BankUnited, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Bank United first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After this speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automatic message advising your hand is raised. Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I will now hand the conference over to your speaker host, Susan Greenfield, Corporate Secretary. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Livia. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today on our first quarter 2024 Rebels 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 around 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, such as adverse events impacting the financial services industry. The company does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or review any forward-looking statement, 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. These factors should not be construed as exhaustive. Information on these factors can be found in the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, and any subsequent quarterly report on Form 10Q or current report on Form 8K, 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. We'll jump quickly into the numbers. We announced this morning an EPS of 64 cents per share, a net income of $48 million. I checked the day before yesterday, I think. Consensus was at 60, so pretty happy about where we came out. These numbers do include, there's not much noise in the numbers this quarter. There's only one item to point out, which is the $5.2 million on additional FDIC special assessment. Other than that, it's a pretty clean set of numbers. The highlights for this quarter are deposits grew very nicely again, and not just the number. We grew non-broker deposits by 644 million, but a large part of that growth was DDA. 404 million of it was DDA. So our DDA total deposits now is back up to 27%. As we have done in the previous quarters, we continue to pay down wholesale funding, which is down a billion for this quarter. So if I look back the last 12 months since March of last year, our total deposits have grown by a billion three and we paid down FHLB advances by 3.6 billion. In fact, I think FHLB advances are now at their lowest level, not just in the last year, but in the last like two years since going back all the way to first quarter of 22. So we're very happy about how much we've improved the balance sheet and the funding mix. Cost of deposits was up 22 basis points, excuse me. The average cost of deposits for the quarter came in at 318, but the most important thing to note over here is that we think, looking back at the last three, three and a half months, is that we have now flattened out on the cost of deposits. The cost of deposits at the beginning of the quarter or during the quarter or at the end of the quarter was all pretty much the same number. We had a pretty big CD cliff that occurred this quarter, and despite that, achieving that inflection point of cost of deposits is actually a pretty important thing to point out. And even into this quarter, it's only been a couple of weeks, but it looks like we have achieved that stability, which obviously means It's good news for margin. We thought this would happen in the second quarter, but it happened a little bit earlier. We're happy about that. As we continue to reposition the balance sheet on the left side, residential loans, like they have been declining, declined again by $152 million, and we want to keep continuing on that trend for the rest of this year. And commercial loan growth, this is always our slowest growth in terms of production. Production did come in exactly where we had projected, but we did have some payoffs that were a little bit unexpected and some line utilization that dropped. For that reason, loan growth was negative. The margin for the quarter came out at 257. I think last quarter we were at 260. We had told you that margin will be somewhat stable, maybe down a couple of basis points. It came in pretty much where we thought it would. Credit looks good. Non-performing assets are down. Non-performing loans are down. Charge-offs are down to almost nothing. This quarter, charge-offs came in at two basis points. I think last year, annualized was at nine basis points. NPAs are at $119 million. They're down from $131 million last quarter. So, you know, excluding SBA guaranteed loans, NPA ratio is down to just 23 basis points. That's a couple of basis points improvement from December. Capital is strong. Liquidity is strong. Book value, tangible book value all built up. So pretty happy about how the quarter shaped up. And also, and Tom will talk more about this, but the pipelines are pretty decent both on the loan side and especially on the deposit and DBA side. So in terms of guidance, when you put these plans together, which is late in the year as to what will happen over the course of the next 12 months, you put those together, we give you guidance in January, and very often coming up with this guidance is not you know, not easy, especially in a volatile environment. And often numbers can go off here and there fairly quickly. But this time around I would have to say that so far we're tracking so close to what we thought we would do that I'm very happy. So in terms of guidance, no changes. Whatever we told you in January stays. Margin will grow over the course of the next three quarters. Deposits should grow. Loans not . So all the guidance we've given you states no change in it. And what else here? Let me turn it over to Tom, and he can get a little more into details on the numbers before Leslie.