PacWest Bancorp

Good day and welcome to the PacWest Bancorp third quarter earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Bill Black. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to PacWest third quarter 2022 earnings conference call.

With me today are Matt Wagner, CEO, Paul Taylor, our president, Bart Olson, CFO, and Mark Young, our COO and the leader of our venture banking business. Before I hand the call over to Matt, please note that we may make forward-looking statements during today's call that are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. For a more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements, see our company's SEC filings, including the 8-K filed yesterday afternoon, which is also available on the company's website. Now I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Matt Wagner. Thank you, Bill. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. I want to start off by making a few comments about the overall business and operating environment. Overall business activity remains strong, but we are proceeding cautiously as we are thinking about and planning for weaker economic environments ahead. We continue to focus our time and attention on our customers, making sure we are there to serve them throughout the cycle. We slowed some of our lending businesses, given the economic environment and our desire to grow capital more rapidly while optimizing our balance sheet. Given the current economic backdrop, we believe this is a prudent thing to do. Credit remains strong and currently we do not see any negative credit trends and we continue to monitor the low portfolio closely as part of our conservative approach to credit. Finally, but most importantly, building capital as we did in the third quarter remains our primary focus and this will continue to be a key component of decisions we make each day. With that, let me turn it over to Bill to cover the key highlights of the quarter. Thanks, Matt. The third quarter was marked by a couple key events. First and foremost, all of our regulatory capital ratios increased during the quarter, including CET1, which increased from 8.24% to 8.55%, as we marched towards our CET1 target of 10% by the end of 2023. Second, our total deposits grew $228 million, and importantly, after two quarters of decreases, Our venture banking deposits not only stabilized, but grew $129 million to $12.2 billion. Third, credit quality remains strong, with non-performing assets only at 34 basis points and net charge-offs for the quarter of three basis points. We continue to monitor the loan portfolio closely and have not seen any significant signs of credit deterioration at this point. Fourth, our net loan growth remains strong and broad-based across the businesses, but lower than the prior two quarters as planned and as previously communicated. Lastly, our net interest income on a tax-equivalent basis was $338.6 million, up 3.3% from last quarter. I'd like to now hand things over to Bart, our CFO, for some specific commentary on the financial results before we go into Q&A.