First Citizens BancShares, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the first Citizens BancShare Q4 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require operator assistance during the program, please press star 0. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce host of this conference call, Mr. Tom Heath, Director of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, Angie. Good morning and thank you so much for joining us. It is my pleasure to introduce our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Frank Holding, as well as our Chief Financial Officer Craig Nix, who will provide an overview of our results After which, we will be happy to take any questions you may have. We are also pleased to have several other members of the team with us as well, including our Chief Risk Officer, Lori Rupp, our Chief Credit Officer, Jim Bryan, our Treasurer, Tom Eklund, our Chief Accounting Officer, Robert Hawley, our Head of Analysis and M&A, Elliot Howard, and lastly, Brian Paul of Risk and Data Analytics. Our remarks today will reference an earnings presentation that is available at firstcitizens.com slash earnings presentation. I should note that statements made during the call and statements included in the presentation materials may be forward-looking statements and that factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those statements are listed in the earnings press release, the presentation materials, and the company's SEC filings. and if any non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on the call or are included in the presentation materials, that reconciliations of those measures to the comparable GAAP measures are available in the presentation materials which are posted on the website. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Frank.

Thank you, Tom, and good morning, everybody. We appreciate you joining us. As you've seen, despite the challenging environment, we've had a very good fourth quarter and a full year 2020. This all translated into record earnings for First Citizens. Performance was broad-based, and I'm exceptionally proud of our team for their hard work and the efforts they have made to see our clients and communities through this challenging period. I'll let Craig Nix, our CFO, walk you through our financial performance in more detail. But before I do, I want to make a couple of high-level comments. First, it's very clear to me that the investments we made in recent years in both people and technology have paid off handsomely. Testament to that fact is that in this tough environment, we've not skipped a beat. and I believe our significant activity in PPP demonstrates just one example of the power of our people and the underlying franchise. The team is hard at work on round two of PPP now as we plan to continue to help our clients navigate these tough times. Second, as you know, we announced a transformational partnership with CIT this past October. While we spent many months on the front end carefully understanding the opportunity, since that time we've had even more time with the CIT team. As of today, I can tell you that we're even more excited about this opportunity given the quality of the combined team and our underlying capabilities as a combined entity. On page three of the investor deck, We provide an update of our activities surrounding our planned merger with CIT. Drawing from both organizations, we've established core merger and integration planning teams to promote a coordinated approach to enterprise issues, drive execution, and aid key decisions. We filed key regulatory applications in December 2020. We have scheduled a shareholder meeting to approve the merger in February. Subject to regulatory and shareholder approval, we are targeting legal close at the beginning of the second quarter. We formed an integration management office to provide governance structure and facilitate reporting. As we move forward, we will be finalizing organizational and personnel decisions as well as completion of our business unit integration plans. We continue to plan operational conversion in 2022. Both First Citizens and CIT have been active in M&A and are experienced in this process and understand its importance. Consequently, we're going to great lengths to do it carefully and to do it right. We remain confident I'd like to close by thanking our employees for their steadfast commitment to their customers through a very challenging year. And with that, I'll turn it over to Craig for a closer look at our results, and then we will take your questions. Craig?