Northwest Bancshares, Inc.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us and welcome to Northwest Bank Share's second quarter 2025 earnings call. This session is being recorded and a playback will be available on Northwest Investor Relations website. All participants are currently in a listen-only mode. Following prepared remarks, we will open the call for a question and answer session. Now, I would like to introduce Michael Perry, Northwest Managing Director of Corporate Development and strategy, and investor relations.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you, operator. Welcome to Northwest Bank Shares' second quarter 2025 earnings call. Joining me today are Lou Torshio, President and CEO of Northwest Bank Shares, Doug Shosser, our Chief Financial Officer, and TK Krill, our Chief Credit Officer. During this call, we will refer to information included in the supplemental second quarter earnings 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 today to discuss our second quarter results. First, I'd like to start by welcoming Pennswood's customers, employees, and shareholders to Northwest, and Richard Grafmeyer, Penn's Woods former CEO to our board of directors. We completed the legal close of Penn's Woods merger after the conclusion of business on Friday, July 25th, and subsequently began the customer and data conversion and financial center rebranding over the weekend. As of 8 a.m. Monday, July 28th, the former Jersey Shore State Bank and Luzerne Bank financial centers began operating under the Northwest Bank name. Closing the largest transaction in our company's history while continuing to deliver strong operational financial performance is a result of the cumulative effort of many months of hard work by our team. I'm grateful to everyone for their dedication to making this merger and conversion successful. I'd also like to note that the key metrics relating to the merger, including expected cost reductions, are on target or better than our original expectations. Our focused execution exemplifies our commitment to disciplined but opportunistic growth. You can see that trajectory on the bottom of page five. Northwest now ranks as one of the nation's 100 largest bank holding companies with total assets of approximately $17 billion. We now have more than 150 financial centers across Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and Indiana, further enhancing our scale for driving sustainable forward momentum and revenue. Together, we are better positioned to deliver value to our shareholders and to offer an expanded range of products and services to customers and communities across our Pennsylvania footprint. Although we are always evaluating acquisition opportunities for additional scale and strategic benefits, with the Pennswoods acquisition and conversion just behind us, we are primarily focused on optimizing the operations and financial performance of the newly combined entity. We continue to enhance our capabilities, expand our footprint through de novo branch openings, and provide personalized services and expertise to our customers and the communities we serve. In June, we opened our first new full-service financial center in six years in Fishers, Indiana. And we have plans to open additional new financial centers in key locations in the high-growth Columbus and Indianapolis metro areas over the next 12 to 18 months. Turning to our second quarter, I'll address some of the quarter's highlights on slide six. I'm very pleased with our performance this quarter as we balance preparing for the acquisition and conversion of Pennswood while maintaining our focus on executing our strategy and delivering on our commitment to sustainable, responsible, and profitable growth. Overall, we built on a strong start to the year, including continued strength in our net interest margin and improved fee income, which together resulted in $150 million of revenue for the second quarter. We continue to exercise prudent expense control, and we reported gap net income of $33.7 million dollars and earnings per diluted share of 26 cents compared to four cents in the second quarter of 2024. if we adjust our second quarter 2025 results for the impact of one-time merger related expenses on a non-got basis we're reporting net income of 38.2 million and earnings per diluted share of 30 cents compared to net income of 35.5 million and 27 cents per diluted share in the second quarter of 2024, which has also been adjusted for the impact of the previously disclosed securities restructuring. This impressively would represent a 10% increase in earnings per share compared to the year-ago quarter. We made further solid progress on our balance sheet strategy while continuing momentum from our strategic shift towards commercial lending. We drove a 19% increase in average C&I loans compared to the same period last year. In addition, the team's focus on deposit gathering continues. We maintained our near best-in-class deposit franchise with a fourth consecutive quarter of reduced cost of funds, which provides us with a high-quality, stable funding base and improving net interest margin. Our credit costs continue to be in line with our expectations. We increased our ACL coverage while reporting modest credit losses with net charge-offs below our guidance range and no increase in total delinquency percentage this quarter. And finally, as we have for the previous 122 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 August 8, 2025. This quarter's strong results and the successful closing conversion of our largest acquisition to date are the product of an extremely talented team's hard work. I want to thank our entire Northwest team for their continued dedication to our company's success. Looking forward to the rest of the year, we continue to focus on managing the factors within our control, serving our core customers and communities, building on our strong financial foundations, and maintaining costs control, and risk management discipline. Now, it's my pleasure to introduce Doug Shosser, our Chief Financial Officer, who will take us through our financial results. Doug?