Webster Financial Corporation

good morning welcome to the third quarter 2025 webster financial corp earnings call please note this event is being recorded i would now like to introduce webster's director of investor relations emlyn harman to introduce the call mr harman please go ahead good morning before we begin our remarks i want to remind you that comments made by management may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the private securities litigation reform act of 1995

and are subject to the Safe Harbor rules. Please review the forward-looking disclaimer in Safe Harbor language in today's press release and presentation for more information about risks and uncertainties which may affect us. The presentation accompanying management's remarks can be found on the company's investor relations site at investors.websterbank.com. For the Q&A portion of the call, we ask that each participant ask just one question and one follow-up before returning to the queue. I'll now turn the call over to Webster Financial CEO, John Sciulla.

Thanks, Emlyn. Good morning and welcome to Webster Financial Corp's third quarter 2025 earnings call. We appreciate you joining us this morning. I'm going to start with a recap of our results. Our President and Chief Operating Officer, Luis Massiani, is going to provide an update on developments in our operating segments, and our CFO, Neil Holland, will provide additional detail on financials before my closing remarks and Q&A. Highlights for the third quarter are provided on slide two of our earnings presentation. Our results were strong. with a return on tangible common equity of 18 percent, ROA of nearly 1.3 percent, and growth in both loans and deposits of over 2 percent linked quarter. Overall revenue grew 2.3 percent over the prior quarter. In aggregate, Webster's results this quarter reflect how our strategic position fuels our performance, including diverse balance sheet growth while maintaining substantial liquidity and conservative credit positioning. Robust profitability is supported by a unique business mix and capital generation that supplements organic earnings growth opportunities. More specifically, loan growth was driven by diversity of categories with all of our portfolios increasing this quarter. Deposit growth was also diverse as we grew the commercial and healthcare financial services books in addition to regular seasonal growth in our public funds business. Webster's capital generation is a distinct strategic advantage. We repurchased 2.2 million shares, or 1.4% of the outstanding shares, at the end of the second quarter. At the same time, tangible book value grew 3.7% over the prior quarter. We continue to see the inflection point in asset quality that we projected at the onset of the year. Importantly, criticized loans were down over 7%, with non-accrual loans essentially flat. Charge-offs of 28 basis points remain near the bottom of our anticipated normalized range of 25 to 35 basis points, and our provision of $44 million is down modestly from last quarter, even as we built slightly more conservative macroeconomic scenarios into our loan loss reserve modeling. As we look to the future, despite recent market volatility, macro tailwinds for the banking industry are building, and we're in a good position to benefit. Loan growth remains solid, and we are seeing opportunities to originate assets with appealing risk-reward characteristics, as we did this quarter. As always, we point to the diversity of our deposit generation on slide three, which is a key factor supporting the balance sheet as activity accelerates. We continue to see indications of a more appropriate regulatory tailoring, which should, over time, allow us to allocate resources towards activity-appropriate risk management practices. While we remain vigilant, Tariffs and labor market uncertainty are not significantly impacting the credit performance of our loan portfolio, and we are not seeing pockets of correlated credit risk emerging. We'll also stay on our front foot in terms of business development opportunities for our existing segments. I'll now turn it over to Luis to review developments in our operating segments this quarter, including an update on commercial banking activity, the Affordable Care Act, opportunity for HSA Bank, and our credit joint venture with Merida.