OceanFirst Financial Corp.

All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call. With an opportunity for questions and answers at the end, please press star followed by one if you wish to join the queue. And I would now like to pass the conference over to your host, Alfred Goon, Investor Relations at Ocean First Financial. Thank you. You may proceed, Alfred.

Thank you very much. Good morning and welcome to the Ocean First fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. I am Alfred Goon, SVP of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Before we kick off the call, we'd like to remind everyone that the 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 8K, 10Q, and 10K, 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 Moore, Chairman and CEO.

Christopher Moore Thank you, Alfred. Good morning, and thank you to all who have been able to join our fourth quarter 2024 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'll 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 fourth quarter reflected net income of 36 cents per share on a fully diluted gap basis and 38 cents per share on a core basis. We were pleased to see expansion of both net interest income and margin this quarter on both a gap and core basis and saw a return to positive growth in our loan portfolio. Deposit growth was also solid as we were able to nearly eliminate the last of our brokered deposits that we had added over the past two years. Operating expenses increased as we expected, reflecting growth from the acquisitions of Garden State Home Loans and Spring Garden Capital during the last few months of the year. We also saw modest increases in the continued hiring of revenue-producing talent, which Joe will discuss in a moment. Asset quality remained very strong. The reserve billed for the quarter was related to the day one CECL provision resulting from the spring garden acquisition and macroeconomic factors. Loans classified as special mention and substandard decreased by 16 percent and represent just 1.56 percent of total loans, well below our historical average and considerably lower than the peer average. We saw another quarter of net recoveries resulting in a full year net charge off rate of less than two basis points. Capital levels remain robust with an estimated common equity tier one capital ratio of 11.2 percent and tangible book value per share of $18.98. This week, our board approved a quarterly cash dividend of 20 cents per common share. This is the company's 112th consecutive quarterly cash dividend and represents 56 percent gap earnings. At this point, I'll turn the call over to Joe to provide more details regarding our performance during the fourth quarter and our organic efforts heading into 2025. Thanks, Chris.