Fulton Financial Corporation

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Fulton Financial third quarter 2025 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 the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today. Matt Joswak, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thanks for joining us for Fulton Financial's conference call and webcast to discuss our earnings for the third quarter ending September 30th, 2025. Your host for today's conference call is Kurt Myers, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Joining Kurt is Rick Kramer, Chief Financial Officer. Our comments today will refer to the financial information and 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 investor relations on 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 or subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors and actual results could differ materially. Please refer to the safe harbor statement and 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 in slides 30 through 37 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 a few high-level comments as well as some operating highlights for the quarter. Then Rick will review our financial results in more detail and discuss updates to our 2025 operating guidance. After our prepared remarks, we'll be happy to take any questions you may have. We were pleased with our strong third quarter operating results. Our community banking strategy and regional scale continue to deliver customer value and strong results for our shareholders. Operating earnings of $101.3 million, or $0.55 per share, demonstrate the impact of positive operating leverage, strong profitability, and a diversified balance sheet. Total revenue increased link quarter as we grew both net interest income and fee income while we continued to show strong expense discipline. All of these positive factors combined to generate quarterly trends that drove our efficiency ratio down to 56.5%. delivered an operating ROA of 1.29% and resulted in an operating ROTCE of 15.79%. These are all strong results for the quarter. Touching on capital, we repurchased 1.65 million shares during the quarter at a weighted average cost of $18.67 per share. We routinely evaluate all of our capital deployment options and found opportunity to repurchase shares at attractive levels. We plan to continue to use our share repurchase authorization. Even with this quarter's repurchase activity, we grew our tangible book value per share 18% on a linked quarter annualized basis. Our strong performance, disciplined approach to balance sheet management, and our diversified business model provides us financial flexibility and positions the company for continued success. Now let me provide a few operating highlights on the quarter. Deposit growth outpaced loan growth at $194 million for the quarter. Deposit growth was primarily driven by targeted sales campaigns and seasonal net inflows of municipal deposits. During the quarter, total demand and savings balances grew $387 million, offset by declines in brokered and time deposits. We were able to drive this growth while maintaining a disciplined and targeted pricing strategy. Turning to loans, originations were up length order as well as compared to the prior period. Total loan balances grew 29 million for the quarter as increased originations were offset by the impact of strategic actions we have been executing on throughout the year. Year to date, these actions represented more than a $600 million headwind to our loan balance growth. Moving forward, we expect these actions to moderate and loan growth to return to our long-term growth trends. Turning to the income statement, revenue growth was driven by a strong net interest margin and a solid linked quarter increase in our non-interest income. As a result, total quarterly revenue hit an all-time high. Our non-interest income as a percentage of revenue ended the quarter at 21%, with our fee-generating businesses growing nicely, and we are positioned well for continued growth. Lastly, let me touch on credit. While we remain cautious on credit given general economic and geopolitical uncertainty, we continue to see steady performance in our portfolio. During the quarter, we saw improvement in non-performing loans and charge-offs. Additionally, we saw improved risk rating migration and a continued reduction in classified and criticized loans. The provision for loan losses remained favorable to expectations, and the allowance ratio was stable compared to the prior quarter. Overall, we are encouraged by the trends we're seeing, but always remain focused on identifying and managing any potential areas of weakness that may arise. Now let me turn the call over to Rick to discuss the details of our financial results and provide comments on our 2025 operating guidance in more detail.