Berkshire Hills Bancorp, Inc.

Good morning or good afternoon all and welcome to the Berkshire Hills Bancorp Q1 earnings release conference call. My name is Adam and I'll be your operator today. If you'd like to ask a question during the Q&A portion of today's call, you may do so by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to Kevin Kahn to begin. So Kevin, please go ahead when you are ready.

Good morning and thank you for joining Berkshire Bank's first 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, berksherbank.com, and will be furnished to the SEC. Supplemental investor information is provided in an information presentation at our website at ir.berksherbank.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 and 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 Bancorp, Shubhit Basu, our Chief Financial Officer, 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 Mahatrey.

Thank you, Kevin, and good morning, everyone, and welcome once again to Berkshire's first quarter's earning call. I'll begin my remarks on slide three, where you can see the highlights of the first quarter. It was another solid quarter with strong financial performance, continued balance sheet strength, and steady progress on our best strategy. Our earnings per share of 43 cents was up by 4% quarter over quarter and up 37% year over year. Revenues were lower year over year, driven by runoff in the PPP and non-strategic loan portfolios, while our continued expense discipline resulted in expenses flat quarter over quarter and lower by 8% year over year. As we've said before, we will self-fund our best strategy through optimization initiatives while reinvesting those saves in bankers, customer experience, and technology investments that enable our future growth. We are pleased to see that trend come through once again this quarter. Adjusted return on tangible common equity improved to 7.5% from 6% a year ago. Moving to balance sheet updates. As indicated on previous calls, we were expecting to reach an inflection point on the total loan balances growth in the first half of 2022. We are pleased to report a quarter over quarter growth of 3.1 and 6.5% in average and end of period loan balances. This growth was driven by strong loan originations this quarter. I'll provide more details on loan balances shortly. Overall, our balance sheet remains strong. We deployed capital for balance sheet growth and returned $35 million of capital to shareholders. We ended the quarter with an estimated CET1 ratio of 14%. We have ample capital to both fund loan growth and continue stock repurchases. Our share count has dropped by 6% over past year. On the strategy front, We've made good progress and will continue to stay focused on execution of our journey forward. We continue to add talent critical to our best plan. Our board replenishment continues, and we've expanded our partnership with NARMI to further improve our digital experience and net promoter score. Turning to slide four, I wanted to spend a moment sharing more details on our loan growth. After seven quarters, we're starting to see loan balances grow once again, primarily driven by growth in commercial portfolio. Balances growth was driven by new loan originations that were up significantly quarter over quarter and year over year. Our existing bankers and new hires are winning new business across the board, which is reflected in our originations and pipeline growth. It is quite encouraging to see our loan growth growing as we reactivate our organic growth muscle. Finally, I'd like to thank all of our employees for their hard work in the quarter. They're the reason why we're making great progress on our transformation. Their dedication and commitment to Berkshire customers is what is driving our success and our progress towards becoming a high-performing, leading, socially responsible community bank. With that, I'll turn the call over to Shivadeep to discuss our financials in more detail. Shivadeep.