First Financial Bancorp.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Mandeep, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the first Financial Bancorp 2024 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Scott Crowley, Corporate Controller. You may begin.

Thank you, Monty. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us on today's conference call to discuss First Financial Bank for its first quarter 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 first quarter 2024 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 31st, 2024, and we will not be updating any forward-looking statements to reflect facts or circumstances after this call.

And I'll 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 financial results for the first quarter. I'll provide some high-level thoughts on our recent performance, and then I'll turn the call over to Jamie to provide further details. I'm pleased with our first quarter results and encouraged by our trends. several of which were bolstered by actions we took during the quarter. These actions included a repositioning of a portion of the investment portfolio, a workforce efficiency initiative, and the acquisition of Agile premium finance. We also commenced the restructuring of a portion of our bank-owned life insurance portfolio, which is expected to increase income in the back half of the year. Adjusted earnings per share was 59 cents, which resulted in a return on assets of 1.3%. and return on tangible common equity of 19.1%. At 4.1%, the net interest margin remains very strong. Asset yields remain steady during the quarter. However, as expected, the continued rise of funding costs negatively impacted our net interest margin. Additionally, loan growth was robust for the second consecutive quarter with balances increasing by 10% on an annualized basis. Average deposit growth slowed for the quarter to a 2.3% annualized growth rate And it included a seasonal outflow of approximately $100 million in business deposits early in the quarter. I'm pleased that non-interest income rebounded from the fourth quarter with increases across most of our free fee revenue areas. During the quarter, we incurred a loss on the sale of investment securities associated with the repositioning of a portion of the investment portfolio. This repositioning has a very short earn back and should enhance our asset yields going forward. We also intensified our focus on expenses during the quarter. Our workforce efficiency initiative resulted in the reduction of approximately $5 million in annual expenses, and we expect to realize an additional $10 to $12 million in annualized expense reductions by the end of 2024. While expenses increased on a linked quarter basis, most of the increase was related to seasonal employee costs and variable compensation tied to the increase in fee income. We're excited to add Agile to our mix of specialty businesses. An overview of the company and transaction can be found on slide 13. Agile operates an impressive business model, which originates high quality, short duration loans at attractive yields. At closing, we acquired $93 million in loans, which grew to $119 million at the end of the quarter. Agile will further diversify the loan portfolio and is a perfect complement to our Oak Street and commercial banking businesses. Asset quality was stable for the quarter. Net charge-offs declined for the second consecutive quarter to 38 basis points and were primarily driven by charges on two office loans that had been on non-accrual since early 2023. These two loans have been charged down to their net realizable value and no other office loans had a classified risk rating at the end of the first quarter. Overall classified assets increased 12 basis points to 0.92% of assets, while non-performing assets declined 9.8% from the prior quarter. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jamie to discuss these results in greater detail. And then after Jamie's discussion, I'll wrap up with some additional forward-looking commentary and closing remarks.