Customers Bancorp, Inc

any further assistance please press star zero thank you i would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today mr dade patty the communications director for customers bank or sir please go ahead thank you ludy and good morning everyone thank you for joining us for the customer bank corps earnings call for the first quarter of 2022. the presentation deck you will see during today's webcast

has been posted on the investor relations page of the bank's website at www.customersbank.com. You can scroll to Q1 2022 results and click download presentation. You can also download a PDF of the full press release at this spot. Our investor presentation includes important details that we will walk through on this morning's webcast. I encourage you to download and use the document. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that some of the statements we make today may be considered forward looking. These forward looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual performance results to differ materially from what is currently anticipated. Please note that these forward looking statements speak only as of the date of this presentation. and we undertake no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events, except to the extent required by applicable securities laws. Please refer to our SEC filings, including our Form 10-K and Form 10-Q, for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our results. Copies may be obtained from the SEC or by visiting the Investor Relations section of Wexley. At this time, it is my pleasure to introduce Customers Bank Corp Chair, Jay Sidhu. Jay, the audience is yours.

Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I, too, want to welcome you to the Customers Bank Corp Bank Q1 2022 investor call. Joining me this morning are Sam Sidhu, the President and Chief Operating Officer of Customers, Carla Leibold, our Chief Financial Officer, and Andy Bowman, our Chief Credit Officer. We are extremely pleased with the Q1 results and are excited that 2022 is off to a great start. In a quarter impacted significantly by geopolitical conflict, rising interest rates, yield curve inversion, inflationary pressures, and the ongoing effects of the pandemic, we remain very focused on severe execution of our strategy while being very mindful of this rapidly changing environment. Before I share my comments with you, please join me in saluting our team members and all their hard work and commitment in helping us achieve these significantly better than average results. From a risk management perspective, we are viewing this challenging operating environment most possibly resulting in a mild to a moderate recession in 2023, and our execution of strategies and guidance for 2022 and 2023 assume the existence of such an environment next year. We would like to take about five minutes at each of our quarterly calls to discuss with you our unique strategy, as well as Sam providing you an update on the results of our major strategic initiatives. Looking at slide four, at the core of our strategy is a true obsession with our clients. There are many ways to center a business strategy. You can be extremely competitor-focused. You can be technology-focused, product-focused, business model-focused, low-cost-focused, etc. However, in our view, being obsessively customer focused is by far the most effective strategy. The customer is at the center of everything we do. We have a unique high touch supported by high tech business model that is executed by our very experienced teams through a single point of contact model. so the team is fully capable of delivering the full-service private banking through omni-channels depending upon customer preferences and needs. We view ourselves as a forward-thinking bank and have recently focused on improving our brand, streamlining our offerings, as well as our underwriting, as well as our portfolio management, and all resulting in dramatically improved turnaround times so that we are truly delighting our customers. We've also significantly improved our onboarding experiences and developed real-time B2B instant payment functionality for our business customers that is paying huge rewards, and we believe we are just beginning to see some of those rewards. Our technology, our products and services, and all our activities are designed to delight customers our customers and helping us remain focused and helping us remain forward thinking to take on tomorrow. On slide five, you can see that our vision for growth has remained a part of our story since the beginning. We took over a failing bank with our own money and formed Customers Bank, that has grown organically from a 200 million problem bank into a very strong customer-focused and strong in risk management standards forward-thinking financial institution with about $19 billion in assets. This equates to a CAGR of about 40% and puts us in the top quartile of banks in our peer group. On slide six, we would like to briefly discuss ESG review because we take that very seriously. In the spirit of just highlighting just one or two things, I'm pleased to share with you the two most significant aspects of our ESG report for 2021. First, we financially supported over 350,000 small businesses across America through our PPP program and believe we saved as many as 1 million jobs and tens of thousands of business establishments with many, if not most, being minority-owned small businesses. On another initiative, we financed over $40 million of solar energy projects in 2021, and our team members have been recognized and our company has been recognized locally as providing the best from a wellness point of view for our teams. We have spent a lot of time and effort in diversity and inclusion. and have initiated several projects along these lines to make ourselves even better. As customers, we are laser focused on maintaining our credit quality better than most peers, increasing total revenues at an above average rate, managing our expenses, improving our efficiency ratios by cutting bureaucracy and continuing to deliver positive operating leverage and superior bottom line results. We will never compromise on effective risk management principles, especially as it relates to maintaining our credit quality. I really thank you for your continued support and interest in our company. And it's amazing to think that we are just getting started on several very interesting and exciting strategic initiatives and the meaning. And we believe we have a huge runway ahead of us. So at this time, I'd like to turn it over to Sam to provide you a lot more details on some of these initiatives. Sam?