Premier Financial Corp.

Good morning, and welcome to the Premier Financial Corp third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants will be in listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad at any time. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Paul Nungister with Premier Financial Corp. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's third quarter 2022 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 I'll turn the call over to Gary for his opening comments.

Thank you, Paul, and good morning. I appreciate your joining us today. I am very pleased to report Premier's third quarter earnings of $28.2 million, or 79 cents per share. That's a good outcome from our perspective over a difficult operating environment. Pre-tax provision income was up 13% over the prior quarter, and total revenue growth for the quarter was 8.9%, which enabled us to post a very strong positive operating leverage figure and that's a key metric for our organization. The team posted another quarter of strong loan and deposit growth, as has been the case over the course of the year. We saw, again, good growth in all three categories, commercial, consumer, and residential. We are extremely pleased with our quarterly commercial growth of 4%, as it follows an extremely strong second quarter, very encouraged, and it really reflects the organization's ability to expand its client base. As Matt will share with us, our mix of C&I business continues to climb. Our customer deposit growth for the quarter was 9% annualized, and I assure you we're working hard to keep pace with the loan growth. Business deposits continue to grow, with our commercial treasury and branch teams doing an excellent job on the deposit acquisition front. September non-interest-bearing deposits for the year were up 10% over September of the prior year. Moving on to the consumer side, Consumer spending is feeding our non-interest income for the quarter. Deposit and interchange fees were up 7.8% over the same period last year, and it's helping to offset the continued difficulty that we are experiencing in the residential mortgage market, where gain on sale is under pressure with the secondary market sales due to a lag in volume and pricing challenges. Our insurance business is benefiting from the inflationary environment from a renewal revenue perspective. And our wealth team is having more value-added conversations with its clients than ever before. They're really leading through, again, a turbulent market environment. Expenses are right on expectation, and that's while we are also absorbing a mid-year compensation adjustment that we made, again, to mitigate to some degree some of the inflationary pressures we see. In summary, it was an excellent asset growth period. good, strong net interest income growth with deposit gathering and beta management being the issues of the day. And Paul and Matt will share some more details. Paul?