First Citizens BancShares, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the first Citizens BancShares first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in the 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 one on your telephone. If you require operator assistance during the program, please press star, then zero. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce the host of this conference call, Ms. Deanna Hart, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to review First Citizens BancShares' first quarter 2022 financial results. It is my pleasure to introduce our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Frank Holding, as well as our Chief Financial Officer, Craig Nix. During the call, they will be referencing our investor presentation, which you can find on our website. We are also pleased to have several other members of our leadership team in attendance with us today who are available to participate in the question and answer portion of our call if needed. Following the completion of our formal presentation materials, we'll be happy to take any questions you may have. As you are aware, we closed the merger with CIT Group on January 3, 2022, and first quarter results are for the combined company. Given the magnitude of this merger on our legacy results, we have included combined numbers for the historical periods for comparison purposes. There are footnotes within the presentation to indicate when historical numbers are combined or on a First Citizen standalone basis. As a reminder, our comments during today's presentation will include forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause our results to differ materially from expectations. We assume no obligation to update these statements. These risks are outlined for you on page three of the presentation. We will also reference non-GAAP financial measures in the presentation. Reconciliations of these measures against the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available in the appendix. Finally, FERC Citizens is not responsible for and does not edit nor guarantee the accuracy of our earnings teleconference transcripts provided by third parties. With that, I'll hand it over to Frank.

Thank you Deanna and good morning everyone. We appreciate all of you joining us today. We're pleased to announce solid first quarter results this morning. We continue to remain focused on ensuring a timely and successful integration with CIT and make good progress during the quarter. And we're very excited about our prospects moving forward. As Craig will touch on when he covers our financial outlook, we expect net interest margin to continue to expand. Our customers, by and large, are in good shape, so we feel good about the prospects for loan growth, and we expect continued momentum in our fee income generating lines of business, as well as further progress on our cost-saved targets. Turning to page five of the investor presentation, we continue to remain focused on ensuring a timely and successful merger integration for our customers and associates. Leveraging our dedicated integration management office comprised of execution-oriented leaders with multiple acquisitions, conversions, and integrations under their belts, We are working hard to ensure that the value of the deal is realized for employees, customers, and shareholders. And I'm pleased to say we are exactly where we expected to be at this point in time. All of us are focused on ensuring our teams are coordinated and meeting our integration timeline. As we've said before and are experiencing as we integrate, Integration risk can be better managed in this merger because of the structure of CIT. Instead of converting a large bank over a long weekend, which is typically the case, CIT is a diverse group, or it has a diverse and unique business units and groups that will include some conversions, like OneWest, which is slated for mid-July, but will also include lifting and shifting or replatforming other lines of businesses like factoring, commercial finance, and rail, which will be managed individually and sequenced in a way that manages the integration cleanly over the next few months. Turning to page six, I want to thank all of our associates for their dedication, hard work, and sacrifice to ensure that we are making progress on our integration milestones. We are pleased with our progress on our cost saves target of $250 million and expect that $200 million will be in the run rate by the end of this year. As Craig will soon cover, during the first quarter we achieved positive operating leverage as net revenue grew at a faster pace than expenses leading to strong core earnings and pre-provision net revenue growth. We will continue to focus on redeploying excess liquidity into loans and investments at higher rates to boost net interest income and margin. We look forward to making progress, further progress, on merger integration and producing strong results in the second quarter. Before I turn it over to Craig, I'd like to say that despite some of the uncertainty out there, given geopolitical and macroeconomic issues, we remain very excited and optimistic about our growth prospects. We're already shifting from integration focus to execution in many areas throughout the bank. and we're working hard to capture the synergistic value from the CIT merger on the revenue and expense side and that's already bearing fruit. We are well positioned to perform well given, we are well positioned to perform well given our long-term focus, our focus on relationships, our risk appetite and the diversity of our business segments and our enhanced earnings profile as we are now merged with CIT. Now, Craig will provide a closer look at our financial quarter results and then we'll open the line for questions. Craig?