First Interstate BancSystem, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the First Interstate BancSystem, Inc. Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance today, please signal a confidence specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one and then touch down to promote. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note today's event is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Lisa Slater-Bray. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thanks, Rocco. Good morning. Thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter earnings conference call. As we begin, please note that the information provided during this call will contain forward-looking statements. Actual results or outcomes may differ materially from those expressed by those statements. I'd like to direct all listeners to read the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements and factors that could affect future results contained in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC and in our earnings release, as well as the risk factors identified in the annual report in our more recent periodic reports filed with the SEC. Relevant factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements are included in the earnings release and in our SEC filings. The company does not undertake to update any of the forward-looking statements made today, A copy of our earnings release, which contains non-GAAP financial measures, is available on our website at fibk.com. Information regarding our use of the non-GAAP financial measures may be found in the body of the earnings release in reconciliation to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measure is included at the end of the earnings release for your reference. Joining us for management this morning are Kevin Riley, our Chief Executive Officer, and Marcie Mutch, our Chief Financial Officer. along with other members from our management team. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Kevin Reilly. Kevin?

Thanks, Lisa. Good morning and thanks again to all of you for joining us on the call today. Again this quarter, along with earnings release, we have published an updated investor presentation that has some additional disclosures that we believe will be helpful. The presentation can be accessed on our investor relations website and if you haven't downloaded a copy yet, I encourage you to do so. I'm going to start off today by providing an overview of the major highlights of the quarter, and then I'll turn the call over to Marcie to provide more details on our financial results. During the fourth quarter, we continued to see economic strength throughout our markets that resulted in high-quality lending opportunities, significant inflows of core deposits, and a reduction of our problem loan categories. As a result, we delivered another strong quarter of earnings, and pre-taxed pre-provisioned income. For the quarter, we generated net income of 46.9 million or 76 cents per share and a pre-taxed pre-provisioned income of 64.9 million. Across our markets, employment levels are increasing and many of the commodity prices are at near or all-time highs providing a boon for our ag borrowers. A mild winter has been a positive for this construction industry, but we have still received some snow in the mountains and the ski season has gone well, helping our tourist industry. As a result, we continue to see many of our commercial clients performing at record levels and our retail clients having a lot of money in their pockets, which is generating strong inflows of core deposits. Our total deposits increased at an annualized rate of 9.5% in the fourth quarter, with all the growth coming in our lower-cost deposit categories. The one drawback to this is that companies are doing so well that they are awash in liquidity. They don't have to need to utilize their credit lines or take on new debt. Excluding PPP loans, which started to run off in a material way in the fourth quarter, our loans held for investment balances increased at an annualized rate of 3.6%, with a broad growth across our residential and commercial real estate portfolios. We made the decision to put more of our liquidity to work by retaining a greater portion of our residential mortgage loan production. By retaining these mortgage loans and also adding to our investment portfolio, we are able to utilize the strong deposit growth to increase our net interest income and positively impact earnings. In the current environment, We believe this is the right strategy. We're willing to trade off a lower net interest margin to generate higher net interest income dollars. We have the view that deposits are raw materials and we're not going to turn away, even though these low cost funds are invested in the security portfolio or residential mortgages at a relatively low rate. We'll take those incremental interest income dollars all day long. The positive economic trends we are seeing in our markets are also driving improvements in our asset quality. For the third consecutive quarter, we had declines in both non-performing loans and non-performing assets. And also the fourth quarter, our criticized loans were down in the quarter. We also continue to see more of our loan deferrals returning to regular scheduled payments. As December 31st We only had $23.7 million of loans on deferral status and $9 million of our residential mortgages in forbearance. Together, this is less than a quarter of a percent of our outstanding loan balances. These positive trends in asset quality, along with the significant reserve bill we had earlier in the year, resulted in a small provision requirement this quarter. Our allowance coverage is relatively consistent with that of the prior quarter. Given our strong financial performance and low risk profile, we continue to have the ability to return a significant amount of capital to our shareholders. During the fourth quarter, we repurchased over a million shares of our common stock, and today we declared an increase in our quarterly dividend to $0.41 per share, which is almost an 8% increase from last quarter's dividend and a 21% increase from the third quarter of last year. We are committed to a balanced approach to capital deployment consisting of organic growth, acquisitions, stock repurchases, and quarterly dividends. We believe this will continue to have a positive impact to the total return that we generate for our shareholders. With that, I'll turn the call over to Marcie so she can provide a little more detail on our fourth quarter results. Go ahead, Marcie.