Good morning, and welcome to the annual meeting of stockholders of Kearny Financial Corp. Please note that today's meeting is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to Craig Montanaro, Director, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Kearny Financial Corp. Mr. Montanaro, the floor is yours. Good morning. The annual meeting will please come to order. Welcome to the annual meeting of stockholders of Kearny Financial Corp. My name is Craig Montanaro, President, CEO of Kearny Financial Corp. and Kearny Bank, and I will act as chairperson of today's meeting. On behalf of the directors, officers of the company, I would like to welcome you and express my appreciation to you for participating in this virtual meeting today. First, I'd like to recognize John J. Mazur Jr. and the full board of directors who joined me today on the phone. I'd also like to acknowledge our executive team, who is also in attendance on the phone. I would also like to acknowledge Gail Corrigan, our corporate secretary, who will act as the secretary of the annual meeting. Others present today include Amilja Regan from Computershare, Mark Levy, Esquire from Luse Gorman, and Andre Dragun from Crowe LLP. In order to conduct an orderly meeting, please follow the rules of conduct, a copy of which is available on this portal. During the meeting, you may submit written questions by clicking Q&A icon in the upper right-hand corner of the portion of the meeting center screen. We will address all questions that relate to business matters conducted at this meeting immediately following our presentation of the proposals. The board of directors has previously appointed Amilja Regan from Computershare to act as the Inspector of Elections in this meeting and adjournaments. The inspector has taken an oath to fairly and impartially perform her duties. An oath of the inspector will be attached to the minutes of this meeting. The records of the company show that there were 65,145,639 shares of common stock outstanding as of the record date August 28, 2023, entitled to vote at this annual meeting. We have previously received an affidavit from the secretary that a notice of internet availability of proxy stating the place, day, and hour of the annual meeting, and the purpose of which has been called, was mailed on or about September 15 to each stockholder of record at the close of business on August 28, 2023. A copy of the affidavit will be attached to the minutes of this meeting. The company has delivered to the inspector the list of stockholders and all proxies that have been received. Our records indicate that more than a majority of the shares of common stock outstanding, entitled to vote at the meeting, are present in person or by proxy. The inspector is making an exact count and will submit a formal report on the number of shares present or represented during the course of the meeting. Based on a preliminary count, the quorum is declared present, subject to the confirmation of that fact by the inspector's report. The business to be acted upon at the annual meeting, as stated in the proxy statement, notice of annual meeting, is to consider and act upon three proposals as outlined in the proxy statement. Since no stockholder proposals were properly filed with the company secretary in advance of this meeting, as provided in the bylaws, the business of the meeting is limited to the foregoing three matters in accordance with the bylaws. At the conclusion of the discussion of few items, we'll take a vote on all items. I will then make a presentation on the operations of the company and will provide opportunity to address questions following my presentation. We will consider the proposals in order presented in the notice of annual meeting. The first item of business to be voted upon is the election of Theodore Aanensen, Curtland E. Fields, Joseph P. Mazza, Charles Pivirotto, John F. Regan as directors of the company for a three-year term. Melvina Wong-Zaza for a two-year term, as described in the proxy statement. The second item of business to be voted upon is the proposal to ratify the appointment of Crowe LLP as the independent auditor for the company for the fiscal year June 30, 2020. The final proposal to be considered in a non-binding advisory vote to approve the compensation paid to our executive officers as described in the proxy statement. Information about executive compensation is contained in the proxy statement. Questions? No questions. No, none. Since there are no questions, this concludes the discussion on all business matters. Any stockholder who wishes to vote or recast their vote at this time may do so by clicking on the link provided online. If you have already voted, there is no need for you to recast your vote. All right. Online voting is now closed. While the ballot is being finalized and confirmed, I will provide an update on company matters. The presentation we're about to make contains both forward-looking statements about the company as well as non-GAAP financial measures. We refer to this information regarding forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures on page 8 of our presentation. The presentation is posted on our website. Okay, so we'll take a look at Kearny as it stands as of June 30. Roughly, we are... I'll go through the top piece. Nasdaq, we trade on the Nasdaq, KRNY. Our market cap as of, let me say, it's October 12, was $442 million. Founded in 1884, top 10 New Jersey-based financial institution. We have 43 full-service branches in 12 counties throughout New York and New Jersey, and we've been an active acquirer for seven whole bank acquisitions since 1999. Here's a picture of our corporate history. We added this a few years ago. It's really a good picture. It kind of shows the progression of the company since 1884. You can see, founded in 1884 in Kearny. We obtained our charter in 1941. And, you know, prior to that, we did a bunch of acquisitions, South Bergen, Pulaski, West Essex. We did our first step, then a couple more acquisitions, Central Jersey, Atlas, our second step, and then, Clifton and Millington. And then more recently, something we added to this is the introduction of the private client service group in 2021, and also the establishment of our investment services program. Take a look at our financial highlights for 2023. As you can see, net income for the year was $40.8 million on an adjusted net income basis, $50.6 million, $0.63 GAAP, and adjusted $0.78. Definitely a challenging year, with the yield curve. An inverted yield curve just creates a lot of challenges for most financial institutions, and, you know, we're no different. During the year, we developed a couple strategies to manage the margin compression. Like, as you can see on the chart above, we reduced some interest rate sensitivity by adding $675 million of fair value asset swaps. We hedged about $700 million in borrowings. We also did, as you probably remember, in the second quarter, we did a wholesale restructuring. We sold $121 million of securities and reinvested them at an average yield of 440 basis points higher than they were. We purchased $100 million in securities and did a little leverage play and produced another 216 basis point spread. One of the bigger initiatives is we did a realignment of our workforce. We consolidated two branches, and we are really focused on managing expenses day-to-day at Kearny. We continue to use technology to manage our overhead. Take a look at equity capitalization. As you can see, we've been levering capital since our conversion in 2015. This is a five-year look back, so you can see on the top piece, equity to assets, a little under 17% in 2019, with tangible equity and tangible assets, 14%. As you can track down the line, you can see we're down to about 10.7% equity to assets or about 8.35% of tangible equity to tangible assets, which is, you know, kind of where we should be. We're getting... You know, we've finally gotten there. If you look at our regulatory capital ratios, again, pretty strong. You can see 9% Tier 1 leverage compared to the S&P U.S. small cap banks at 9.59%. And on common equity Tier 1, over 14%, Tier 1 risk-based over 14%, and total risk-based over 14%. So strong capital ratios and, you know, we're, we're hovering around where we should be, I think, personally, from an equity standpoint and a capitalization standpoint. Take a look at capital management. As I mentioned prior, we've been levering capital for a while. If you look at this chart, this is a continuation from last year. We'll start off on the left side. 2019, we returned a total amount of capital, up to 2019, about $502 million, $69 million in NIBs, and $433 million in repurchases. As you go up the line, you can see every year we've continued to repurchase, pay more dividends as our earnings have improved. You can see we're up to roughly almost $100, 960,000,000 in capital returned to us as shareholders, $181 million in dividends and $779 million in repurchases. There's a little footnote here, $2.8 million in shares repurchased in fiscal 2023 at an average price of $9.73, which is, which is very good. Take a little more granular look at the earnings performance. As you can see, we have pretty good trend line all the way to 2022. And with the yield curve inverting, you know, that certainly put pressure on us, and most people in the financial service business. You see, on an EPS basis, we made $0.63 in 2023, on an adjusted basis, $0.78. I will tell you that we are doing everything we can on the earnings front to manage expenses. We've done a bunch of things in terms of looking at verticals from the medical field, the dental field, the veterinarian field, nonprofits, to grow non-interest-bearing deposits, because that seems to be the key in helping, you know, the margin compression. On the loan front, continue to focus on construction, small business, and even some residential mortgages. We've been doing some more residential lending, believe it or not, and the yields are pretty good there, so we're going to continue to do that. More recently, we launched a corporate banking group, you'll read a little more about over the coming months. Their goal is to come out and, you know, grow non-interest-bearing deposits, which is, which in this environment would be great if we could pay down some of our borrowers and use those, that funding to pay them down, I think would be very beneficial to our margin. So those are kind of the strategies we are looking at. I mean, we're looking at everything under the sun on a daily basis. Take a look at our deposits. If you look at the left-hand, chart, you can see year-to-date cost of deposits for 2023 was 1.47. You can see the biggest portion of our deposit composition is interest-bearing DDA. The second is, retail CDs. We're seeing retail CDs grow more. In this environment, with the inverted yield curve, there's a lot of pressure on CD pricing. Most banks have specials, and that's why we're seeing CDs grow and people gravitate back into CDs, which is interesting. 13.3% on the savings side in terms of the portion of our deposit composition. Wholesale CDs, 11.4%, and non-interest bearing, about 10.8%. Again, as I mentioned before, that's really the goal to grow those, we call them divs, non-interest bearing checking. So we hope to see that grow over the coming quarters. If you look at the growth in terms of deposit growth, you actually saw some shrinkage this year, about $233 million. And again, like I mentioned to you, the notable shifts are really movement into CDs. CD specialists have become all the rage. We've seen, you know, all the other categories, including non-interest bearing, have shrunk. We're seeing non-interest bearing shrink, among our competitors and peers. It's just the gradual yield from clients, so it's not uncommon. Take a look at our lending. Take a look at the right side of the page. You can see the yield on loans as of 6/30 was 4%. You can see the multifamily, roughly 47% of our portfolio, 1-4 is around 29%, and the other major portion is 16.6%. You can see, construction has been growing nicely. We're doing some construction business very carefully with some of the most solid developers that we find around and we've had experience with. So we're very selective on the construction piece, and that's been a big growth mechanism for us on the loan side. You can see we grew net loans 8% in fiscal 2023. You know, that's going to continue. The focus, C&I, resi, some CRE, some small business, you know, hopefully that will help, you know, help manage the margin compression. If you look at our geographic distribution, our average LTV is 61%. That means, you know, most of our properties are not very levered. I think that's really, really solid. I think that stacks up against most in the industry. If you look at from a beyond that, from more of a geographic focus, you can see roughly 35.3% of our loans are in New York, another 54% in New Jersey. We continue to see the New York market trend down and doing more lending in other areas. You see a little more in Pennsylvania, so that'll be a continued focus. Take a look at asset quality. If you take a look at the left-hand chart, you can see net charge-offs to average loans kind of bounces up and down. But overall, I think when you average out the last 5 years, it's about 2 basis points of charge-off. This year was only at 1 basis point, last year was about seven. So, you know, that's been, that's been really solid. Our special assets group has really done a great job leveraging, you know, all the strategies they can to reduce our non-performing loans. And as you can see, our non-performing loans are down to $42.6 million in 2023 from $70 million in 2022. So they've done a great job. It's been a, you know, a difficult environment with the court systems and other things, but they are continuing to improve and help us, you know, deal with the non-performing loan problems that have occurred, and, and they've lowered the NPLs nicely. Take a look at it from a non-performing assets, total asset basis. You can see 1.19% in 2022, 69 basis points in 2023. So again, good improvement there, which is important. And finally, if you look at our ACL, as of 2023, June 30, we were at $48.7 million, about 83 basis points. Interestingly enough, with all the things going on with CECL and other things, that's historically where we've been, around an 80 basis point reserve. So I think that really makes a lot of sense for where we're at right now. M&A history. Listen, there's not much to talk about on the M&A front. I think we're all focused, at least at Kearny, on managing margin and managing the profitability in this difficult environment. So that's really not a big focus right now, and it's very quiet on the M&A front all around. Selected technologies. This is a chart you saw before. I want to note one thing on the chart. Q2, we launched our mobile banking platform a couple of weeks ago. This is a new platform, not part of Fiserv, but part of a fintech company. It's a really great platform. We've gone through some, you know, initial growing pains in terms of, you know, conversions, but I think we're all through the woods now, and I think most people who are clients will enjoy Q2. It is a much better product. It has an ecosystem, and it gives us more opportunity to add tools and products for our digital banking clients. And that seems to be the direction of many of our clients, is doing more and more digital banking. One other thing I wanted to note, something here called Power Automate, robotics process automation platform. We do a lot of that. We don't hear a lot about it, but robotics process has been around a long time. We utilize it in many areas. In particular, we've used it on loan servicing to eliminate manual uploads of loans and manual processing, and these bots basically automate the process for us. We've also used it, BSA/AML, to help improve, you know, different things in BSA in terms of research and timing, because we can automate those things so people don't physically have to do it, the bot actually does it for them. So we're really focused on those two areas. ESG, great topic. If you go out to our website, we produced our ESG platform report this year. This is just the cover page. I want to welcome two of our new directors, as a part of that, appointing a director of diversity and equity and inclusion, and we're going to be implementing an energy management system for corporate headquarters as a part of our ESG program. Those are just GAAP reconciliation. Go through those. All right. There's no relevant questions in the business of data, right? Okay. Let's see. The inspector has completed a count of the vote and now reports a certificate and report of inspection of election. The report confirms that a quorum is, and has been in attendance at the annual meeting for all purposes. The report also shows that each director received more than a plurality of the votes cast. The proposal to ratify the appointment of Crowe LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm for the company for the year ending June 30, 2024, received the affirmative vote of at least the majority of the shares cast. The advisory non-binding proposal to approve our executive compensation, as described in the proxy statement, received the affirmative vote of at least a majority of the shares cast. Accordingly, each of the six directors has been elected, the proposal to ratify the appointment of Crowe LLP has been approved, and the company has received advisory approval of its executive compensation as described in the proxy statement. The certificate of report of inspector of elections has been accepted and approved and will be attached to the minutes of the annual meeting. Again, on behalf of the directors and officers of Kearny Financial Corp., I would like to thank all of you for participating in today's meeting and for the interest you have shown in the affairs of the company. This meeting is adjourned. Thank you. This concludes the meeting. You may now disconnect.