Fulton Financial Corporation

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Fulton Financial 4th Quarter 2022 Results 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 that session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your phone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded, and I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Matt Jozwiak. Director of Investor Relations. Sir, please go ahead.

Good morning, and thanks for joining us for Fulton Financial's conference call and webcast to discuss our earnings for the fourth quarter in year-end of December 31st, 2022. Your host for today's conference call is Kurt Myers, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Joining Kurt is Mark McCollum, Chief Financial Officer. Our comments today will refer to the financial information the related slide presentation included with our earnings announcement, which we released yesterday afternoon. These documents can be found on our website at fult.com by clicking on investor relations and then on news. The slides can also be found on the presentations page under the investor relations section of our website. On this call, representatives of Fulton may make forward-looking statements with respect to Fulton's financial condition, results of operations, and business. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, and actual results could differ materially. Please refer to the Safe Harbor Statement on forward-looking statements in our earnings release and on slide two of today's presentation for additional information regarding these risks, uncertainties, and other factors. Fulton undertakes no obligation other than as required by law to update or revise any forward-looking statements. In discussing Fulton's performance, representatives of Fulton may refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the supplemental financial information included with Fulton's earnings announcement released yesterday and slides 10 through 13 of today's presentation for a reconciliation of those non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measures. Now I'd like to turn the call over to your host, Curt Myers.

Well, thanks Matt and good morning everyone. For today's call, I'll be providing some high level thoughts on the year as well as some comments on our quarterly business performance. Then Mark will share the details of our financial results and step through our outlook for 2023. After our prepared remarks, we'll be happy to take any questions you may have. Our results for the fourth quarter and year were very good and we were pleased with our overall performance, operating earnings for both the quarter and the year represent all-time highs for us. Some key highlights for 2022 were that net interest income grew significantly, reaching an all-time high of $782 million. Our loan portfolio had strong growth across most categories. We grew nicely in both commercial and consumer businesses. In the fourth quarter, we eclipsed the $20 billion mark in total loans. Wealth management had another record year despite the market volatility. and our commercial fee business delivered double-digit revenue growth year over year. In addition, we completed the Prudential Bank Corp acquisition in the third quarter and successfully handled the conversion and full integration in the fourth quarter. Our board of directors declared a special dividend of $0.06 to supplement our quarterly common dividend, returning $0.65 per share in dividends for the year. These positives were offset by some of the operating headwinds that materialized throughout the year. Mortgage banking revenues continue to be pressured by the effects of a rising interest rate environment. And expenses continue to migrate higher due to inflationary pressure and elevated incentive compensation accruals. Overall, we were pleased with the performance and the results that our team generated this year. We look forward to continuing to execute on our corporate strategy to grow the company by delivering effectively for customers and operating with excellence. So then we can serve all of our stakeholders. So now let me turn to our quarterly performance. Overall total loan growth was strong for the quarter at 584 million or 12% annualized. We experienced solid originations and uptick in line utilization and saw continued declines in paydowns and prepayments. Turning to deposits, we saw a decline in overall balances during the quarter due to average balances per household declining. We did see continued growth in our overall customer count and we remain committed to growing our customer base. As always, we are focused on deposit growth over the long term. Turning to our fee income, we continue to benefit from the diversity of our businesses as the macroeconomic environment challenges certain business lines, and we continue to grow other business lines. Mark will share more details in a moment. Moving to credit, the provision for credit losses of $14.5 million was an increase from $11 million last quarter when excluding the CECL day one charge related to the acquisition of Prudential Bancorp. Factors contributing to the $3.5 million increase were predominantly loan growth and the changes in the macroeconomic outlook, as we saw credit metrics remain relatively stable. Length quarter, we saw improvements in NPLs, NPAs, and criticized and classified assets. Finally, we continue to actively manage our financial center network. We plan to open four new locations in 2023 and have recently announced the consolidation of five existing financial centers. We continually evaluate how and where our customers choose to connect with us. So now let me turn the call over to Mark to discuss our financial performance in 2023 outlook in a little more detail.