BankUnited, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Bank United 2022 Second Quarter Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Susan Greenfield, Corporate Secretary. You may begin.

Thank you, LaTanya. Good morning and thank you for joining us today on our second quarter 2022 results conference call. On the call this morning are Raj Singh, our Chairman, President, and CEO, Leslie Lunak, our Chief Financial Officer, and Tom Cornish, our Chief Operating Officer. Before we start, I'd like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that reflects the company's current views with respect to, among other things, future events and financial performance. Any forward-looking statements made during this call are based on the historical performance of the company and its subsidiaries or on the company's current plans, estimates, and expectations. The inclusion of this forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by the company that the future plans, estimates, or expectations contemplated by the company will be achieved. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and assumptions, including, without limitations, those relating to the company's operations, financial results, financial condition, business prospects, growth strategy and liquidity, including as impacted by external circumstances outside the company's direct control. The company does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or review any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future developments, or otherwise. A number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements. Information on these factors can be found in the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, and any subsequent quarterly report on Form 10-Q or current report on Form 8-K, which are available at the SEC's website, www.sec.gov. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Raj.

Thank you, Susan. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us. You've seen the earnings release. We announced $65.8 million of net income this morning for the quarter, 82 cents a share. That compares to 79 cents a share for the previous quarter, so happy about the numbers. Really excited about loan growth, which came in very strong at $780 million. That's excluding, of course, the PPP runoff, which is a little bit. More importantly, of that $780 million, $553 million of that was in the commercial segment, so very healthy and broad-based growth. On the other side of the balance sheet, average non-interest DDA grew $370 million, though period end, there was a decline of $80 million. If you remember, at period end, there was always noise in our numbers. Last quarter, we had mentioned to you there was a couple of hundred million dollars that came in on the last day of the quarter and left on the first day of this quarter. So if you adjust for that, we still had DDA growth, which I'm happy about because we In this environment, to grow DDA gets harder than it was a year ago or two years ago. But we're happy with the way the teams have performed, and it's very much in line with our expectations and with the guidance that we've given you. Margin expanded even better than we had thought. It is at 263 basis points, up from 250 basis points last quarter. And just to remind you, the second quarter of last year, I think we were at 237 basis points. So, very nice trajectory. NII, net interest income, grew 16.8 million, which, again, we're happy about. The rate environment, obviously, is changing rapidly. Deposit pricing, as I said in the last call, bottomed out in the first quarter, and now will keep increasing, at least until the Fed stops our deposit price price. Average is at 30 basis points for the quarter. It was 17 last quarter. But overall, like I said, margin expanded because, of course, we're benefiting on the other side of the balance sheet from the Fed moves. Credit, again, nothing but good news. Criticized classifieds, again, declined by $181 million this quarter. I believe last quarter it was roughly $150 million. NPLs also declined, excluding the guaranteed portion of non-accrual SBA loans. Our NPL ratio now stands at 42 basis points. Charge-offs came in at 23 basis points. Again, to put it in perspective, last year, full year, we ran at about 29 basis points. Capital, as we have said to you many times in the past, we will be opportunistic. When we see weakness in our stock price, we will lean in and be more aggressive with our buybacks, which is exactly what we did last quarter. We announced and largely completed $150 million authorization. And I think for the year, we have now bought back $326 million of stock, which roughly is like 10% of our market cap. So We think this is a good opportunity to step in and be aggressive, and we were. In terms of guidance, I think we're going to stick with all the guidance we gave you. In terms of loan growth, we're seeing pretty decent pipelines, like what we just saw this quarter happen. I fully expect next quarter and the quarter after that, that trend to continue in terms of Guidance we gave you on margin, we're sticking by it. Margin should expand from what it is. We're happy it expanded as much as it did, and we remain pretty optimistic about that as well. Expenses also, Leslie will talk about it. We're happy where we came out. So no real change to our guidance. We still remain focused on growing DDA. That is, at the end of the day, the long-term single driver of success is for me to bring in core, commercial, DDA, and and uh we're executing on that pipeline said good uh overall deposit growth will be lower uh than our uh low growth uh long growth we've said it would be in high single digits and deposit growth total deposit growth will be in you know uh low single digits uh so we're not changing any of that uh in in terms of uh you know i didn't make remarks on on the environments usually i start my my comments with that let me let me do that before handing it over to tom We are obviously in uncertain times, but I take a somewhat optimistic view of this. Actually, this is a definition of getting old. I'll recycle a joke that I've probably told you guys many times over. The optimist and the pessimist are walking down the street, and the optimist says to the pessimist, look around you, life couldn't get any better. And the pessimist says, well, that's exactly what I'm afraid of. That's sort of the environment that we're in. It depends on, you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If I was to be analytical about it and say, you know, where do we fall on that optimism, pessimism spectrum, one being totally pessimistic and ten being totally optimistic, we're somewhere in the six, six and a half range. That's, you know, the average sort of view of the management team. There are opportunities. We're cautiously optimistic. if, you know, there clearly are signals coming from Wall Street of, you know, of trouble that might be ahead maybe six months or so down the road, and we will monitor that carefully and change our attitude. But right now, I see slightly more optimism than pessimism. But we're being very careful, right? And loan growth is strong. Margins are better than we've seen in the recent past. And we had an event just three days ago, Monday, with our top clients in New York. And 60 of these people were together. We were there with them all the entire day. Got to speak with people from various industries. And overall, I'd say they were even more optimistic than what I am being. There is concern about the economy. We have to be careful, but also there are opportunities that we can tap into in this environment. So cautiously optimistic and always opportunistic. That's what I would say is the stance of the management team. With that, let me pass it over to Tom. He'll get a little deeper into the numbers.