Valley National Bancorp

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Q2 2026 Valley National Bancorp Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll 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 turn the call over to Andrew Giannetti. Please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome to Valley's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I am joined today by CEO Ira Robbins and CFO Travis Lan. 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 Bancorp and the banking industry and actual results may differ from those statements. 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. Our second quarter results illustrate continued progress against our strategic growth priorities. We delivered strong customer deposit growth, including meaningful growth and non-sparing balances. We generated diverse loan growth concentrated in C&I and owner-occupied commercial real estate. And we continue to expand fee income in both absolute dollars and a percentage of revenue. We remain focused on strengthening our value proposition by scaling our relationship-oriented, commercially-focused model across our markets and business lines. While the quarter's growth was encouraging, our focus remains on the quality, durability, and strategic value of the relationships that we attract. We believe continued execution against these priorities will support stronger returns over time. This execution translated into strong financial performance for the quarter. Net income was approximately $171 million, or 29 cents per diluted share. Excluding certain non-core items, adjusted net income was approximately $173 million, or 30 cents per diluted share. Adjusted pre-provision net revenue increased 6% from the prior quarter, and at 1.64% of average assets, reached its highest level since the fourth quarter of 2022. Deposit growth remains central to our strategy. We believe that our diversified commercial and consumer funding channels are increasingly critical as deposit competition intensifies across the industry. By expanding our commercial banking talent and driving greater adoption of our treasury platform, we expect to continue to win relationships based on service, capability, and value, not simply based on rates. These efforts directly contributed to nearly $300 million of non-interest-bearing deposit growth during the quarter. On the asset side, our focus in C&I and owner-occupied commercial real estate continues to drive strong loan growth and greater portfolio diversification. C&I growth was broad-based during the quarter, with contributions from New York, Florida, Chicago, and our specialty healthcare and fund finance verticals. These efforts also support our non-interest-bearing deposit growth as we continue to target disciplined, well-funded commercial relationships that can contribute to our sustained profitability improvement. Fee income was another area of strength. Sequential growth was driven by high-quality, sustainable businesses, including capital markets and tax credit advisory. Within capital markets, we continue to see a strong pipeline of value-led syndication opportunities while swap activity has benefited from higher commercial real estate origination volumes. These fee-based capabilities are an important part of our commercial value proposition, and based on performance to date, we remain on track to achieve our 2026 growth objectives. As we discussed a bit last quarter, Technology and artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly important to our ability to further scale our franchise. From a macro perspective, we believe that banks can effectively adopt AI, have the potential to structurally shift their efficiency ratios lower by around 500 basis points. At Valley, we intend to be an industry leader and we are excited about the progress that we have made to date. As shown on slide nine of the deck, we believe that Valley has several structural advantages that support our AI strategy, including Valley Ventures, our international and technology banking business, and our relationship with Bank Leumi in Israel. Valley Ventures give us direct exposure to the startup ecosystem and access to emerging talent and technologies. Our international and technology banking team provides deep relationships with venture capital funds and early stage technology companies, including businesses expanding from Israel into the United States. Additionally, our relationship with Bank Leomi gives us additional visibility into leading practices in cyber, fraud, and risk management. We have a robust team of AI practitioners focused on sourcing use cases and aligning solutions from these relationships that I just mentioned. Importantly, our AI strategy is embedded in our broader operating model and is intended to support productivity, risk management, client experience, and scalable growth. As we look ahead, our priorities remain consistent and clear. Continue to grow core deposits, deepen commercial relationships, to generate more diversified loan and fee income growth and improve operating efficiency to translate our progress into stronger returns. We expect our continued commitment to these areas to drive further shareholder value over time. With that overview, I will now turn the call over to Travis to walk through the financial results and our outlook in more detail.