Northwest Bancshares, Inc.

Hello and thank you for standing by. My name is Bella and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Northwest Bank Shares in Q3 2025 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Michael Perry, Managing Director, Corporate Development and Strategy and Investor Relations. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you, operator. Welcome to Northwest Bank Shares Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. Joining me today are Lou Torchio, 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 third 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.

Thank you, Michael, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our third quarter results. It was a busy and productive third quarter, and I'm pleased with our results and the team's performance. At the end of July, we closed the Pennswood merger, the largest transaction in our company's history, and completed customer and data conversion and financial center rebranding. This is Northwest's first quarter as a combined entity with about two-thirds of a full quarter of combined company results. Deal synergies are as expected, and the various financial impacts of the merger including cost savings, are all on target or better than expected. I would like to thank and congratulate our team on the successful execution and integration of this merger. In early August, in celebration of that achievement and joining the ranks of the nation's 100 largest bank holding companies, we rang the NASDAQ opening bell in New York City. During the third quarter, we continued to make strategic additions to our leadership team. We welcome the new chief legal officer treasurer and the head of wealth management, a new role to lead our expanding wealth management team. We now have more than 150 financial centers across Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and Indiana. And yesterday we had an official groundbreaking ceremony for our first de novo financial center in the Columbus market. And we're joined by the mayor of new Albany and the chair of its chamber of commerce. This is the first of three new financial centers we'll be opening in the Columbus market next summer. We're already building out our Columbus de novo teams to support local deposit gathering, customer acquisition, and developing business relationships for a fast ramp up when we open our doors. Our newest de novo financial center in Fishers, Indiana, which we opened in June, is performing well and on target. And as we look out over the next 12 to 18 months, we expect to open additional new financial centers in key locations in the high-growth Columbus and Indianapolis markets. I'll now walk through some of the highlights of the third quarter, directing everyone to slide four. I'm pleased with the performance of our first quarter as a combined company, with the team staying focused on executing our strategy and delivering on our commitment to sustainable, responsible, and profitable growth. The merger enhanced our balance sheet scale. At quarter's end, we had $16.4 billion in total assets, $13.7 billion in deposits, and $12.9 billion in loans. We delivered more than 25% year-over-year average commercial CNI growth with strong progress on our continuing strategic rebalancing of the portfolio. We're in the third year of our commercial banking transformation, and we're seeing the benefits of that focus and investment with progress in our specialty verticals, commercial deposits, and continued growth in SBA lending. Northwest was recently named as a top 50 SBA lender nationally by volume. We delivered 168 million in revenue for the third quarter, a record in the company's history, resulting in more than 20% year-over-year revenue growth. Net interest margin improved nine basis points quarter-over-quarter to 3.65%, benefiting from higher average loan yields and purchase accounting accretion. Our EPS on a gap basis was up $0.08 or 15% for the nine months ended September 30, 2025, and our adjusted EPS increased $0.16 or 21% for the same period. Turning to credit, which we know is currently a topic of significant interest across the industry. For the record, we have no direct exposure or known indirect exposure to any of the companies with high profile credit issues that have recently been referenced in the media coverage on regional banking. The headline is that we continue to manage risk tightly and our credit costs continue to be in line with our expectations. We're happy with our progress in reducing the level of our criticized and classified loans that we highlighted last quarter. Prior to accounting for acquired loans, which resulted in an increase of 9 million to classified loans of the combined company, legacy Northwest classified loans decreased by 74 million dollars this quarter. And we've seen further improvement post quarter end. As we continue to manage our loan book in a focused and methodical manner. And finally, As we have for the previous 123 quarters, the Board of Directors has declared a quarterly dividend of 20 cents per share to shareholders of record as of November 6, 2025. Based on the market value of the company's common stock as of September 30, 2025, this represents an annualized dividend yield of approximately 6.5%. This quarter's results 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 final quarter of 2025, 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 tight cost controls and risk management discipline. Now, I'll hand it over to Doug Shosser, our Chief Financial Officer. Doug?