First Financial Bancorp (NASDAQ:FFBC) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call October 25, 2023 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Scott Crawley - Corporate Controller

Archie Brown - President & Chief Executive Officer

Jamie Anderson - Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer

Bill Harrod - Chief Credit Officer

Conference Call Participants

Daniel Tamayo - Raymond James

Terry McEvoy - Stephens

Jon Arfstrom - RBC Capital Markets

Christopher McGratty - KBW

Operator

Good morning and welcome to the First Financial Bancorp Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. My name is Brianna and I will be your conference operator today. Please note that this call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to Scott Crawley, Corporate Controller. Please go ahead.

Scott Crawley

Thank you, Brianna. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss First Financial Bancorp's third quarter and year-to-date 2023 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 third quarter 2023 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 September 30, 2023 and we will not be updating any forward-looking statements to reflect facts or circumstances after this call.

I'll now turn the call over to Archie Brown.

Archie Brown

Thank you, Scott. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us on today's call. Yesterday afternoon, we announced our financial results for the third quarter. I'll first provide some high-level thoughts on our recent performance and then turn the call over to Jamie to discuss further details. Overall, I'm pleased with our third quarter performance, strong net interest income and robust fee income led to a 13% increase in net income from the third quarter of 2022.

In our most recent quarter, we achieved adjusted earnings per share of $0.67, a 1.49% return on average assets, a 23.8% return on average tangible common equity. As expected, higher deposit costs led to a slight reduction in earnings on a linked-quarter basis. Even so, our net interest margin was 4.33% for the quarter which was at the high end of our expectations.