First Financial Bancorp. (NASDAQ:FFBC) Q2 2022 Earnings Conference Call July 22, 2022 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Scott Crawley - Corporate Controller

Archie Brown - President and CEO

Jamie Anderson - CFO

Bill Harrod - Chief Credit Officer

Conference Call Participants

Chris McGratty - KBW

Scott Siefers - Piper Sandler

Daniel Tamayo - Raymond James

Jon Arfstrom - RBC Capital Markets

Terry McEvoy - Stephens

Operator

Hello, and welcome to the First Financial Bancorp Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. My name is Breaka [ph], and I'll be coordinating the call today. [Operator Instructions]

I now have the pleasure of handing the call over to our host, Scott [technical difficulty]. Please go ahead.

Scott Crawley

Thanks, Breaka. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss First Financial Bancorp second quarter and year-to-date 2022 financial results. Participating on today's call will be Archie Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer; Jamie Anderson, Chief Financial Officer; and Bill Harrod, Chief Credit Officer.

Both the press release we issued yesterday and the accompanying slide presentation are available on our website at www.bankatfirst.com under the Investor Relations section. We'll make reference to the slides contained in the accompanying presentation during today's call.

Additionally, please refer to the forward-looking statement disclosure contained in the second quarter 2022 earnings release as well as our SEC filings for a full discussion of the Company's risk factors. The information we will provide today is accurate as of June 30, 2022, and we will not be updating any forward-looking statements to reflect facts or circumstances after this call.

I will now turn it over to Archie Brown.

Archie Brown

Thank you, Scott. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's call. Yesterday afternoon we announced our financial results for the second quarter. Before I turn the call over to Jamie to discuss those results in greater detail, I'm going to say a few words regarding the quarter. I'm extremely pleased with our performance in the recent period, which was highlighted by a rapidly expanding margin, strong loan growth and exceptional [indiscernible].

For the quarter, we achieved adjusted earnings per share of $0.56, a 1.31% return on average assets and a 21.26% return on average tangible common equity. Earnings improved from the first quarter as our asset sensitive balance sheet was positively impacted by recent rate increases. In addition, credit quality was stable with lower net charge-offs and nonaccrual loan balances. This led to a small provision recapture for the quarter.