Provident Financial Services, Inc. (NYSE:PFS) Q2 2024 Results Conference Call July 26, 2024 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Adriano Duarte - Head of Investor Relations
Tony Labozzetta - President and CEO
Tom Lyons - Senior EVP, CFO

Conference Call Participants

Mark Fitzgibbon - Piper Sandler
Tim Switzer - KBW
Billy Young - RBC Capital Markets

Operator

[Call Started Abruptly] I would now like to turn the call over to Adriano Duarte, Head of Investor Relations. Adriano. Please go ahead.

Adriano Duarte

Thank you, Greg. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us for our Second Quarter Earnings Call. Today's presenters are President and CEO, Tony Labozzetta; and Senior Executive, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Tom Lyons. Before beginning the review of our financial results, we ask that you please take note of our standard caution as to any forward-looking statements that may be made during the course of today's call. Our full disclaimer is contained in yesterday evening's earnings release, which has been posted to the Investor Relations page on our website, provident.bank. Now it's my pleasure to introduce Tony Labozzetta who will offer his perspective on the second quarter. Tony?

Tony Labozzetta

Thank you, Adriano. Good morning, everyone. And welcome to the Provident Financial Services earnings call. Before we discuss our quarterly results, I am happy to note that as of the 16th of May, we closed the Provident Lakeland merger and officially welcomed the Lakeland team into Provident. We'd like to congratulate and thank our team members who have worked diligently to complete the merger. As we combine our banks and our cultures, we are excited by the opportunities to offer our expanded customer base access to our valuable products and services, especially those of our insurance, wealth management and treasury management businesses. We continue to build momentum and our team is well prepared for systems integration in September. Please bear in mind that our financial statements this quarter reflect combined results beginning on May 16th and include 1 time cost related to the merger transaction. Moving on to our quarterly results. The second quarter was characterized by steady economic growth, continued high interest rates and an environment of mixed results in the banking sector. Thanks to the efforts of the Provident team, now reinforced by talented members from the former Lakeland Bank, we continue to build our core businesses and maintain strong credit quality. We are on track to achieve our projected merger cost savings and we are well positioned for the future. As expected, we reported a net loss of $11.5 million or $0.11 per share, reflecting the impact of merger related transaction costs. If we were to exclude these expenses, earnings per diluted share would've been $0.44 for the quarter. We can see that our underlying performance remains strong as our pre-tax pre-provision return on average assets was 1.47% for the second quarter compared to 1.28% for the trailing quarter.