Washington Trust Bancorp, Inc.

one to get in the queue today's call is being recorded and now I would like to turn the call over to Elizabeth be echo executive vice president chief marketing and corporate communications officer the second thank you good morning and welcome to Washington Trust Bancorp Inc conference call for the 2024 first quarter joining us this morning our members of Washington Trust executive team

Ned Handy, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mary Nunes, President, Chief Operating Officer, Ron Osberg, Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, and Bill Ray, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Risk Officer. Please note that today's presentation may contain forward-looking statements and actual results could differ materially from what is discussed on today's call. Our complete safe harbor statement is contained in our earnings release, which was issued earlier this morning. as well as other documents that are filed with the SEC. All of these materials and other public filings are available on our investor relations website at ir.washtrust.com. Washington Trust trades on NASDAQ under the symbol WASH. I'm now pleased to introduce today's host, Washington Trust Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Ned Handy.

Thank you, Beth, and good morning, and thank you all for joining our first quarter conference call. We appreciate your time and interest in Washington Trust. I'll provide brief comments and then Ron Osberg will offer more detail regarding our first quarter performance. After our prepared remarks, Mary Nunes and Bill Ray will join us for the Q&A session. Our primary focus continues to be on ensuring the strength of our balance sheet while we work towards regaining historic levels of profit generation. We continue our concentration on capital, credit, deposit growth, and expense management, controlling what we can as the administration in Washington works to balance interest rates and inflation risk. We are positioning to take advantage of prudent growth opportunities as they present themselves going forward. We will soon roll out some deposit-related enhancements to power our deposit growth strategies, including the addition of an omni-channel automated deposit account opening tool. Overall, this quarter reflected the value of our diversified revenue base as our fee businesses somewhat offset continued margin pressure. It also reflected some good work the team has done to manage expenses in this inflationary environment. I'll now turn the call over to Ron for some more detail on the quarter, and then we'll be glad to address any questions you might have. Ron?