Hope Bancorp, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the HOPE Bancorp 2025 first quarter earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal conference specialists 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 on your touchtone phone. And to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Angie Yang Please go ahead.

Thank you, Chuck. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the HOFANC Corp 2025 First Quarter Investor Conference Call. As usual, we will be using a slide presentation to accompany our discussion this morning, which is available in the presentations page of our investor relations website. Beginning on slide two, let me start with a brief statement regarding forward-looking remarks. The call today contains forward-looking projections regarding the future financial performance of the company and future events. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. Actual outcomes and results may differ materially. Hope Bancorp assumes no obligation to revise any forward-looking projections that may be made on today's call. In addition, some of the information referenced on this call today are non-GAAP financial measures. For a detailed description of the risk factors and a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to the company's filings with the SEC, as well as the safe harbor statements in our press release issued this morning. We also note that our press release and remarks in our call today present preliminary, unaudited financial information for Territorial Bancorp, Inc., which may be subject to change. Purchase accounting adjustments are preliminary and we estimate deposits and loans, net of fair value adjustments. Now, we have allotted one hour for this call. Presenting from the management side today will be Kevin Kim, Hope Bank Corp's Chairman, President, and CEO, and Juliana Beliska, our Chief Financial Officer. Peter Koh, our Chief Operating Officer, is also here with us as usual and will be available for the Q&A session. With that, let me turn the call over to Kevin Kim. Kevin?

Thank you, Angie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Let us begin on slide three with a brief overview of the quarter. For the first quarter of 2025, we earned net income of $21.1 million, or 17 cents per diluted common share. Excluding notable items, net income for the first quarter of 2025 was $22.9 million, or 19 cents per diluted common share. This compares with 20 cents per diluted common share for the fourth quarter of 2024. For the first quarter, net interest income after provision expense was $96 million, up 4% quarter over quarter, from $92 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. This reflected a modest decrease in net interest income, which was more than offset by a lower provision for credit losses, driven by a sequential improvement in net-charge jobs. First quarter non-interest expense, excluding notable items of $81.3 million, increased quarter-by-quarter due to typical first-quarter increases in salary and employee benefits expense. In the first quarter, we received regulatory approvals for our merger of Territorial Bank Works, which we completed on April 2, 2025. As of the merger close, Territorial contributed approximately $1.7 billion of stable low-cost deposits at a weighted average cost of 1.96% and approximately $1 billion after accounting discounts of residential mortgage loans with pristine asset quality. On slide four, you can see the details of our strong capital ratios, all of which expanded quarter over quarter and year over year. Our healthy capital levels and ample liquidity provide us a healthy cushion with which to navigate emerging macroeconomic volatility, support prudent balance sheet growth, and continue to invest in our company. As part of the territorial transaction, Hope issued 7 million shares or $73 million of equity. Our board of directors declared a quarterly common stock dividend of 14 cents per share payable on May 16th to stockholders of record as of May 2nd, 2025. Continuing to slide five, we remain focused on Strengthening our deposit makes a key priority as we position our balance sheet for prudent growth. At March 31, 2025, our total deposits were $14.5 billion, an increase of 1% from the end of the prior quarter. Overall growth in customer deposits more than offset planned reductions in broker deposits, which decreased to less than 7% of our total deposits as of March 31, 2025. Moving on to slide six. At March 31, 2025, our loans receivable of $13.3 billion were down 2% from year end of 2024. Quarter over quarter, residential mortgage loans increased 7%, offset by a 5% decrease in commercial and industrial loans, and a 2 percent decrease in commercial real estate loans. Loan production in the first quarter increased 11 percent year over year. We continue to see elevated paydowns and payoffs in the first quarter. Market pricing competition and spread compression continue to be aggressive, and commercial customers are refinancing loans before maturity. We also passed on some renewals due to pricing or potential credit concerns, and this impacted our net loan growth for the quarter. That being said, we remain positive about supporting prudent balance sheet growth and our loan pipelines are strengthening. We continue to invest in people to grow our teams, which is positively impacting production. Furthermore, although we are cautious about the backdrop of macroeconomic volatility, and increasing probabilities of a recession, we note positive outlook from our Korean subsidiary sector customers. We have been seeing an acceleration of direct investments in the United States by Korean companies. In part, current geopolitical tensions are accelerating the timing of previously planned investments in manufacturing. We believe this should translate into improved loan demand and line utilization as well as greater opportunities to expand our deposit relationships and ancillary fee-based services. As the largest Korean American bank in the United States, Hope is best positioned to meet the growing lending, deposit, and banking service needs of this customer segment. On slides seven and eight, we provide more details on our commercial real estate loans, which are well diversified by property type, and granular in size. The loan-to values remain low with a weighted average of approximately 46% at March 31, 2025, and the profile of our commercial real estate portfolio has not changed meaningfully. Asset quality remains stable. With that, I will ask Juliana to provide additional details on our financial performance for the first quarter. Juliana?