Provident Financial Services, Inc

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Provident Financial Services third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. 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 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to Michael Perito, head of investor relations. Michael, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us for our third quarter 2026 earnings call. Today's presenters are President and CEO Tony Labozzetta and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Adriano Duarte. Before beginning their review of our financial results, we ask that you please take note of our standard caution as to any forward-looking statements that may be made during the course of today's call. Our full disclaimer is contained in last evening's earnings release which has been posted to the investor relations page on our website provident.bank. Now I'd like to hand it off to Tony Labozzetta who will offer his perspective on our third quarter.

Tony. Thank you, Michael. And good morning, everyone. I appreciate you joining us today to discuss our third quarter results. Provident continued its strong performance delivering another quarter of solid financial results with core net income of $84 million. or 65 cents per diluted share. Our annualized adjusted return on average assets was 1.3% and our adjusted return on average tangible common equity was over 16% for the sixth consecutive quarter. Total operating revenues of 238 million marked another record quarter and continued to be driven by good growth in both our spread and fee-based businesses. Year over year, net interest income grew 7% and our wealth and insurance revenues grew 6% and 20% respectively. Our adjusted pre-provision net revenue reached a record 120 million, representing 92 cents per share and an annualized core PPNR return on average assets of 1.85%. Over Labor Day weekend, the bank completed its core conversion as planned. This was a significant project that touched virtually every aspect of our bank. I'm extremely proud of our team for executing with excellence on this critical initiative. Their planning, collaboration, effort, and focus on the customer experience resulted in a very successful conversion. Our strong core profitability and ability to drive positive operating leverage while making significant investments such as our core conversion represents one of the key elements of our strategy. Balance sheet trends during the quarter show continued positive momentum, keeping us on track to achieve the growth we guided to for the year. We saw solid expansion during the quarter in non-interest-bearing deposits, and more broadly, our core business deposits, which drove deposit growth over 5% annualized. The bank remains focused on growing our deposits to fund our strong lending activity. We have several impactful deposit initiatives in flight, particularly in our small business group and within certain targeted specialty deposit verticals. Commercial loan balances grew 3% annualized in the third quarter, which, as a reminder, is typically a seasonally slower quarter for our business. In addition to normal seasonality, the recent rise in interest rates also weighed slightly on our mortgage warehouse balances. Overall, activity and loan growth remain positive. We funded approximately 550 million of commercial loans during the quarter, and our pipeline remains over 3 billion. For the third consecutive quarter, our pipeline remains well diversified with C&I, middle market, and specialty representing over 50% of the total. We are pacing to achieve approximately 6% loan growth for the year, although we remain mindful that payoffs in the fourth quarter could have an impact on net growth. Asset quality metrics were stable when compared to the prior quarter and remain at low levels. We continue to make good progress on the senior housing relationship that migrated to non-performing status earlier this year and anticipate a satisfactory resolution by year end. Adjusting our non-performing assets for the resolution of these four credits, our MPAs would be only 23 basis points of total assets. Overall, asset quality trends remain favorable. Commercial delinquencies have improved, and net charge-offs were only five basis points for both this quarter and year-to-date. The bank has a strong balance sheet, and we continue to actively manage our interest rate risk profile. During the quarter, we saw improvement in both our loan-to-deposit and pre-concentration ratios. Our CET1 ratio grew to 10.9%, and during the past few weeks, the bank has been buying back stock due to increased market volatility. Overall, I'm incredibly proud of the hard work of our employees. Our strong performance is a direct result of the culture we have at Provident. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Adriano for his comments on our financial performance. Adriano?