WesBanco, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the West Banco Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please limit yourself to a couple of questions, and you can re-enter the queue to allow others to ask. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to John Iannone, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Andrew. Good morning, and welcome to West Banko Inc.' 's third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Leading the call today are Todd Claussen, President and Chief Executive Officer, Bob Young, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Dan Weiss, Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer. Today's call, an archive of which will be available on our website for one year, contains forward-looking information. Cautionary statements about this information and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures are included in our earnings-related materials issued yesterday afternoon, as well as our other SEC filings and investor materials. These materials are available on the investor relations section of our website, westbanco.com. All statements speak only as of October 27th, 2021, and WestBanco undertakes no obligation to update them. I would now like to turn the call over to Todd. Todd?

Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we'll review our results for the third quarter of 2021 and provide an update on our operations and 2021 outlook. Key takeaways from the call today are West Banco remains a well-capitalized financial institution with solid liquidity, strong balance sheet, solid credit quality. We're committed to expense management while we continue to make the appropriate investments, including strategic hires across our organization and markets to enhance our ability to leverage our growth opportunities. And we remain focused on ensuring a strong organization for our shareholders and will continue to appropriately return capital to them through both long-term sustainable earnings growth and effective capital management. We're pleased with our performance during the third quarter as we delivered solid pre-tax, pre-provision earnings and managed discretionary expenses. For the quarter ending September 30, 2021, we reported net income available to common shareholders of $45.4 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.70 when excluding merger and restructuring charges. On the same basis, pre-tax, pre-provision income was $57.8 million, or $60.4 million when excluding settlement costs with respect to the pending resolution of a lawsuit of $2.6 million that we incurred during the quarter. We reported strong pre-tax, pre-provision return on assets and average tangible equity of 1.34 percent and 14.73 percent, respectively. Reflecting our strong legacy of credit and risk management, Our key credit quality ratios remained at low levels, and our regulatory capital ratios remained well above the applicable well-capitalized standards, as well as remained favorable to peer bank averages. The significant amount of excess liquidity across our local economies, combined with the supply chain and labor constraints, continue to temporarily impact loan growth. So far this year, we have generated nearly $1.3 billion in new commercial loan production, with 35 percent of that occurring during the third quarter. Our commercial pipeline is building again and approaching 600 million, with more than a third of that pipeline coming from our more recently acquired higher growth markets in Maryland and Kentucky. Further, our residential mortgage pipeline remains strong, which bodes well for originations the next couple of quarters. While up slightly from last quarter, commercial line of credit utilization is still about 12 percentage points or so below the historical mid to upper 40 percent range, as companies have excess liquidity or delay growth opportunities due to supply issues. We continue to experience high commercial real estate project payoffs via an aggressive secondary market that is flush with liquidity, searching for yield, and offering very generous rates and terms for purchasing projects outright due to a strong cap rate-based valuations. For the first nine months of this year, we've had more than $630 million of commercial real estate project payoffs, far outpacing the $450 million we experienced during 2020 and the $500 million we experienced during the full year of 2019. So while we expect our commercial real estate projects to go to the secondary market for permanent financing, it's been happening at a much earlier point in their projected timelines, creating a short-term mismatch with our new production to offset the runoff. We anticipate commercial real estate payoffs to be slightly elevated during the fourth quarter before returning to much more historical numbers, around $85 million a quarter range during next year. On the positive side, we generated more than $90 million of new construction loans during the third quarter, which we'll fund over the next 12 to 18 months. A key investment we are making is the investment in our employees, as they are critical to our long-term growth and success. During the third quarter, we redeployed some of the savings from our optimization efforts to raise the hourly wage in order to retain and attract, which is having a positive impact. In addition, we continue to formulate plans to make strategic hires across our organization and markets to enhance our ability to leverage growth opportunities once they fully return. Throughout the years so far, we have made more than 35 revenue-producing hires in key markets across our organization in order to strengthen our teams and enhance our ability to leverage future growth opportunities. These hires have been concentrated in our commercial lending, residential lending, and wealth management groups. Our new residential mortgage loan production office in Northern Virginia, which I mentioned in July, has hit the ground running producing approximately 5% of our originations during the quarter. In addition to ongoing efforts to add wealth management personnel in our metro markets, we are implementing plans to hire an additional 20 commercial lenders, whether individuals or teams, over the next year or so. These hiring plans are focused on both our existing metro markets and potential new metro markets that would be adjacent to our existing franchise footprint. We believe that our diversified revenue engines and footprint, combined with our experienced teams and hiring plans, make us well-positioned to take advantage of future growth opportunities, and over the long term, we still anticipate mid- to upper-single-digit loan growth. I remain proud of our entire organization as it remains diligently focused on serving the financial needs of our customers and our communities throughout the pandemic, the reopening of our economies, and throughout the completion of our core banking software system conversion. For the second year in a row, we've been named to Newsweek Magazine's ranking of the best banks which recognize those institutions that best serve their customers' needs. This great accolade follows one we received a few months ago, where we were named for the third consecutive time one of the world's best banks on customer satisfaction. These recognitions are a testament to the hard work and dedication of our employees, our focus on our Better Banking pledge to deliver superior customer service, and our efforts to provide our customers with high-quality products and services and the ability to access them when it best meets their schedule, whether in person or through our full-range digital platform. I would also like to congratulate our community development team led by Lorena Lowther for their receipt of the ABA Foundation Community Commitment Award for Community and Economic Development. This prestigious national award is for their strong performance and outreach with our New Market Loan Program, as well as recognition of our strong community banking roots. Through our New Markets Loan Program and other innovative programs, our goal is to promote meaningful, community-driven investments and fund a wide variety of business providing critical and social commercial services to low-income communities. Lastly, on August 2nd, we completed the conversion of our core banking software system to FIS's IBS platform. This was an important project that involved hundreds of employees across our organization to ensure its success. This dynamic platform provides improved operational efficiencies, capabilities for growth opportunities, including partnerships with fintechs, and enhanced products and services for our customers. Just some of the digital enhancements include the national person-to-person payments network, Zelle, which we are now on, enhanced security measures, robust personal financial management tools to allow account aggregation, budgeting and spending targets, and the ability to stop or release payments online. As I said before, I firmly believe that during the last couple of years with our investments in Kentucky and the Mid-Atlantic region and our new core operating system, We have solidified our evolution into a strong regional financial services company that is supported by several unique competitive advantages. I'd now like to turn the call over to Bob Young, our CFO, for an update on our third quarter financial results and the current outlook for the fourth quarter of 2021. Bob?