Great Western Bancorp, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Great Western Bancorp first quarter fiscal year 2021 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 on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Seth Arts, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Andrew, and good morning. Joining us for today's presentation and discussion, we have Mark Barreco, President, Chief Executive Officer, Pete Chapman, Chief Financial Officer, Steve Yost, Chief Credit Officer, and Carlin Canarium, Chief Risk Officer. As usual, we have prepared a presentation for today's earnings review, which is available for webcast and also for download through our investor relations website at ir.greatwesternbank.com. We'd like to remind you that today's presentation may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainty, which may cause actual future results to materially differ from those discussed. please refer to the forward-looking statement disclosures contained in the earnings materials on the website, along with periodic SEC filings for an outline of the company's risk factors. Additionally, any non-GAAP financial measures presented are provided to further assist you in understanding 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 and SEC filings. I will now turn the call over to Mark Barreco. Mark, please go ahead.

Thank you, Seth, and good morning. Thank you for joining us, joining the call. I hope that you remain safe and healthy during these continued times. Before we share our results for the quarter, I want to first thank our employees for their continued efforts in supporting the Great Western Bank mission to make life great by strengthening our customers and enriching our communities. For the first quarter fiscal year 2021, we reported net income of $41.3 million. Pete will walk through the specifics on our financials shortly. I am pleased with our progress on our current financial performance, but I'm also excited about the progress on our priorities to better position Great Western for the future. With regard to our top priorities, after ensuring the safety of our employees and customers, credit risk management remains priority number one. We made progress with our asset quality this quarter, particularly as successful loan workouts and upgrades help support a 10% decrease in non-accrual loans and a 7% decrease in classified loans. We made progress in de-risking the bank's balance sheet by completing the sale of $209 million of hotel loans at a 12% discount. We made progress in working with our customers regarding COVID payment deferrals. We decreased our referrals to $113 million, or 1.29% of total loans, excluding PPP, as of January 13th. down from a peak of $1.69 billion that was on deferral in round one. Agriculture commodity prices, specifically soybean and corn, continue to improve, which will likely result in future upgrades over the next few quarters. From a measured actions perspective on slide two, we made progress managing our net interest margin, resulting in a seven basis point decrease in our deposit costs. In addition, our NIM benefited from recoveries resulting from focused loan workouts. We made progress in strengthening our capital position with 40 basis points of improvement through earnings. Since Great Western has a September fiscal year end, we adopted CECL this quarter. Our quarter end allowance for credit loss ratio was 3.5% of total loans, excluding PPP, and our comprehensive coverage is 3.84%, which Pete will expand on later. From an organizational standpoint, we continue to make progress attracting top talent for our senior roles, with the recent hire of Rick Robinson as our president of wealth management. Rick comes to Great Western Bank with extensive wealth experience, and it reinforces our commitment to growing revenue in this important non-interest income category. We are making progress in the implementation of our small business center, with our pilot launching in 20 markets this March. With this addition, we will improve the way that we originate, decision, and manage our smaller commercial relationships. This will significantly improve the client experience and allow us to capture more small business opportunities in our footprint. And lastly, this initiative will also free up our commercial banking team to allow them more time to pursue larger relationships in our underweight segments and market. I am now directly leading our business lines and I'm excited to get closer to our customers and to understand how our key business segments can leverage our bankers, technology, and processes to fuel future growth. Our company culture continues to evolve with a renewed focus on accountability, commitment, teamwork, service, and trustworthiness. Now for a review of our financial results, I will turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Pete Chapman. Pete.