S&T Bancorp, Inc.

Welcome to the S&T Bancorp fourth quarter conference call. After management's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Now I would like to turn the call over to Chief Financial Officer Mark Kochvar. Please go ahead.

Well, thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call. You can follow along with the slide portion of the presentation by clicking on the page advance button at the bottom of your screen. Before beginning the presentation, I want to take time to refer you to our statement about forward-looking statements and risk factors, which is on page two. This statement provides the cautionary language required by the Securities and Exchange Commission for forward-looking statements that may be included in this presentation. A copy of the fourth quarter 2022 earnings release, as well as this earnings supplement slide deck, can be obtained by clicking on the materials button in the lower right section of your screen. This should open up a panel on the right where you can download these items. You can also obtain a copy of these materials by visiting our investor relations website at stbankcorp.com. With me today are Chris McCommish, S&T's CEO, and Dave Antolik, S&T's president. I'd now like to turn the call over to Chris.

Good afternoon, everybody, and Mark, thanks for the introduction. Welcome, everyone, to the call. I certainly appreciate the analysts being here with us this afternoon, and we absolutely look forward to your questions. I also want to take a moment to thank our employees, shareholders, and others listening in on the call. Your commitment and engagement is what drives these financial results, and these results are yours, and you should be very proud. You know, 2022 was an historic year for S&T, and in many ways was an inflection point for the company, both strategically and historically. We started the year by celebrating our 120th anniversary, which provided a great opportunity to not only celebrate our past, but to think strategically about our future. During the year, we made significant enhancements and additions to our leadership team, all focused on building for the future while ensuring we delivered performance today. Our leadership team took this opportunity to also engage with all of our teammates to define our purpose for the next 120 years, all around building a future that's people-focused, a people-forward future. This purpose supported our values and provided the roadmap and blueprint for our growth and our impact and differentiation as we move forward in the market. While building for tomorrow, we certainly stayed focused on today as evidenced not only by the numbers we'll talk about in a few minutes, but also by the achievement we had in the marketplace around things critically important to us around employee engagement and customer experience. We have multiple instances of market-leading recognition from third parties, and we are quite proud of these results also. We define them as our trophies, and there's many of them. And we look forward to continuing success there as it's so foundational for everything that we're trying to do financially. In addition, we delivered a 13% shareholder return on our stock, which significantly outpaced our peer median. This return was aided over the past year by three separate dividend increases, equaling more than 10% growth in our dividend to the current $0.32 level that we announced yesterday. Now let me turn to page three and talk a little bit about the quarter as well as the year. And then I'm going to turn it over to Dave to talk about the balance sheet. But as you can see on page three, we had record earnings of $1.03. That's an 8% increase link quarter. It was driven by a 29 basis point increase in our NIM, achieving 4.33%, obviously aided by the higher interest rates as well as the asset-sensitive nature of our balance sheet. The return metrics were extremely strong with a 20.36 ROTE and a PPNR of 236. numbers that we feel very good about. What's not on here, we will talk about later, is also an efficiency ratio of 49% for the quarter. This efficiency ratio is important to us. While you'll see some expense growth, that expense growth is all around investing for the future, and having a starting point at an efficiency ratio like that gives us the flexibility needed to make the investments and move our company forward. Moving to page four, again, a record year, 346 earnings per share and $136 million of net income, approximately $25 million more than a year ago at this time. Again, very solid return metrics aided, obviously, and driven by NIM expansion, while at the same time continuing to see improved credit costs. We'll talk about those in a few minutes. Again, it's been a heck of a year from a performance standpoint. We feel very good about the opportunities as we head into 2023, not only on the strength of our financial performance, but as I said, the engagement level of our team, the clarity of how we're moving forward together and the opportunities in the marketplace. With that, I'll turn it over today.