First Financial Bancorp.

Hello and welcome to the First Financial Bank Corp First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. My name is Emily and I'll be coordinating the call today. During the presentation, you will have the opportunity to ask a question by pressing start followed by one on your telephone keypads. I now have the pleasure of handing the call over to our host, Scott Corley from First Financial Bank Corp. Please go ahead, Scott.

Thank you, Maureen. Thank you, Emily. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss First Financial Bancorp's first quarter 2022 financial results. Participating on today's call will be Archie Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer, Jamie Anderson, Chief Financial Officer, and Bill Harriot, 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. Additionally, please refer to the forward-looking statement disclosure contained in the first quarter of 2022 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 March 31, 2022, 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 financial results for the first quarter. Before I turn the call over to Jamie to discuss those results in greater detail, I'm going to provide a few comments on our performance. Like others in the industry, our recent quarter was impacted by revenue pressures from rising mortgage rates and the wind down of PPP. Despite these challenges, the first quarter was in line with our expectations and a good start to what we expect will be a very strong year. For the quarter, we achieved adjusted earnings per share of 46 cents a 1.09% return on average assets, and a 15.75% return on average tangible common equity. These results were driven by provision recapture of $5.8 million, resulting from strong credit quality trends, stable economic conditions, and improved expense management. Improvement in the core margin highlighted the quarter, with the margin increasing 12 basis points when excluding PPP and other more volatile loan fees. The margin benefited from the upward shift in rates driving asset yields higher. Given interest rate forecasts in our asset-sensitive balance sheet, we should see additional improvement in our margin during the year. In addition, credit quality trends remain excellent, evidenced by stable classified asset levels, lower net charge-offs, and provision recapture. We were also pleased with our ability to diligently manage expenses, which were in line with our expectations. despite some elevated healthcare costs. First quarter fee income was lower than we anticipated as rising rates negatively impacted mortgage banking revenue. While foreign exchange declined for the fourth quarter levels, Bennett Burns' income can vary from quarter to quarter, and we expect it to rebound in coming quarters. Consumer deposit balances grew modestly as our customers continue to maintain substantial liquidity levels. Overall loan growth was muted in the first quarter as originations were slowed by the peak of Omicron in January and higher payoffs continued in our commercial lines of business as many borrowers sold their businesses or underlying assets. We are pleased to see growth in all of our business lines with the exception of ICRE and franchise where payoffs were elevated. Loan pipelines are strengthening and we are optimistic about improved loan growth for the remainder of 2022. The integration of Summit continues to go as expected. Its first quarter financial performance was in line with our expectations, and the cultural fit has proven to be as we had hoped. Given the impact of acquisition accounting, our projection is that Summit's contributions will be neutral to overall 2022 financial results, and we remain bullish on the future success of this addition to our company. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jamie to discuss the first quarter results in more detail. After Jamie's discussion, I'll wrap up with some additional forward-looking commentary. Jamie.