First Financial Bancorp. (NASDAQ:FFBC) Q1 2022 Results Conference Call April 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

Scott Siefers - Piper Sandler

Daniel Tamayo - Raymond James

Terry McEvoy - Stephens

Chris McGratty - KBW

Jon Arfstrom - RBC

Operator

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

I now have the pleasure of handing the call over to our host, Scott Crawley from First Financial Bancorp. Please go ahead, Scott.

Scott Crawley

Thank you. Good morning, and thank you, Emily. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss First Financial Bancorp first quarter 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 first 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 March 31, 2022, and we will not be updating any forward-looking statements to reflect facts or circumstances after this call.

I'll now turn it over to Archie Brown.

Archie Brown

Thanks, Scott. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call. Yesterday afternoon, we announced our financial results for the first quarter. Before I turn the call over to Jamie to discuss those results in greater detail, I'm going to provide a few comments on our performance.

Like others in the industry, our recent quarter was impacted by revenue pressures from rising mortgage rates and the wind-down of PPP. Despite these challenges, the first quarter was in line with our expectations and a good start to what we expect will be a very strong year. For the quarter, we achieved adjusted earnings per share of $0.46, a 1.09% return on average assets and a 15.75% return on average tangible common equity. These results were driven by a provision recapture of $5.8 million, resulting from strong credit quality trends, stable economic conditions and then prudent expense management.