Berkshire Hills Bancorp, Inc.

Welcome to the Berkshire Hills Bancorp Q2 earnings release conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then 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 touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kevin Kahn. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining Berkshire Bank's second quarter earnings call. My name is Kevin Kahn, investor relations and corporate development officer. Our news release is available in the investor relations section of our website, berkshirebank.com, and will be furnished to the SEC. Supplemental investor information is provided in an information presentation at our website at irbrookshirebank.com, and we will refer to this in our remarks. Our remarks will include forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from those statements. For details, please see our earnings release and most recent SEC reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q. In addition, certain non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed in this conference call. References to non-GAAP measures are only provided to assist you in understanding our results, and performance trends should not be relied on as financial measures of actual results or future projections. A comparison and reconciliation to GAAP measures is included in our news release. On the call today, we have Nitin Mahatre, President and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Hills Bank Corp. Shubhideep Basu, our Chief Financial Officer, and Sean Gray, our Chief Operating Officer, and Greg Lindenmuth, our Chief Risk Officer. At this time, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Nitin Mahatre.

Nitin Mahatre Thank you, Kevin, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to Berkshire's second quarter earnings call. We've been busy since our last earnings call. We held our virtual strategy meeting on May 18th, where we announced BEST, or Berkshire's Exciting Strategic Transformation. Details of this program and its projected impact is captured in the materials that remain available on our website, and I'd encourage you to take a look. In June, we welcomed two new board members, Deborah Bailey and Misha Zaitsev, to their first board meeting. And we've also been building our Berkshire team, which I'll address later in the call. Let's turn to our earnings presentation, beginning on slide three. We had a strong quarter with solid financials improved asset quality, continued capital deployment, and the launch of our transformational best strategy as the key highlights of the quarter. In terms of financials, we had a good year-over-year trend across all key financial metrics that drove improved EPS and return on tangible common equity, or ROTC. Adjusted EPS was 44 cents, up 12 cents quarter-over-quarter, and up 57 cents year-over-year. Revenue improved year-over-year and declined slightly from Q1. Net interest income was stable once again, and fee revenue strengthened year-over-year. Increased consumer spending drove interchange fees higher, while strong gain on sale from higher SBA loan originations increased loan-related fees. Expenses were down across the board on both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year basis. Lower compensation and lower professional services expenses drove much of the improvement. Shubhadeep will share more details on this in a few minutes. On credit, what a difference two quarters make. Asset quality has shown consistent improvement over past two quarters with delinquencies, non-accruals, charge-offs all down quarter-over-quarter driven by improving economic conditions and proactive loss mitigation programs. We are well reserved for credit, and I'm grateful to our credit and portfolio management teams for their diligence and vigilance over the last six quarters under the pandemic's challenging circumstances. On capital, we returned $26.8 million to shareholders in the second quarter through share buybacks and dividends, representing about 124 percent of net income in the quarter. Our capital ratios remain strong relative to peers, with CET1 at 14.3 percent of risk-weighted assets at the quarter end. Our balance sheet strength gives us ample of capital to both opportunistically repurchase stock and to achieve our expected loan growth targets. And on strategy, we are grateful that about 700 investors analysts, employees, community members, and centers of influence attended our Best Strategy launch meeting on May 18th. As we said then, our strategy will self-fund. That is, expense saves will fund investments in bankers, technology, and customer experience, which in turn will significantly enhance stakeholder value. For example, our enhanced procurement strategy targets over $10 million in expense saves over three-year best program timeline, in addition to real estate rationalization cost saves. Later in the call, I'll discuss how we're building back our loan originations engine, and we'll provide data on early progress on our best program's performance targets. With that, I'll turn the call over to Shubhadeep to discuss our financials in more detail. Shubhadeep.