First BanCorp. New

Good morning, all, and thank you all for attending the First Bank Corp Q3 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. My name is Brika, and I will be your moderator for today. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call, with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. I would now like to pass the conference over to your host, Ramon Rodriguez, Investor Relations Officer at First Bank Corp. Thank you. You may proceed with mine.

Thank you, Brica. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining FirstBank Corp's conference call and webcast to discuss the company's financial results for the third quarter of 2024. Joining me today from FirstBank Corp are Aurelio Aleman, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Orlando Verges, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin today's call, it is my responsibility to inform you that this call may involve certain forward-looking statements such as projections of revenue, earnings, and capital structure, as well as statements on the plans and objectives of the company's business. The company's actual results could differ materially from the forward-looking statements made due to the important factors described in the company's latest SEC filings. The company assumes no obligation to update any statements made during the call. If anyone does not already have a copy of the webcast presentation or press release, you can access them at our website at fbpinvestor.com. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Aurelio Rima.

Thank you, Ramon, and good morning. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. This morning, we reported another strong quarter for our franchise, earning $73.7 million in net income, or $0.45 per share, which resulted in a solid return on assets of 1.55%. Adjusted pre-tax preprovision was slightly down to 1.12, mostly due to an increase in expenses, as we have discussed before. Still, the organization continues to operate in the 52% efficiency ratio range in line with our guidance. Credit demand continues to be healthy in our environment, resulting in actually our strongest quarter of commercial loan ordination for the year. Our loan portfolio grew by 63 million. despite higher levels of unexpected commercial prepayments that amounted to approximately $132 million in the third quarter. Even though we continue to see a very strong pipeline and we continue to work towards our 5% loan growth guidance, but we now expect our loan portfolio to grow closer to 4% in 2024, and actually it's primarily driven by the higher-than-forecasted prepayments that I just made reference to. In terms of deposit, market dynamics seems to be behaving as expected at the start of this easy cycle. Core deposits, other than broker and government deposits, remain at $12.7 billion. We did prepay some broker CDs. Most of the decline coming from non-interest-bearing deposits. We, you know, we're broadly monitoring deposit flows and potential deposit repricing opportunities as we capitalize on the expected rate environment which started and will continue in 2025 with our target of achieving NII improvement over the period. Asset quality, it also improved during the quarter with non-performing assets coming down to just 63 basis points of total assets. We think their coming rate environment should be favorable. to commercial customers and votes well for additional asset quality improvement. Finally, our liquidity and capital position remains quite strong. This quarter, we were able to sustain our commitment to deliver 100% of earnings in the form of some capital actions by redeeming 50 million of our outstanding energy ventures and paying 26.3 million in common dividends. Even accounting for these actions, our capital ratios improved during the quarter, and our tangible book value per share grew by 15%, benefiting from the rate backdrop and the short duration of our bond book. We enjoy a nice degree of capital flexibility and expect to deploy it in a manner that best suits the long-term interests of the franchise. Let's turn to page five to talk a little bit about the environment. You know, we continue to experience, you know, what we consider stable and positive economic backdrop reflected in a good quarter of the re-nations and also in the trends of asset quality. September unemployment in Puerto Rico just came out at 5.5%. Actually, historical lowest in 1976. It also is reflecting, you know, year over year, payroll employment improvement of 1.6%. Our team remains focused on expanding the city relationship, building commercial loan pipeline, and adopting new platform technology. We did launch in September our Encino platform, which actually provides a completely digital experience in the commercial lending workflow. We continue to generate a lot of organic capital and we continue to, our priority is to fund loan growth and continue franchise investment in technology to better serve our customers while deploying any excess capital into ongoing equity balance sheet, you know, management opportunities. We're, you know, we are proud of our third quarter result. We thank all our employees and we look forward to updating you in January. on what to expect in 2025. I will now turn the call over to Orlando, and we'll be back to answer some questions. Thank you.