructure, including digital initiatives that also enhance risk management tools and processes. Look over at Bowfly, even as the number of our franchisor brands on that platform increase, we're turning our efforts towards automated underwriting to improve functionality for the franchisor and franchisee and ultimately increase the profitability of the core business line. These continued investments ultimately allow Bowfly to build for scale. We're continuously improving the client experience while also achieving greater efficiency and revenue generation for that platform. We're also creating additional opportunities beyond the SBA vertical with the loyal client base that Bowfly has built. Shifting gears, as you may have seen, Connect One became an early member bank in the USDF Consortium, which is an association of U.S. banks with a mission to build a network to further the adoption of the USDF, which is a tokenized deposit. This is an early step in employing blockchain within the regulatory perimeter in order to offer enhanced solutions for our commercial banking clients. We're also happy to announce that we recently signed an agreement with Nimbus, a leading fintech company to provide cloud-based banking and core services. Working in partnership with Nimbus, we'll be building a niche-focused offering, providing us a new avenue to collect deposits. We're set to kick this project off in the near future, and we'll share more details as we progress. You know, supporting our industry-leading efficiency ratio is our ability to leverage technology and streamline internal processes. A great example of this you've heard me discuss before is our partnership with Encino, which has been instrumental in this regard. We partnered with Encino in 2017 when our total asset size was just $4 billion to help deploy a single cloud-based platform throughout the organization and business lines. And today, we've more than doubled in size, and yet we've been able to create efficiencies as we continue to build scale. So, we look forward to sharing our progress in the quarters ahead. In summary, this has been an exciting time at Connect One. We're well positioned, our capital position remains strong, and we continue to internally generate capital support growth. As you saw in our press release this morning, the Board of Directors today announced another increase to our common dividend, an increase of nearly 20 percent. Also, we continue to be opportunistic with share repurchases, having about 2 million in authorized capacity at the present time. So with that, I'll turn it over to Bill to give us a little more depth and some color on our results.