United Community Banks, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to United Community Bank's first quarter 2026 earnings call. Hosting the call today are Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lynn Hardin, Chief Financial Officer Jefferson Harrelson, President and Chief Banking Officer Rich Bradshaw, and Chief Risk Officer Rob Edwards. United's presentation today includes references to operating earnings, pre-tax, pre-credit earnings, and other non-GAAP financial information. For these non-GAAP financial measures, United has provided a reconciliation to the corresponding GAAP financial measure in the financial highlights section of the earnings release as well as at the end of the investor presentation. Both are included on the website at ucbi.com. Copies of the first quarter's earnings release and investor presentation were filed this morning on Form 8K with the SEC, and a replay of this call will be available in the investor relations section of the company's website at ucbi.com. Please be aware that during this call, forward-looking statements may be made by representatives of United. Any forward-looking statements should be considered in light of risks and uncertainties described on page 5 and 6 of the company's 2025 Form 10-K, as well as other information provided by the company in its filings with the SEC and included on its website. At this time, I will turn the call over to Lynn Hartin.

Good morning, and thank you for joining our call today. We've got a lot to cover. I'm gonna start with our quarterly earnings update, and then we will close with the details of our acquisition of Peach State Bank, headquartered in Gainesville, Georgia. We had a great start to 2026. For the first quarter, we realized net income of a little over 84 million, translating into EPS of 69 cents. On an operating basis, our EPS was 70 cents, representing a 19% increase from the first quarter of 2025. Annualized loan growth of 4.5% for the quarter and an expansion of our net interest margin of three basis points helped to drive these results. Credit also performed very well this quarter, with total charge-offs of 22 basis points, only 10 basis points excluding Navitas. Non-performing assets as a percentage of loans were 50 basis points, down one basis point from Q1 2025, and special mention in substandard loans totaled only 2.9% of total loans down two basis points from Q1 of 2025. Our operating return on assets was 122 basis points, an 18 basis point improvement year over year, and our operating return on tangible common equity was 13.1%. Given our high capital levels, we continued to return capital to shareholders, both via a 25-cent quarterly dividend and the repurchase of 37 million of our common stock. We also announced the intention to redeem our remaining $100 million in sub-debt in the second quarter, only 20% of which qualified as Tier 2 capital. Even with the dilution from our repurchase activity, tangible book value per share grew at an annualized rate of nearly 6% for the quarter, and by 10% year over year. We were also excited to have been recognized by J.D. Power as the top-ranked bank for retail client satisfaction in the Southeast during the quarter. This is the 12th time the United team has received this recognition. I'm very proud of the dedication and genuine care that our teams across the footprint demonstrate every day. it's because of them that we are the most recognized bank for customer satisfaction in the Southeast. I'll now turn it over to Jefferson to cover our first quarter's performance in more detail.

Thank you, Lynn, and good morning to everyone. I will start on page five and talk about our deposit results. On an end-of-period basis, our customer deposits grew by $237 million, or 4% annualized, mostly driven by DDA growth in the quarter. We were also very pleased that our cost of deposits moved down nine basis points to 1.67%, and that our cumulative total deposit beta stands at 39% in this down cycle, which exceeded our goal. On page six, we turn to the loan portfolio, where our growth continued at a 4.5% annualized pace. Our growth came primarily in the HELOC and CNI categories, which are two of our current areas of focus for growth. Turning to page seven, where we highlight some of the strengths of our balance sheet, we believe that our balance sheet is in good position from a liquidity and capital standpoint to be ready for any economic volatility. We have very limited broker deposits and very limited wholesale borrowings of any kind. Our loan to deposit ratio remained low and was unchanged at 82% this quarter, with a solid end-of-period deposit growth. Our CET1 ratio was flat at 13.4% and remains a source of strength for the bank. On page 8, we look at capital in more detail. As I mentioned, our CET1 ratio was 13.4% and our TCE was also flat at 9.92%. We were active in our buyback again in the first quarter. buying back $37 million in shares, which equated to 1.1 million shares in the quarter, or just under 1% of our shares outstanding. Moving on to spread income on page nine, spread income was down in Q1 mainly due to having two less days in the quarter. On a year-over-year basis, our spread income was up 10%. Our net interest margin increased three basis points in the quarter, to 3.65% and up 29 basis points compared to last year. And the first quarter is the fifth quarter in a row of margin expansion. We continue to experience a margin tailwind from our back book repricing and from the mixed change towards loans away from securities. In the next year, using just maturities, we have about $1.4 billion of assets paying down in the 4.63% range. And because of this continued impact, I would expect the margin to be up between three and five basis points in the second quarter. Moving to page 10, non-interest income was $43.7 million in the quarter. This included a $5.2 million gain on an interest rate cap that was hedging a sub-debt issuance that we intend to redeem on April 30th. Excluding the cap gain, Non-interest income benefited from a strong mortgage quarter and was offset by seasonally lower service charges. And we opted to sell less Navitas loans than usual. Last quarter, we sold $41.6 million in Navitas loans compared to $8.3 million this quarter. Our gap expenses were $157.3 million in the first quarter, and our operating expenses were $151.6 million. We had a small amount of our normal merger charges, but we had two more unusual and offsetting non-operating expenses. First, we had fully accrued for the FDIC special assessment that came after the Silicon Valley failures. That said, the FDIC refilled its fund faster than expected and is not asking for the full assessment. We had taken the original assessment as a non-operating loss, and so the release of the assessment of $1.9 million comes through non-operating as well. We also had another non-operating charge in the first quarter related to a change in our payroll process necessitated by changes in legislation. We had paid our employees on a current basis, and we changed this to paying our employees in arrears. As a result of the transition in payroll timing, some of our employees would have gone nearly a month without a paycheck. so we paid an additional check to bridge the gap. Besides the one-timers, expenses were $151.6 million, relatively flat compared to the fourth quarter. Moving to credit quality on page 12, net charge-offs were 22 basis points in the quarter, improved from last quarter and flat to last year. We also saw relatively flat NPAs and a nice improvement in past dues as credit quality remained strong. I will finish on the quarterly results on page 13 with the allowance for credit losses. Our loan loss provision was $10.9 million in the quarter, which was in line with our net charge-offs. With the loan growth, our allowance coverage of credit losses moved down slightly to 1.15%. With that, I'll pass it back to Len.