S&T Bancorp, Inc.

Welcome to the S&T Bancorp first quarter 2023 conference call. After the management's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Chief Financial Officer Mark Kochvar. Please go ahead, sir.

All right, thank you. Good afternoon, 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 events button on the 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 first quarter 2023 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 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 like to now turn the call over to Chris.

Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon, everybody. I will begin my remarks on page three. Thank you all for being on the call with us today. I certainly appreciate the analysts being here with us, and we look forward to your questions. I will mention on the front end that our remarks today may be a little longer than in previous quarters. In light of all that has occurred in our industry since early to mid-March, we wanted to take additional opportunity to provide some more information to you in our presentation around our deposit franchise. as well as our commercial real estate exposure. Our goal is to provide increased clarity and transparency around our financial performance. You know, it goes without saying that the quarter was a very active one for us here at S&T, not only from all that transpired since March the 10th, but for us, the work that we undertook as a leadership team at the end of February through early March with our employees. As you may recall, we spent the last 12 to 18 months focusing on our vision for the future in the next chapter of S&T's performance, defining our people-forward purpose, clarifying the customer and employee values that guide how we run the company, and emphasizing the financial performance drivers that will deliver long-term, sustainable financial results for our shareholders. We define this work as our shared future, shared between our Employees are customers, communities, and shareholders. Within that shared future, we spent a lot of time focused on our financial drivers, and in our discussions with our team, they center around four things. One, the health of our deposit franchise, asset quality, enhancing our already strong core profitability, and underpinned in all that we do, employee talent, and engagement. The strategic focus and tactical execution center around these drivers, underpinned by our values and built by over 1,200 employees. To ensure effective communication and engagement around our people, forward purpose, values, and these drivers of performance, we actually spent 12 days at the end of February through March the 9th face-to-face with all 1,200 of our employees in 12 different sessions. It couldn't have been timelier because no sooner did we finish this work, but the events of March the 10th began. It provided a rallying cry for our team and our people forward focus on customers, all centered around ensuring confidence, stability, safety, and soundness in the eyes of our employees as well as our customers. We believe as leaders our responsibility is not only to ensure our employees know what to do, but as probably more critically, that we help our employees understand the why. The last four weeks since March the 10th have provided the perfect why behind our focus around our deposit franchise and the other drivers of our performance. Speaking of performance, turning to page Three, you can see a summary here that Mark and Dave will dive into in more detail. But for the quarter, we had earnings of $1.02. That's the second quarter in a row with earnings over $1, net income of just under $40 million. Return metrics is defined here as solid. We could also throw the word strong in there with an ROTC of 1961 and a PPNR of 2.23%. Expenses remained well controlled with an efficiency ratio of right at around 50%. NIM down one basis point to 432, and the benefit of a net recovery leading to a recovery of 29 basis points, where we'll spend more time on later. Turning to page four, we did show loan growth of just under 4% for the quarter, driven primarily in our consumer book. with over $65 million of consumer loan growth. I will say that we feel very good about the level of our pipelines within our commercial business. They're the highest we've seen in a number of months and are representative of the growth and the commitment that we've made to that segment, including the attraction of talent into the company. On the deposit side, deposits ended at just right at $7.2 billion. There was a decrease. of $67 million in the quarter, but the declines occurred early in the quarter in January and then actually showed increases as the quarter went on. We think that that was very important in light of all the external environments and the environment, and the details are actually on page five here. This is a newer slide that we provided to you all to give you an idea of what happened within the quarter. To the deposit side of our balance sheet, again, we do want to emphasize this well-diversified deposit base of almost 230,000 customers, 60-40 mix between personal deposits and business, very granular in nature. You see the uninsured numbers there. Within that uninsured number is about 300, a little over $300 million of collateralized municipal deposits. The trends, as you can see, the green line represents the events that occurred in early March and the growth that we saw through the month. I do want to, you know, we have a lot of employees on this call and others, and I do want to recognize the great work that was done by our teams beginning really on that Monday early where we organized ourselves around very proactive outreach with customers, through social media, face-to-face interaction, helping them understand what was happening in the marketplace, the safety and soundness of our institution, and the options that they had available to them. We continue that focus every day, and we feel we're proud of the growth we've seen since March the 10th. I'm going to stop there. I'll turn it over to Mark to provide a lot more details.