Great Western Bancorp, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Great Western Bancorp fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2020 earnings announcement and call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would like now to turn the conference over to Seth Arts, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. Taking us through our presentation this morning, we have Mark Barreco, President and Chief Executive Officer, Peter Chapman, Chief Financial Officer, and Steve Yost, Chief Credit Officer. Also here with us to support our Q&A session after our prepared remarks, we have Doug Bass, our Chief Operating Officer, and Carlin Canarium, our Chief Risk Officer. As usual, we have a prepared presentation for today's earnings review, which is available for webcast on our website at greatwesternbank.com. Before getting started, we would like to remind you that today's presentation may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to certain risks and uncertainty that could cause the company's actual future results to materially differ from those discussed. This is especially true in the current environment with continued uncertainty stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. please refer to the forward-looking statement disclosures contained in the earnings materials on the website, along with periodic SEC filings for a full outline of the company's risk factors. Additionally, any non-GAAP financial measures discussed in the conference call are only provided to assist you in understanding Great Western's results and performance trends and should not be relied upon as a financial measure of actual results. Reconciliations for such non-GAAP measures are appropriately referenced and included within the presentation. I would now like to turn the conference over to Great Western Bancorp's President and Chief Executive Officer, Mark Barreco. Mark, please go ahead.

Mark Barreco Good morning, Seth. Thank you, and thank you everyone for joining us. I hope that you, your family, your coworkers are doing well and are staying healthy. Before we discuss results for the quarter, I would like to take a moment and acknowledge that this will be our last call with Doug Bass, our Chief Operating Officer. who recently announced he will be retiring at the end of December. We are grateful for Doug's 11 years with the bank and his many contributions. I also appreciate his support as I've transitioned into the company over the past seven months. Doug, thank you for all that you have done for Great Western, and we wish you all the best in your retirement. A quick update on our markets and operating environment. All of our branches are essentially reopened, and we are following CDC guidelines and internal protocol, including temporary closure and cleaning for branches when we become aware of a close contact. We remain cautiously optimistic about our footprint. While COVID cases are on the rise, our tracking continues to indicate market activity is still faring better than the majority of other U.S. markets. Now for an update on our key initiatives and developments from the quarter on slide two. We've talked about bolstering our credit risk management. Our external loan review, completed by Protiviti, resulted in minimal, non-material findings. As a reminder, the scope for this review included 99% of loans, over $5 million in our high-risk segments, along with other smaller credits to ensure that they are accurately risk-rated and underwritten to appropriate standards. I'm very pleased with the outcome. Steve will provide additional comments later in the presentation, but for me, the key takeaways are less than 1% of the loans reviewed had a downgrade from passed to criticized. We now have a level of assurance that our credit team, along with our first-line bankers, are appropriately leveraging our new risk rating system. In addition, we have been diligently managing our COVID-related deferrals. At the peak, loan deferrals for Great Western Bank were just over 17.7%, of total loans excluding PPP. As of October 22nd, 2020, our loans on deferral has declined to 1.98% of total loans excluding PPP. To improve ongoing credit monitoring, we have decided to outsource our loan review function to a third party. This new relationship will elevate the level of independent review and improve our ability to have early detection of any material credit issues. Conservative and measured actions. Our previous conservative decisions have contributed to our improving capital ratios, which Pete will discuss later on. Loan loss reserves provide a healthy coverage of 2.02% of total loans, excluding PPP, and Pete will share our day one estimates for our CECL adoption later on. We did not fill positions and we reduced FTE, resulting in an ongoing cost savings of $4 million a year. NIM contracted only seven basis points for the quarter. In addition, we paid off $205 million of our FHLB borrowings to improve our balance sheet and earnings profile moving forward. Organizationally, we continued to fill a number of important senior roles. We announced last quarter the importance of improving our treasury management client experience and performance. We are delighted to have hired Amy Johnson to lead this enhanced function. Amy comes to Great Western with over 20 years of experience with a large financial institution in the Midwest where she led multi-region treasury management and sales teams. We implemented a centralized facilities function and hired a new head of facilities. We are currently doing a thorough review of all of our branch and office locations. Small Business Center of Excellence. As we discussed previously, historically we have originated and decision all commercial credits, regardless of size, using the same process. To support our key initiative to reinvent our small business segment, we have selected Fundation as our third party loan origination provider. We expect to launch our pilot by March 1 of 2021. I am appreciative at how the team has come together to support our modified agenda. I'm also pleased about our ability to attract high-caliber new employees during this period of volatility. We are clearly making progress on the credit front, and I'm excited about what lies ahead for us in 2021. Now for a review of our financial results, I will turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Pete Chapman. Pete.