Customers Bancorp, Inc

Hello and welcome to the Customers Bank Corp Inc. 2024 Fourth Quarter and Year-End Earnings Report. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the conference over to David Patti of Customers Bank. You may begin.

Thank you, Sarah, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the Customer Bank Core Earnings Webcast for Q4 and the full year 2024. The presentation deck you will see during today's webcast has been posted on the investors' webpage of the bank's website at www.customersbank.com. You can scroll to Q4 and full year 2024 results and click Download Presentation. You can also download a PDF of the full press release at the spot. Our investor presentation includes important details that we will walk through in 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 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 our website. At this time, it's my pleasure to introduce Customers Bank Corp Chair, Jay Sidhu.

Jay? Thank you, David, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our 2024 Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and are off to a great start in 2025. Joining me this morning on this call are President and CEO of Customers Bank, Sam Sidhu, and Customers Bank Corp CFO, Bill Watkins. I am this morning pleased to share with you that in 2025, we'll be celebrating the 15-year anniversary of starting Customers Bank Corp. From the humble beginnings of our family and friends making a 17 million equity capital infusion to take full controlling interest in this, in what was at that time a 200 million asset new century bank, and which had only $70 million in core deposits, but also had 30% non-performing assets. From those kind of beginnings, today, Customers Bank Corp has been built into a thriving $22 billion asset bank, a high-performing bank. Please join me in congratulating and thanking our team members and our board of directors who have worked very hard to make all this happen. For those of us who made the $17 million investment in Customers Bank Corp 15 years ago, we also can celebrate because we have made about seven times our money over this 15-year period, even though we are still trading today at the low book value. We believe that the best days of Customers Bank Corp actually lie ahead. That's just one of the reasons why the entire management board or what many people call the executive and senior management team, this year has elected to take their entire 2024 bonus in stock rather than in cash. We are a future-focused bank. Through the hard work of our exceptional team, we built a franchise that is extremely ready for the future with diversified deposit and lending platforms that, in our opinion, are truly unique. We are very well positioned to continue our evolution from a small community bank to a well-diversified regional business bank with a national presence in several niche businesses and a business model that truly reflects the single point of contact for our customers. Our strong results this past quarter and over the past several quarters and years underscores this transformation and the progress we've made. Reflecting on 2024, it was truly a pivotal year for us and a year of strategic investments in our foundation for the future. We believe this will stand out as one of the most transformative periods in our company's history. And like I stated earlier, we are very excited about the future of our company. Moving now to slide three, most of you are familiar with the customer's bank franchise. For those that are newer to our story, let me briefly highlight what makes our model unique. We are not a traditional bank. We are very well positioned, diversified tech forward institution operating across community banking, corporate banking, and digital banking franchises. We believe we are building a bank of the future. Our goal is to provide clients with the breadth of products and services that you'd expect from a larger bank while delivering the personalized high touch service of a private bank. This is what we mean by single point of contact. Exceptional client service is not just a priority for us. It's the cornerstone of our culture and the key to our success. This focus is so central to who we are, it's embedded in our name. Our dozens of teams of outstanding and experienced bankers deliver for their clients through a high-touch single point of contact model supported by a high-tech platform. We have been a consistent recruiter also of top talent, and that, we believe, is a major strength of our company. While the frontline teams that I've talked about that we've added over the last several years get most of the attention, we believe we've added excellent leaders and team members across the entire organization, including credit, risk management, compliance, marketing, treasury management, human resources, and of course, technology, just to name a few. Their efforts are continuing to level up the way we operate and are fueling the next phase of our growth. With that, I'll pass the call over to Sam on slide five to add to this and share with you the highlights of the quarter and the year. Sam?