Washington Trust Bancorp, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Washington Trust Bancorp Inc's conference call. My name is Lydia and I'll be your operator today. If participants need assistance during the call at any time, please press star zero. Participants interested in asking a question at the end of the call should press star one to get in the queue. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. I'd now like to turn the call over to Elizabeth Eckel, Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing and Corporate Communications Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Lydia. Good morning and welcome to Washington Trust Bancorp Bank's conference call for the second quarter of 2024. Joining us this morning are members of Washington Trust Executive Team, Ned Handy, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mary Nunes, President and 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 our 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 yesterday, 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 irwashtrust.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. Ned?

Thank you, Beth. Good morning and thank you for joining our second 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 second quarter performance. After our prepared remarks, Mary Nunes and Bill Ray will join us for the Q&A session. We continue to prioritize building balance sheet strength, managing credit, controlling expenses, and positioning to be opportunistic for earnings growth as the economy and interest rates allow. Capital ratios improved somewhat in the quarter as we de-emphasized asset growth and stabilized earnings in the quarter. Credit remains strong and expenses are down quarter over quarter. We've introduced new deposit growth oriented tools to enhance our customers' experience in online account opening, bank switching, and to reward our customers for referrals. We look forward to opening a new branch in the Onlyville section of Providence next month. Other than this branch, we have no other planned branch expansion at this time. In recent years, we shifted much of our operations to the cloud, allowing us to make a strategic decision to sell our operations center and consolidate team members into existing offices. We continue to review every owned or leased space for optimization of our occupancy efficiency. With continued pressure on the margin, our fee-based businesses, wealth and mortgage, performed well and generated higher revenues in the quarter. Again, continued expense discipline and our diversified revenue base contributed nicely to this quarter's results. 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. Ron?