Synovus Financial Corp.

Good morning and welcome to the Synovus First Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Cal Evans, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. During today's call, we will reference the slides and press release that are available within the investor relations section of our website, synovus.com. Kevin Blair, President and Chief Executive Officer, will begin the call. He will be followed by Jamie Gregory, Chief Financial Officer, and they will be available to answer your questions at the end of the call. Our comments include forward-looking states. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and the actual results could vary materially. We list these factors that may cause results to differ materially in our press release and in our SEC filings, which are available on our website. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements because of new information, early developments, or otherwise, except as may be required by law. During the call, we will reference non-GAAP financial measures related to the company's performance. You may see the reconciliation of these measures in the appendix to our presentation. And now, Kevin Blair will provide an overview of the quarter.

Thank you, Kyle. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter earnings call. The first quarter provides another proof point of our continued focus on growth. I'm extremely proud of the way our team members set and kept the pace and focus as we pursued and won new business deepened wallet share, enhanced our clients' experiences, and made ongoing progress in several areas of investment, including MAST, CIB, and wholesale banking. Our relationship banking approach delivered strong growth this quarter in loans, core transaction deposits, and core banking fees, and are a product of broad-based success across our lines of business and client segments. At the same time, we've maintained good expense discipline by leveraging Synovus Forward initiatives to partially offset the inflationary expense environment that we have faced, while continuing to invest in talent and our longer-term initiatives. The roadmap that we shared during our investor day back in February strikes the appropriate balance between core and transformational initiatives. You'll hear during today's call the positive impacts from several initiatives and investments we've outlined in our strategic plan and progress we are making towards building sustainable top quartile performance. We continue to make progress on Synovus Forward with run rate benefits increasing to $125 million as of March end, and we remain on track to deliver $175 million by year end. The optimization of our branch network is a significant initiative within the Synovus Forward program, with nine locations closed in the first quarter and approximately 30 planned for the rest of the year. We are also continuing to make some promising hires in revenue-producing talent and new leadership in key lines and key markets. increasing our wholesale middle market team by 10% this quarter, while also expanding our specialty lending team and naming new community banking leadership in our Tampa and Chattanooga markets. On the CIB front, our plan to have talent in place by the second quarter remains on track, with 15 to 20 team members expected by year end. Additionally, from a digital standpoint, we have continued to successfully migrate to our Synovus Gateway digital commercial banking platform. Later this month, we'll complete a year-long transition of all of our commercial, wholesale, and small business clients, providing an enhanced and streamlined experience. Also during the first quarter, we launched our mobile virtual commercial card, which will make it even easier for our clients to utilize their credit facilities. From a consumer perspective, we heightened engagement across our digital platform, MySynovus, and expanded online account opening with increased product availability and expansion of capabilities and channels, and launched phase one of consumer analytics, which is focused on the next best action for our clients. We also continued the measured integration of commercial analytics into how we manage credit events and borrower monitoring, most notably within the community and consumer bank lines of business. Lastly, development of our banking as a service platform, MAST, is progressing on schedule with the second quarter pilot planned. We are finalizing the selection process for the ISV, which we will partner with for this phase. As the platform is being built, we continue to add talent to our team with two new senior leaders added this quarter who both have vast experience working with fintechs, integrations, and technology solutions. We also have signed a definitive agreement to acquire a 60% interest in QualPay, a provider of cloud-based platform that combines a payment gateway with robust merchant processing solutions, which will allow merchants and independent software vendors to easily integrate payments into their software or websites. The completion of this investment is subject to the satisfaction or waiver of customary closing conditions, including receipt of necessary regulatory approvals. Beyond the proposed investment to propel growth in QualPay's core business, Synovus has chosen to leverage QualPay's payment technology stack as an integral part of MAST. We believe this investment will help to speed up the delivery on MAST, as well as ongoing enhancements and solution expansion. Now let's look at slide three, where we've included key financial highlights for the quarter. I'd like to begin with loans, which increased $1.1 billion excluding PPP or 11% on an annualized basis. Our wholesale banking segment had another exceptional quarter, and we also posted growth in both community and consumer banking client segments, evidencing the momentum we have across the franchise. Commercial lending continues to be the driver of overall growth with first quarter funded production up 43% year over year. What is important is that we've achieved this robust growth in a diversified fashion while maintaining our underwriting standards and adhering to our discipline credit framework. Quality deposit growth continued in the first quarter, driven by an increase in non-interest bearing deposits of $284 million. We continue to see growth in core consumer transaction accounts resulting from both balance augmentation and account growth. Our multi-year journey focused on remixing our deposit base into lower cost sticky sources has positioned us well to manage deposit costs in this rising rate environment. PPNR adjusted for one-time items and excluding PPP fees was $213 million for the first quarter. This represents a $17 million or 9% increase year over year. Revenues increase driven both by balance sheet growth as well as continued growth in multiple fee income businesses. We would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge the recent geopolitical risk and inflationary economic environment and their potential impacts to our clients, both from a consumer and commercial perspective. Increased prices and supply chain bottlenecks are putting additional pressure on liquidity and business activity in certain segments and may impact margins moving forward. Despite the challenges, our credit outlook remains positive. Overall, our strong quarter led to an adjusted EPS of $1.08 and operating metrics that demonstrate our focus on profitable growth. Jamie will now share a more detailed update on the results for this quarter. Thank you, Kevin.