First Financial Bancorp.

Good morning or good afternoon all and welcome to the First Financial Bancorp third quarter earnings call and webcast. My name is Adam and I'll be your operator today. If you'd like to ask a question during the Q&A portion of today's call, you may do so by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to Scott Crowley to begin. So Scott, please go ahead when you are ready.

Thank you, Adam. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss First Financial Bancorp's third quarter 2001 financial results. Participating on today's call will be Archie Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Anderson, Chief Financial Officer, and Bill O'Hara, 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 will 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 third 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 September 30, 2021, and we will not be updating any forward-looking statements to reflect facts or circumstances after this call. I'll now turn it over to Archie Brown.

Thanks, Scott. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call. Yesterday afternoon, we announced our third quarter financial results, which were highlighted by strong earnings, long growth, solid fee income, lower credit costs, and improving credit trends. Third quarter results were exceptional across the board with earnings per share of 63 cents, a return on assets of 1.49%, and an adjusted efficiency ratio of 60.1%. Third quarter earnings were the highest they've been since the main source merger in 2018 and were highlighted by significant provision recapture of $10.1 million. Provision recapture during the period was a result of improving credit quality trends, specifically lower net charge-offs and declines in classified asset balances and we expect further reductions in credit costs in the fourth quarter of 2021 and the first part of 2022 given our optimism for further economic recovery in addition earnings were positively impacted by elevated mortgage and wealth management revenues and we were encouraged by strong loan originations during the period Total loan balances declined $150.6 million, driven by $225.4 million in TPP forgiveness during the quarter. Core loan balances increased $74.8 million for the period as a result of strong origination activity, which was approximately 12% higher than the second quarter. We're very pleased with the growth in our C&I portfolio of 16% on an annualized basis. Our origination levels more than offset loan payoffs, which remain high, particularly in our specialty finance and our ICRE units. Additionally, we are encouraged by the pipeline activity has increased over the course of the last quarter. Deposit balances remained elevated as we saw some modest increases towards the end of the quarter as clients continue to maintain substantial liquidity levels. The third quarter continued to be very active for PPP loan forgiveness. three quarter in over 98% of round one and over 50% of round two loans have been forgiven. We expect the majority of remaining round two payoffs to flow in over the remainder of the year. During the quarter, we repurchased approximately two and a half million shares at an average price of $23.04, bringing our total shares repurchased in 2021 to approximately 4.6 million. When combined with the common dividend, The share repurchases approximated return to shareholders of 131.7% of quarterly earnings. There are approximately 367,000 shares remaining in our buyback authorization. We were also very excited to bring our associates back to physical office locations during the quarter, albeit with greater flexibility than pre-COVID. We firmly believe we are stronger when we're together, and we've already witnessed how combining best practices learned from the pandemic with our culture of collaboration positively impacts our clients and financial performance. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jamie to discuss the details of our third quarter results. And after Jamie's discussion, I'll wrap up with some additional forward-looking commentary. Jamie. Thank you, Archie, and good morning, everyone.