WesBanco, Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to the West Banco Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key, followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to John Iannone, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to WestBanco, Inc.' 's second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Leading the call today are Todd Glosson, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Dan Weiss, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial 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, westbankland.com. All statements speak only as of July 27, 2022, 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 second quarter of 2022 and provide an update on our operations and current 2022 outlook. Key takeaways from the call today are WestBanco remains a well-capitalized financial institution with a strong balance sheet and solid credit quality metrics. We continue to make appropriate strategic investments to enhance our ability to leverage long-term growth opportunities while remaining focused on expense management. The successful execution of our strategies built upon our unique long-term advantages and strong credit and risk culture has positioned us well for future opportunities. while also supporting our teams as they generate very strong sequential quarter-long growth. We are very pleased with our performance during the second quarter of 2022 as we continue to demonstrate the success of our operational strategies implemented the past few years. For the quarter ended June 30, 2022, we reported net income available to common shareholders of $40.3 million and diluted earnings per share of 67 cents when excluding after-tax merger and restructuring charges. We exhibited strong expense management as our operating expenses have remained roughly consistent the last few quarters, and our capital position remains strong and continues to provide financial flexibility while enhancing shareholder value through effective capital management, which includes the appropriate balancing of share repurchases, dividends, and M&A. While M&A is still not a major focus for us, we remain opportunistic, and if we found the right opportunity at the appropriate price that fit our well-defined strategy, we would act upon it. The key story this quarter was the strength of our balance sheet, as we demonstrated year-over-year growth in both total deposits, which increased 5.3% when excluding certificates of deposit, and total loans, which increased 3.8% when excluding SBA PPP loans. Furthermore, we reported very strong sequential quarter loan growth of nearly 22% annualized that was broad-based across our markets and loan categories. This strong growth demonstrates the successful execution of our expansion into higher growth markets, including Kentucky and Maryland, and ability to hire top-tier commercial and mortgage loan officers across our footprints. The growth in our residential loan portfolio reflects both our efforts to retain more loans on our balance sheet during the first half of the year and continued relative strength in originations. Total commercial loan growth, which was 21% annualized, was driven by both our commercial real estate and C&I portfolios. We continue to see good production from our commercial lending teams based upon our record commercial pipeline of $990 million on March 31st our commercial teams generated gross loan production of roughly $740 million during the second quarter. CNI line utilization, which has improved slightly to approximately 37%, is still roughly eight percentage points below our historical range. While we did not anticipate similar sequential loan growth the next few quarters, our teams continue to find new business opportunities, which has helped our commercial pipeline remain relatively strong at approximately $825 million as of June 30, with roughly 30% of that pipeline in Kentucky and Maryland. That said, we remain committed to our mid to upper single-digit growth target over time as our recent strategic investments in lenders and loan production offices begin to generate positive operating leverage. In addition, we continue to invest in our residential lending programs, which we have built for long-term sustainable growth. We did not overstaff during the refinance boom the last two years. In fact, we continue to make strategic hires across our footprint as our residential mortgage team easily served the refinance demand and then pivoted to home construction and purchases, which accounted for approximately 90% of our second quarter originations. While many other residential mortgage providers have posted significant decreases in originations and subsequently adjusted their operations, our strong team has resisted the national trends. Our team originated $328 million of mortgages during the second quarter, which was a 21% increase from the first quarter and comparable to the level of a year ago. Our residential mortgage production should remain relatively strong in the near term based upon our quarter end pipeline of approximately $170 million and our hiring efforts. During the first half of the year, We've added 11 mortgage loan officers, including two strong leaders in our new Indianapolis and Nashville offices. We'll be building high quality teams over the next few months. I'd like to provide a quick update on the strategic investments we have been making, which we have funded through discretionary expense control and managing our financial center footprint. As of today, we have accomplished our plan to hire an additional 20 commercial lenders with the hiring of 14 during the first six months and an additional 10 that will start with us over the coming month. Further, we continue to be tactical with hiring additional top performers as opportunities arise. Our new loan production offices in Cleveland, Indianapolis, Nashville, and Northern Virginia are being well received. As they continue to build their commercial and residential lending teams, we look forward to their contributions to our loan growth and operating leverage in coming quarters. As I've said previously, Our focus remains firmly on organic growth potential within our markets, but we will carefully balance the risk-reward proposition between both growth and credit quality. As we have clearly demonstrated, our credit strategy continues to generate strong metrics and long portfolios and enables us to make prudent long-term decisions for our shareholders. We believe that the strong foundation we have developed supported by our unique long-term advantages positions us well for future opportunities. I remain extremely proud of our entire organization as our employees continue to live and breathe our Better Banking pledge as they strive daily to provide top-tier service to our customers. Their efforts through the past year, which included our core banking system conversion, have allowed us to receive numerous national accolades so far this year. Following closely on our being the only mid-sized bank in the country to receive top 10 honors for both employee satisfaction and financial success, as well as being named one of America's most trustworthy companies and being voted one of the world's best banks by our customers, we are honored to again be recognized by our customers for our trust and service. West Banker was privileged to have recently been voted the number one bank in Ohio and the number two bank in Kentucky. These rankings were based on customer satisfaction and feedback as we've received strong scores across the survey, including high scores for trust, branch services, terms and conditions, customer service, digital services, and financial advice. These top rankings are a strong testament to the outstanding effort and dedication of our employees. I would now like to turn the call over to Dan Weiss, our CFO, for an update on our second quarter financial results and outlook for 2022. Dan?