Valley National Bancorp

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Valley National Bancorp first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Andrew Giannetti, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to Valley's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I am joined today by CEO Ira Robbins and CFO Travis Land. 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 release and presentation. 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 10Q and 10K. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ira Robbins.

Thank you, Andrew. Valley delivered another strong quarter with net income of approximately $164 million or 28 cents per diluted share. Excluding certain non-core items, adjusted net income was $169 million or 29 cents per diluted share. Despite traditional first quarter headwinds, including elevated payroll taxes and a lower day count, adjusted pre-provision net revenue increased to $253 million during the quarter, providing a strong jumping-off point for the rest of the year. While Travis will provide additional detail on the financial performance, I wanted to spend my time discussing strategic execution and long-term value creation. We have spent the past few years deliberately reshaping this organization. We have strengthened our balance sheet and upgraded our operating model while supporting incremental investments in talent, technologies, and capabilities that we believe will be impactful over the long run. The cumulative impact of those efforts has become increasingly evident in our recent financial results. Just as importantly, these enhancements have positively impacted our daily operations and ways of working. Strategically, our focus is consistent and clear. First, we are building a higher quality and increasingly resilient funding franchise. Our emphasis on core deposit generation is not just about short-term pricing advantages. We are focused on winning primary operating relationships, deepening engagement across our client base, and creating a stable funding engine that can support our growth aspirations across cycles. The combination of scalable specialty deposit verticals, enhanced treasury management capabilities, and an improving client experience has enabled us to better compete across markets and channels. Secondly, we are pursuing diverse relationship-focused loan growth. We are intentionally allocating capital towards businesses, geographies, and industry verticals where we see durable demand and strong risk-adjusted returns. This includes business banking and middle market opportunities in our high-quality markets, as well as specific niches, like healthcare, where we have a differentiated value proposition. To fund this strategic growth, we have remained disciplined about selectively exiting lower return transactional clients that do not align with our future strategic focus. This is not about maximizing short-term growth. We are building a relationship-focused portfolio that we believe will perform consistently across economic environments. Thirdly, we continue to focus on operating leverage and scalability. Many of the investments that we have undertaken over the last few years, including our core conversion, data infrastructure enhancement, and organizational redesign, were made with a long-term lens. As a result, we are increasingly able to grow deposits, loans, and revenue faster than our fixed cost investments, and without adding unnecessary complexity. We view this as a critical advantage for a regional bank that operates in an underserved size range, but still competes regularly with upmarket institutions. That brings me to values positioning around artificial intelligence, which we believe represents a meaningful inflection point for the banking industry. Valley's approach to AI reflects a balance between our pragmatic relationship-led culture and the acknowledgement that these technologies can enable us to reimagine how work gets done across our company. We believe these rapidly accelerating capabilities can augment the productivity of our associates, enhance decision-making, improve operational efficiency, and most importantly, position Valley to better serve our diverse client base. Our dedication to improving the granularity, consistency, and infrastructure around our data over the last few years has been a key underpinning in our ability to effectively utilize AI tools today. We invested early in AI talent and advanced analytics and have embedded certain capabilities into our operating model in the wake of our core conversion. Already, AI is helping our bankers prioritize opportunities and better understand client needs. we have already utilized AI to improve access to our internal knowledge base, to rethink legacy back office processes, including card service requests, certain elements of underwriting, and risk monitoring to accelerate data analytics and software development. Specific use cases implemented to date include a customer facing voice AI agent that proactively contacts past due auto loan customers to motivate payment, fraud tools to verify transaction legitimacy and to prioritize suspicious activity alerts, and AI enhancements to our sales process to optimize the next best product offer. These are small examples of a much broader effort to unlock our associates to spend more time doing what they do best, building relationships and delivering high value advice. We expect these capabilities will continue to translate into higher productivity, better risk outcomes, and a more consistent client experience with less friction, all while preserving the human element that defines our brand. Looking forward, our priorities remain consistent. We plan to continue to selectively invest in growth, maintain our balance sheet discipline, and deploy capital thoughtfully. We are confident that the foundation we have built positions Valley to navigate uncertainty, capitalize on opportunities around us, and deliver sustainable returns over time. With that, I would turn the call over to Travis to walk through the financial results in more detail.