OceanFirst Financial Corp.

on your telephone keypad. I will now pass you over to your host, Alfred Goon, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Alfred, please go ahead.

Thank you, Glenn. Good morning and welcome to the Ocean First second quarter 2023 earnings call. I'm Alfred Goon, SVP of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Before we kick off our call, we'd like to remind everyone that our quarterly earnings release and related earnings supplement can be found on the company website, oceanfirst.com. Our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements and may refer to non-GAAP financial measures. All participants should refer to our SEC filings, including those found on Forms 8-K, 10-Q, 10-K, for a complete discussion of forward-looking statements and any factors that could cause actual results to differ from those statements. Thank you. And now I will turn the call over to Christopher Marr, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

Christopher Marr Thank you, Alfred. Good morning and thank you to all who have been able to join in on our second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. This morning I'm joined by our President, Joe LaBelle, and our Chief Financial Officer, Pat Barrett. We appreciate your interest in our performance and this opportunity to discuss our results with you. This morning we will provide brief remarks about the financial and operating performance for the quarter and some color regarding the outlook for our business. We may refer to the slides filed in connection with the earnings release throughout the call. After our discussion, we look forward to taking your questions. Our financial results for the second quarter included GAAP diluted earnings per share of 45 cents. Our earnings reflect net interest income of $92.1 million, which, while down from the prior linked quarter, has increased $1.3 million, or 1.4%, as compared to the prior year. Our second quarter results were impacted by industry pressures on deposit costs, increasing our deposit betas to 29%, which we believe will outperform our peer group over the cycle. Advancing a more competitive pricing strategy has protected our deposit base, which increased to $10.2 billion. Our balance sheet continues to remain solid, with non-performing loans and criticized classified assets representing just 17 basis points and 80 basis points of total assets, respectively. We continue to build capital ending the period with a tangible book value per share of $17.72 and a common equity tier one ratio of 10.2%. Turning to capital management, the board approved a quarterly cash dividend of 20 cents per common share. This is the company's 106th consecutive quarterly cash dividend and represents a 44% of core earnings. The company did not repurchase any shares in the second quarter. At this point, I'll turn the call over to Joe to provide some more details regarding our progress during the quarter.