Northwest Bancshares, Inc.

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 Inc. Q1-2026 Orange Call. All lines have been pressed unmute 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, Northwest Seminary Director of Corporate Development Strategy and Investor Relations. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you, operator. Welcome to Northwest Bank Shares' first quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me today are Lou Torchio, president and CEO of Northwest Bank Shares, Doug Shosser, our chief financial officer, and TK Creel, our chief credit officer. During this call, we will refer to information included in the supplemental first quarter 2026 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. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our first quarter 2026 results. I'll let Doug take you through the specifics of our first quarter performance. But first, I want to reflect on the growing momentum and continuing transformation at Northwest. and how our achievements in the first quarter have positioned us for continued growth in 2026. On slide four, you can see some of the financial highlights of the first quarter of 2026. We delivered $51 million in net income for the first quarter, a record in the company's history, resulting in more than 16% year-over-year net income growth. Momentum in our CNI business continued with 191 million of average CNI loan growth in the first quarter, representing a 28% year-over-year growth. We have continued to grow our nationwide business verticals in a disciplined manner. The first of these was launched in 2023, and collectively they now represent approximately 23% of our commercial lending portfolio. These verticals are led by experience, and highly networked industry leaders, giving us a strong point of distinction in these specialty finance areas. We continue to focus on growing our SBA lending business both locally and nationally in 2026, building on our momentum from earning a spot among the top 50 originators in the U.S. by volume in 2025. We recorded a net interest margin of 370 basis points in the first quarter of 2026 benefiting from our deposit franchise, which is one of Northwest core strength. We achieved our third consecutive quarter of lower deposit costs, one of the best in class among our peers. Our ongoing expense management discipline allowed us to achieve another quarter of improved performance with our efficiency ratio at 59.4% and our adjusted efficiency ratio of 57.8% for the quarter. And we have now fully recognized all the expense benefits from our recent acquisition. Our record net income in the first quarter of 2026 drove strong returns with an ROAA of 1.22% and ROTCE of 14.6%. In addition, with all the recent headlines surrounding credit, I wanted to highlight that we saw our nonperforming assets and overall delinquencies decline this quarter. And we recorded a lower annualized net charge off ratio of 16 basis points for the quarter, which is below the low end of our full year guidance. We achieved these results while continuing to invest in talent, technology and new financial centers to support our future growth. I'm pleased with our results and I'm proud of the team for driving a strong core performance across the bank. As we've highlighted on previous calls, we continue to execute on our plans to transform the consumer bank. With the opening of our first new financial center since 2018 and the Indianapolis MSA last year, we debuted our new financial center design focused on customer hospitality. And we're continuing to build out our presence in our Columbus headquarters market with five new financial centers now under development and due to open later this year in key locations. We expect to open the first of these by the time we have our next earnings call in July. And in the first quarter of 2026, we delivered on our commitment to our shareholders, returning more than half of our profits through a quarterly dividend of 20 cents per share. This is the 126th consecutive quarter in which the company has paid the cash dividend. Looking ahead for the rest of 2026, we continue to focus on delivering organic growth and strong financial performance, expanding our financial center network, serving our core customers and communities, and delivering growth across our consumer and commercial lines of business. With that, I'll turn it over to Doug to review our first quarter results in more detail. Doug?