Forbright, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to FORBRIGHT, Inc. Q2 2026 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Ben Wakana, Chief Public Affairs and Investor Relations Officer at Farbright. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Rivka. Before we begin, I'd like to remind listeners that remarks on this call may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risk and uncertainties. Please refer to the Safe Harbor Statements found in today's earnings release and in our investor presentation for additional details. Management may also reference non-GAAP financial measures during this call. A reconciliation of non-GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release and investor presentation slides. Finally, I'll identify the speakers on the call this morning. They are John Delaney, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fulbright, Inc., Don Cole, President and Chief Operating Officer of Fulbright, Inc., and Chief Executive Officer of Fulbright Bank, and Chris Lynch, our Chief Financial Officer. We'll also be joined for Q&A by Aaron Juda, our Chief Strategy Officer. And with that, I'll turn it over to John.

Thank you, Ben. And good morning, everyone. This is Forbright's first call as a public company, so we're very excited and grateful to our new shareholders and the research analysts who have become involved in the company and who have joined us this morning. At a high level, three things stood out this quarter. Loan growth was very strong. Credit trends continue to be favorable. and probably even more important, our outlook on credit is very positive based on the insights we have into our portfolio. And then finally, our digital deposit platform is outperforming what I would describe as our very high expectations for it. So let me go through some of these in a little more detail before I turn it over to Don. Our total loans were up about 275 million this quarter compared to the first quarter. and we continue to see very attractive lending opportunities across our six national lending strategies. And again, importantly, our pipeline in each of these businesses is very strong, which is why we would expect second half loan growth to be greater than first half because we see it accelerating as we go into the second half. Loan originations were up 13% compared to the first quarter. The growth was pretty evenly distributed across our lending strategies with healthcare and lender finance having the largest share of the $1.2 billion of new and upsized loan commitments for the quarter. Just as important, pricing and structures remained disciplined. Loan yields increased slightly by about three basis points in the quarter. and as I noted, our credit metrics remained very favorable. We were also pleased that our new asset finance business closed its first transaction this quarter. It was a small deal, but it was important because it was a few months ahead of schedule. As we've mentioned to some of our new shareholders, we're very excited about the team we've assembled for asset finance. They complement the other five lending teams very well. and just to put it in perspective the team that is running our asset finance business has collectively run a business in just that business that is bigger than all of Forbrite which puts into context why we're excited about that new team. So loan growth and credit remain strong and those are the two probably most important measures you'll hear from us in the future and again as we go into the second half of the year we feel very good about both of them. On the deposit side, the feedback we're getting from the market continues to validate our digital deposit gathering model. We've now crossed 100,000 accounts on our proprietary digital banking platform, and approximately 90% of those deposits are FDIC insured. As the quarter ended, our digital deposits were up 9% from the first quarter. which allowed us to decrease some of our other higher cost funding leading to a small improvement in cost of funds for the quarter. We successfully launched our digital deposit promotion capability at the end of the second quarter on June 15th it launched. It's performing meaningfully better than we projected. And that's good because it'll position us to have more deposits than we had planned at the end of the third quarter, significantly more. and it'll also position us to make progress on our cost of funds sooner than we had projected. We expect continued investments in technology to further enhance this capability so that we can have additional successful deposit gathering promotion, but we're pleased to be ahead of schedule with what we've launched thus far. And this is a good example of the value of a flexible API-driven technology stack rather than a cumbersome legacy core system. We saw an opportunity in the marketplace to add deposits. We launched this promotion capability very quickly, and we're reaping the benefits now. And I think it's also an example of the entrepreneurial culture that is pervasive across the Fulbright platform. Don will talk more about expenses in a minute. But I wanted to emphasize that we remain very focused on expense management and we are on track to meet our 2027 expense targets and perhaps even exceed them. And we talk a lot about expense management not only because spending less drives higher returns, but our aim is to continue to simplify the business, not tolerate distractions or unnecessary activities, Allocate our resources as intelligently as possible and create the capacity to invest more aggressively in technology and the strong growth opportunities we see in our business. So again, I'll turn it over to Don in a second, but as we head into the second half of the year, we have very high convictions about the key drivers of the business, loan growth, credit quality, funding costs, and operating efficiency. Execution is our central responsibility. We concentrate on the drivers that matter most, value our clients, producing responsible growth, maintaining rigorous credit and risk standards, managing expenses with intensity, allocating our capital intelligently, and investing in the capabilities that will strengthen the franchise for years to come. Our commitment is straightforward, focus on what matters, avoid distraction, and continuously improve the company. In my judgment, the second quarter was a good example of us doing just that. Don?