Premier Financial Corp.

Good day and welcome to the Premier Financial Corporation Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. And to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Paul Nungester, CFO. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Chuck. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. This call is also being webcast, and the audio replay will be available at the Premier Financial Corp website at premierfincorp.com. Following our prepared comments on the company's strategy and performance, we will be available to take your questions. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that during the conference call today, including during the question and answer period, you may hear forward-looking statements related to future financial results and business operations for Premier Financial Corp. Actual results may differ materially from current management forecasts and projections as a result of factors over which the company has no control. Information on these risk factors and additional information on forward-looking statements are included in the news release, and in the company's reports on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And now I'll turn the call over to Gary for his comments.

Thank you, Paul, and good morning to all. We appreciate you joining us today. I'll start off by stating that macroeconomic indicators across our market continue to be positive. Order boards are in good shape for our clients, and supply chain issues are not proving to be overwhelming or at least unsolvable for the majority of the folks we do business with. We maintain a very positive outlook only tempered by the typical uncertainties coming out of Washington, lingering COVID impacts, and a tough employment environment. The spike in current costs are certainly real, but not a detriment to business at this point. We at Premier are pleased with our third quarter performance, and we had many strengths that were reflected in the numbers for the quarter. We reported 28.4 in net income, 76 cents per share, which for us, from our perspective, gave us a strong 1.49% return on assets and a 16.7% return on tangible capital. And we'll be fine with each of those numbers. Strong pre-tax, pre-provision return at 1.91% return on assets as well. We had solid core loan growth north of 5%. Our core margin was up seven basis points. And we returned to our more typical residential mortgage contribution for the quarter, as we telegraphed on our last quarter's earnings call. Commercial activity is very robust. New business books for the quarter and the commercial loan pipeline each remain very strong. The existing commercial line drawdown rate saw slight improvement versus the second quarter, but it remains well off normal levels. Expenses for the quarter were a bit higher than expectation, driven by health care benefit costs. We are self-insured, so we feel the impact of cyclicality and any high-impact incidences as incurred, and it makes for more uneven figures from quarter to quarter. No trend should be inferred from Q3's numbers. The loan portfolio as a whole continues to perform well. Low delinquencies continued to experience low MPLs in general. However, during the quarter, we did move a single relationship to non-accrual status. returning our non-performing stats back to a range that we experienced at the end of 2020. The relationship had moved to classified status earlier in this year. Our portfolio quality indicators remain strong, and we're in familiar and very manageable territory. This particular relationship is current, and it did not participate in COVID deferral programs that were available over the last 18 months. They face challenges due to an interruption of business on significant government contracts that remain affected by COVID-related policy decisions. Matt Garrity will touch on this more in his comments. At this point, I'll turn it back over to Paul to cover a few more performance details.