Northwest Bancshares, Inc.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us and welcome to Northwest Bank Share's fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. This session is being recorded and a playback will be available on our investor relations website. All participants are currently in listen-only mode. Towards the end of today's call, we will open the floor for a question and answer session. Now, I would like to introduce Michael Perry, who recently joined Northwest as Managing Director of Corporate Strategy and Development and Investor Relations.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you, Operator. Welcome to Northwest Bank Shares' fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. It's great to be here. Joining me today are Lou Torshio, President and CEO of Northwest Bank Shares, Doug Schosser, our Chief Financial Officer, Sean Morrow, our treasurer, and TK Creel, our chief credit officer. During this call, we will refer to information included in the supplemental earnings release presentation, which is available on our investor relations website. If you'd like to read our forward-looking and other related disclosures, you can find them on slide two. Thank you, and now I'll hand it over to Lou.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us to discuss our quarterly results. I'm pleased to report that we delivered solid returns in the fourth quarter and we're happy with our core financial performance, which Doug will cover momentarily. In particular, last quarter we saw significant improvement in our net interest margin as well as in our efficiency ratio. This continues to demonstrate that we are delivering on our commitment to sustainable growth. Thanks to our company-wide focus on deposit gathering while maintaining near best-in-class cost of funds, We continue to maintain a stable and strong funding base. In addition, we're able to reduce classified loans, helping us further eliminate risk from the balance sheet. All these results can be attributed to the talent, hard work, and thought put forth each day by the members of our Northwest team. I want to thank them for the continued dedication to our company's success, as well as their focus on our customers and communities. As we have reported at Northwest, we are steadfast in our commitment to responsible growth, both organically and through acquisition. With that, I'm happy to report that last quarter we announced that we entered into an agreement to acquire Penn's Woods Bank Corp. This transaction is expected to be completed sometime in the third quarter of this year. This merger is Northwest's largest to date and marks another milestone in our long-term strategy. It further connects our Pennsylvania franchise, and will make us one of the top 100 largest banks in the nation. Finally, as we have for the previous 120 quarters, on behalf of the Board of Directors, I'm pleased to declare a quarterly dividend of 20 cents per share to shareholders of record as of February 3rd, 2025. Now, it's my pleasure to introduce Doug Shosser, our Chief Financial Officer, who will take us through our financial results.