Valley National Bancorp

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Valley National Bancorp Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After this previous presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is pre-recorded. I'd like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Andrew Giannetti. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to Valley's fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. I am joined today by CEO Ira Robbins and CFO Travis Lamb. Our quarterly earnings release and supporting documents are available at valley.com. Reconciliations of any non-GAAP measures mentioned on the call can be found in today's earnings report. Please also note slide two of our earnings presentation, and remember that comments made today may include forward-looking statements about Valley National Bank Corp and the banking industry. For more information on these forward-looking statements and associated risk factors, please refer to our SEC filings, including Forms 8-K, 10-Q, and 10-K. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ira Robbins.

Thank you, Andrew. Valley delivered record earnings in the fourth quarter of 2025 with net income of approximately $195 million, or 33 cents per diluted share. Excluding certain non-core items, adjusted net income was $180 million, or 31 cents per diluted share, an increase from 28 cents on both the reported and adjusted basis in the third quarter of 2025. Our adjusted return on average assets of 1.14% represents the highest level since the fourth quarter of 2022. For the full year of 2025, we produced $598 million of net income, or $585 million on an adjusted basis. This material improvement versus 2024 reflects disciplined balance sheet management, a stronger funding mix, and continued benefits from strategic investments in talent, technology, and our operating model. We entered 2025 with a fortified balance sheet and clear profitability targets tied to sustained funding improvement and credit cost normalization. By year-end, we had exceeded these expectations across all major metrics while further strengthening our capital and liquidity positions. This performance underscores both the resilience of our franchise and the depth of our customer relationships. Our improved profitability has accelerated retained earnings growth and enabled us to return more capital to investors through share buybacks and regular cash dividends. Our substantial core deposit growth stands out as one of our major significant achievements of the past year and is the key underpinning of our profitability improvement in 2025. On a year-over-year basis, we grew core deposits by nearly $4 billion, or 9%. Past strategic investments in talent and technology have deepened customer engagement, increased operating account wins, and driven momentum across our diverse delivery channels. We continue to recruit experienced commercial bankers who are focused on both loan and deposit opportunities in their geographies or areas of focus. While future growth is not likely to be linear, we have a high degree of confidence in our ability to further enhance our funding profile over the next 12 months. The quarter's loan growth was strong, diverse, and tightly aligned with our relationship-focused strategy. For the first time since the second quarter of 2024, total commercial real estate loans grew on a sequential basis. This growth was primarily in the owner-occupied category and was partially funded by a strategic runoff of non-relationship commercial real estate. During the quarter, owner-occupied Cree and CNI growth was driven primarily by activity in our specialty healthcare vertical and Southeast franchise. Loan growth is well-positioned to accelerate further in 2026. Our immediate and late-stage pipelines are exceptionally strong, up over $1 billion, or nearly 70% from just a year ago. driven by a $600 million increase in CNI and $700 million increase in commercial real estate. Past investments in data analytics, artificial intelligence, and sales effectiveness are making our bankers more productive across the franchise. These investments also ensure that newly onboarded relationship bankers have the tools necessary to hit the ground running and contribute more quickly to our consolidated results. To this end, Recent additions to our teams New Jersey, California, and Florida have already generated loan and deposit activity and directly support the aforementioned expansion in our pipelines. Our recruiting efforts remain active, which we expect will continue to accelerate the growth in our relationship-focused business model. Most importantly, increased activity from both legacy and new hires is the result of our strategic focus on attracting profitable, holistic banking relationships, which align with our risk appetite. Our improved balance sheet position and profitability metrics reflect the cumulative benefits of a variety of multi-year initiatives. We have focused on geographic and business line diversification across the franchise and have invested in high-caliber commercial talent to achieve our goals. Our 2023 core systems conversion set the stage for our expanded treasury management offering, which improved our ability to win operating encounters. and deepen commercial relationships. This has directly supported additional growth in both core deposits and fee income, and has been further augmented by specialty funding niches that have produced above average deposit growth. Our strategic priorities for 2026 remain generally consistent and focused on sustained value creation. To support our deposit ambitions, we are igniting our small business sales efforts, improving branch productivity, and exploring new growth-oriented deposit niches. Additionally, there is an opportunity to further expand the customer adoption of our treasury platform. Recent investments in branding, artificial intelligence solutions, and service model improvements have been designed to accelerate customer acquisition and elevate the client experience, which we believe will contribute to future revenue growth and increased franchise value. At the same time, we are always working to identify and execute on expense offsets to help fund these initiatives. Our strong momentum in 2025 directly supports our 2026 outlook, which Travis will detail shortly. From a high level, we expect continued benefits from repricing opportunities on both the funding side of the balance sheet and in the lower yielding fixed rate segment of our loan portfolio. While Travis will describe some of the traditional seasonal headwinds that we face in the first quarter of each year, we anticipate an additional 15 to 20 basis points of margin expansion from the fourth quarter of 2025 to the fourth quarter of 2026, all else equal. This combined with continued fee income growth, credit stability, and expense management should result in further profitability improvement in 2026. I am extremely proud of what our team accomplished in 2025. We have built undeniable momentum with respect to customer growth, funding diversification, loan quality, talent acquisition, and ultimately financial performance. Our strategy is paying off, our teams are executing, and we remain focused on delivering additional long-term value for our associates, shareholders, and clients. With that, I will now turn the call over to Travis to discuss our financial results. After his remarks, Gina Martocchi, Patrick Smith, Mark Sager, Travis, and I will be available for your comments.