Cadence Bank

Good morning, and welcome to the Cadence Bank first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. All participants will be in 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 your telephone keypad. 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 Wilford Sackerley, Executive Vice President and Director of Finance. Please go ahead.

Wilford Sackerley Good morning, and thank you for joining the Cadence Bank first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. We have members from our executive management team here with us this morning, Dan Rollins, Chris Bagley, Valerie Tolson, and Billy Braddock. Our speakers will be referring to prepared slides during the discussion. You can find the slides by going to our investor relations page at ir.cadencebank.com, where you'll find them on the link to our webcast, or you can view them at the exhibit today that we filed yesterday afternoon. These slides are also in the presentation section of our investor relations website. I would remind you that the presentation, along with our earnings release, contain our customary disclosures around forward-looking statements and any non-GAAP metrics that may be discussed. The disclosures regarding forward-looking statements contained in those documents applied our presentation today. And now I'll turn to Dan for his opening comments.

Good morning. We appreciate everyone joining us this morning to discuss our first quarter 2024 results. I will comment on some of the key highlights, and then Valerie will dive into the financials in more detail. Our executive management team will be available for questions following our remarks. We're extremely pleased to see the efforts and hard work of teammates across our company bear fruit in the financial results we've reported this quarter. If you recall, we completed some strategic initiatives in 2023, including the sale of our insurance agency, the restructuring of our securities portfolio, the streamlining of our branch network, as well as other opportunities to improve our operating efficiency. These efforts, along with a continued focus on business development, can be seen throughout the results that we will be discussing this morning. We reported GAAP net income for the first quarter of $114.6 million, or $0.62 per common share, with adjusted net income from continuing operations for the first quarter of $114.4 million, also $0.62 per common share, representing considerable improvement over each of the last several quarters. From a balance sheet perspective, our active pipelines resulted in loan balances growing just over $385 million, or 4.8% annually. We saw good growth in our non-real estate and owner-occupied C&I portfolios, as well as a nice pickup in residential mortgages. From a deposit perspective, we continued to strategically reduce both brokered and certain thinly priced public fund balances, which collectively declined just over $1 billion linked quarter. Importantly, we were able to organically grow core customer deposits by approximately $400 million in the quarter, which offset much of this decline. Our community bank continues to perform very well in the face of continued strong competition for deposits, driving the majority of the core deposit growth in the quarter. As expected, we saw a significant improvement in our net interest margin, which was up 18 basis points compared to the fourth quarter to 3.22%. The balance sheet dynamics that I mentioned and our fourth quarter securities portfolio restructuring contributed to this improvement. Valerie will discuss the moving parts more in just a moment. Our results for the quarter also reflected considerable improvement in operating efficiency. Our adjusted expenses declined by over $6 million compared with the fourth quarter of 2023, which, along with our revenue growth, drove close to a 600 basis point reduction in our adjusted quarterly efficiency ratio to 60.1%. We anticipate additional improvement as we move throughout the remainder of 2024. From a credit quality perspective, we recorded a provision for credit losses of $22 million, while net charge-offs totaled $19.5 million, or 24 basis points of average loans on an annualized basis, both of which were in line with our expectations and improved over our fourth quarter 2023 results. Finally, we repurchased just over 650,000 shares during the quarter at a weighted average price of $25.65. We were able to do that while continuing to grow our capital metrics, which is reflected in CET1 of 11.7% and total capital of 14.5% at March 31, 2024. I'll now turn the call over to Valerie for her comments. Valerie?