First Financial Bancorp.

Good morning and welcome to the first Financial Bay Corp second quarter 2021 earnings call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. If you need assistance, please signal conference specialists by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation will be opportunity to ask questions. Please note that this event is being recorded. I'd like to turn the conference over to Mr. Scott Crowley, Corporate Controller. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks, Nick. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss First Financial Bancorp's second quarter 2021 financial results. Participating on today's call will be Archie Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer, Jamie Anderson, Chief Financial Officer, and Bill Harrod, Chief Credit Officer. Both the press release we issued yesterday and the accompanying slide presentation are available on our website at www.bankatfirst.com under the Investor Relations section. We'll make reference to the slides contained in the accompanying presentation during today's call. Additionally, please refer to the forward-looking statement disclosure contained in the second quarter 2021 earnings release, as well as our SEC filings for a full discussion of the company's risk factors. The information we will provide today is accurate as of June 30th, 2021, and we will not be updating any forward-looking statements to reflect facts or circumstances after this call. I'll now turn the call over to Archie Brown.

Thanks, Scott. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call. Yesterday afternoon, we announced our second quarter financial results, which were highlighted by strong earnings, lower credit costs, higher fee income, and improving credit trends. Our core financial metrics reflected the strong quarter with earnings per share of $0.58, a return on assets of 1.39%, and an efficiency ratio of 58.4% after being adjusted for non-recurring items. The quarterly performance was bolstered by higher fee income in interchange and record revenue and wealth management in Bannockburn. Additionally, provision recaptured during the period positively impacted our results, driven by improved credit quality trends, which included declines in net charge-offs and classified asset balances. We're optimistic about the economic environment and expect further reductions in credit costs in the coming periods. We're pleased with a 23% increase in loan originations for the quarter, driven primarily by our core commercial markets, in addition to consumer and mortgage banking. Loan payoffs accelerated during the quarter in almost all commercial banking areas, with larger payoff amounts in commercial finance and ICRE driving an overall reduction in core loan balances for the quarter. Given the state of our loan pipeline, we expect originations to remain strong in the second half of the year. However, we also anticipate higher payoffs to continue due to the amount of liquidity in the market. The second quarter was again very active for PPP loan forgiveness with $301 million in round one and $41 million in round two payoffs. Three quarter end, 86% of round one and 13% of round two loans have been forgiven. We expect the majority of round one forgiveness payoffs to complete in the third quarter, while round two payoffs are expected to continue to flow in over the remainder of the year. Average transactional deposits increased 18% on an annualized basis as clients continued to build liquidity from recent government stimulus actions. However, we believe these balances may have peaked as we began to experience some outflows late in the quarter. Our capital ratios remain strong in excess of both internal and external targets. We also remain active in our share buyback program, repurchasing over 1 million shares during the quarter. When combined with the common dividend, The share repurchases approximate a quarterly return to shareholders of 98% of adjusted earnings. We anticipate further share buyback activity in the third quarter, absent higher priority capital deployment alternatives. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jamie to discuss the details of our second quarter results. And after Jamie's discussion, I will wrap up with some additional forward-looking commentary. Jamie.