OceanFirst Financial Corp. (NASDAQ:OCFC) Q2 2022 Earnings Conference Call July 29, 2022 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Jill Hewitt - SVP & IR

Christopher Maher - Chairman & CEO

Joseph Lebel - President & COO

Conference Call Participants

Michael Perito - KBW

David Bishop - Hovde Group

Matthew Breese - Stephens Inc.

Manuel Navas - D.A. Davidson

Operator

Good morning. Thank you for attending today's OceanFirst Financial Corp. Earnings Conference Call. My name is Bethany, and I'll be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions-and-answers at the end. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Jill Hewitt with OceanFirst Financial Corp. Please go ahead.

Jill Hewitt

Thank you, Bethany. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us. I'm Jill Hewitt, Senior Vice President and Investor Relations Officer at OceanFirst Financial Corp. We still -- we will begin this morning's call with our forward-looking statement disclosure. Please remember that many of our remarks today contain forward-looking statements based on current expectations. We refer to our press release and other public filings including the risk factors in our 10-K, where you will find factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements.

Thank you. And now, I will turn the call over to our host, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Christopher Maher.

Christopher Maher

Thank you, Jill, and good morning to all, who've been able to join our second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. This morning, I'm joined by our President, Joe Lebel; and our Chief Financial Officer, Pat Barrett. You may recall Pat joined our team in April and resumed his role as Chief Financial Officer on June 2, upon the retirement of Mike Fitzpatrick. So this is Pat's first quarterly earnings season with us.

As always, we appreciate your interest in our performance and are pleased to discuss our results with you. This morning, we'll provide brief remarks about the financial and operating performance for the quarter and then provide some color regarding the outlook for our business. As a reminder, in addition to the earnings release issued last night, an investor presentation is also available on our company's website. We may refer to those slides during the call. After our discussion, we look forward to taking your questions.

Our financial results for the second quarter included GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.47. Earnings reflect strong loan growth, expanding margins and benign credit conditions. Core earnings were $0.59 per share and reflect non-core items primarily related to unrealized equity mark-to-market valuation adjustments on preferred stock positions and to a lesser extent charges related to branch closures and mergers.