S&T Bancorp, Inc.

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

Thank you very much, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for participating in today's earnings call. Before beginning the presentation, I want to take time to refer you to our statement about forward-looking statements and risk factors. This statement provides the cautionary language required by the Securities and Exchange Commission, four forward-looking statements that may be included in this presentation. A copy of the fourth quarter and full year 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 will 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 program over to Chris.

Chris? Mark, thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. I certainly appreciate the analysts being here with us on the call, and we look forward to your questions. I also want to take a minute to thank our employees, shareholders, customers that are also listening to the call. To our leadership team and employees, your commitment and engagement is what drives these financial results and these These results are yours, and you should be very, very proud of them. 2023 was a historic year for S&T in many ways. As for the second year in a row, we produced record net income and earnings per share. For a company that is almost 122 years old, we certainly feel very good about these results. Before we get into the numbers, I also want to express how good I feel about the progress that we've made centered on S&T's people forward purpose and guided by the values that define who we aspire to be as a company. This purpose and these values connected to our core drivers of performance, the health of our deposit franchise, growth of our deposit franchise, solid credit quality, and best in class core profitability are where we are focused to deliver for our shareholders. not just in any one quarter or year, but over the long term. I'm going to begin my remarks on the numbers on page three. And in the fourth quarter of 2023 and in 23, we saw great progress on all of our drivers of performance. For the year, net income was just under $144 million with an EPS, again, a record EPS, of $3.74. We achieved excellent return metrics with an ROTCE above 17 and profitability metrics including our top tier PPNR and efficiency of 2.12% and 51% respectively. Our net interest margin remained above 4% for the year and we delivered an excellent efficiency ratio, as I said, of just over 51%. Turning to page four and for the quarter, We made $0.96 a share, or $37 million, which was up $0.09 from Q3 and up more than 10% on a link quarter basis. Our return metrics were, again, excellent with a 17% ROTCE, while our PPNR remained relatively flat, again, at a very strong 1.97% for Q3. Our NIM did see some contraction, however, Our net interest income remained above $85 million for the quarter, and Mark's going to provide some additional color here. Net charge-offs at 19 basis points were flat, while our efficiency ratio did rise, but still remains quite strong. Moving to page five, we saw solid loan growth of over 7% annualized, with both our commercial and consumer lines of business contributing. On the deposit side, our customer deposit growth of just under $100 million, produced 5.5% growth annualized, which is a number we feel very good about, in the quarter. While the mixed shift continued, we do see a slowing rate of decline in DDA balances, while also the stabilization of the NIM during the quarter. Mark is going to, again, provide a lot more details on that. Next, I'm going to turn it over to Dave to talk a little bit more about the loan book and certainly about credit quality. And then Mark will come in and talk about the income statement and capital further. I also look forward to your questions following their remarks. Dave, over to you.