Customers Bancorp, Inc

Good morning. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Customers Bancorp 2025 Q4 and year end earnings report. My name is Devin and I will be your call moderator for today. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the call over to Philip Watkins, Executive Vice President, Head of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Devin, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the Customers Bank Corp's earnings webcast for the fourth quarter and full year of 2025. The presentation you will see during today's webcast has been posted on the investor's webpage of the bank's website at www.customersbank.com. You can scroll to fourth quarter and full year 2025 results and click download presentation. You can also download a PDF of the full press release at this spot. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that some of the statements we make today may be considered forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. These forward-looking statements are subject to change and involve 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 most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q, and our current reports on Form 8-K, for a more detailed description of the assumptions and risk factors related to our business. Copies of these filings may be obtained from the SEC or by visiting the Investor Relations section of our website. At this time, it is my pleasure to introduce Customers Bank Corp. Executive Chairman Jay Sidhu.

Thank you so much, Phil, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I, too, want to welcome you to the Customers Bank Corp fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. Hope you've all had a great start to 2026. I'm joined this morning by Customers Bank and Bank Corp CEO, Sam Sidhu, and Customers Bank and Bank Corp CFO, Mark McCollum. I'd like to start by congratulating Sam again on his appointment as CEO and also to the Board of Directors of Customers Paying Corp. The Board of Directors and I are delighted with this transition, which has been in force since we began our succession planning exercise at the board level over five years ago. We have every confidence that Sam and the team that he has assembled will continue to build upon the incredible results we have achieved over the past few years. Since we founded this bank in late 2009, the journey has been exciting. With a clear vision and a lot of determination, what began as an approximately 175 million troubled, failing bank has now grown into a 25 billion asset institution, recognized for its unique single point of contact strategy, its exceptional customer service focus, and a forward-thinking approach to technology. That success did not happen by chance. It's the direct result of superior execution by a world-class team. We have consistently put customers first and built a best-in-class risk management infrastructure while embracing innovation and change. Moving to slide four, we are pleased to report another quarter and a very strong quarter and a very impressive full year 2025, which Sam and Mark will talk through in more detail. As you know, our 2025 core EPS was $7.61 a share and up from $5.60 a share in 2024. Before they discuss the details of 2025 with you, I wanted to spend some time putting into perspective our performance over the past few years. Customers Bank has been one of the strongest organic growth stories in the entire industry. And we see no reason that will change in the years to come. We've had incredible deposit-led growth in our balance sheet with low-cost core deposits growing at a 16% compounded annual rate over the last six years. And we did this while materially improving the quality of our deposit franchise as you will hear much more about that later from Sam and Mark. Moving to slide five, we highlight that we believe is the clearest way to evaluate sustainable franchise value creation, long-term compounding returns in revenue, earnings, and tangible book value. We've been an industry leader in growing these metrics by a number of years now, for a number of years. We are the number one compounder of core earnings per share over the last six years, which represent outstanding performance against the peer medium. And so we performed over five times better than the peer median. And we performed over three times better than the top quartile. Similarly tangible book value per share. Compounding is the number two among the entire peer group and represents outperformance of the peer medium by about three times and the top quartile by over two times. Finally, on slide six, our core strategy has translated into significantly improved profitability over the last several years. Our margin increased by 57 basis points and our return on asset increased by 33 basis points. And very importantly, our return on equity increased by 450 basis points while we simultaneously increased our capital level by 500 basis points. This profitability improvement has been achieved while making substantial investments for the future. Investments in people, investments in technology, investments in processes, and huge investments in risk infrastructure for the future. These have turned into incredible results for our shareholders while helping us build a very strong foundation for the future. Our five-year total shareholder return has been over 300%, placing us at the very top of our peers as an industry In fact, in the entire financial services industry. It is exactly these kinds of financial results and multi-year transformations that give us the great confidence in SAM and the rest of the management team to continue building on our momentum and to take on tomorrow. Our mission will remain unchanged, and that is to deliver long-term value for shareholders and our communities Jay Cunningham, By putting client first and continuing to innovate and build strong risk management and execute with excellence, we believe our best years are still ahead of us. Jay Cunningham, With that i'm going to turn it on now over to Sam.