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. Thank you. 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 and CEO of Kearny Financial Corp. and Kearny Bank, and I will act as the chairperson of today's meeting. On behalf of the directors and officers of the company, I would like to welcome you and express my appreciation for your participation in this virtual meeting today. First, I'd like to recognize our chairman, John J. Mazur, Jr., and the full board of directors who've joined me today. I'd also like to acknowledge our executive team, who is also in attendance. And lastly, I would also like to acknowledge Gail Corrigan, our corporate secretary, who will act as the secretary of the annual meeting, and others present today, including Adele Forsythe from Computershare, Marc 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 icons in the upper right-hand 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 Adele Forsythe from Computershare to act as the Inspector of Election at this meeting and any adjournments. The inspector has taken an oath to fairly and impartially perform her duties. The oath of the inspector will be attached to the meeting, oh, excuse me, the minutes of this meeting. The records of the company show that there were 64,579,683 shares of common stock outstanding on the record date of August 19, 2024, and entitled to vote at this annual meeting. We have previously received an affidavit from the secretary that a notice of internet availability of proxy materials stating the place, the date and hour of the annual meeting, and the purpose of which has been called, was mailed out on or about September sixth, 2024. To each stockholder of record on the close of business of August 19, 2024. A copy of the affidavit will be attached to the minutes of this meeting. The company has delivered the inspector, the list of stockholders, and all proxies that have been received. Our records indicate that more than a majority of shares of common stock outstanding entitled to vote at this meeting are present in person or by proxy. The inspector is making an exact count and will submit formal report on the number of shares present and represented during the course of the meeting. Based on a preliminary count, a 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's notice of annual meeting, is to consider and act upon three proposals outlined in the proxy statement. Since no stockholder proposals were properly filed with the company secretary in advance of the annual meeting, as provided in the bylaws, the business of this meeting is limited to the foregoing three matters in accordance with the bylaws. At the conclusion of the discussion of the three items, we'll take a vote on all items. I will then make a presentation on the operation of the company and will provide an 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 vote upon is the election of John N. Hopkins, Catherine A. Lawton, Craig L. Montanaro, and Leopold W. Montanaro as directors of the company, each for a three-year term. The second item of business to be voted upon in the proposals: to ratify the appointment of Crowe LLP as the independent auditor for the company for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025. The final proposal to be considered is a non-binding advisory vote to approve compensation paid to our executive officers, as described in the proxy statement. Information about our executive compensation is contained in the proxy statement. Okay. Since there are no questions, this concludes the discussion of 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 react, or excuse me, recast your vote. Online voting is now closed. While a ballot is being finalized and confirmed, I will provide an update on the company matters. This presentation we are about to make contains both forward-looking statements about the company as well as non-GAAP financial measures. We refer to the information regarding forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures on page 20 of our presentation, which is posted on the website. All right, well, we'll start with slide number one. As you can see, this is the company overview. As most of you know, we trade on the Nasdaq KRNY, founded in eighteen eighty-four. Our assets this year are roughly $7.7 billion. Loans, $5.7 billion. Deposits, $5.2 billion. TBV or tangible book value, $9.90, and market cap as of the thirtieth of September was $443 million. Top ten New Jersey-based financial institution of assets and deposits. Forty-three service branches in twelve counties, including New Jersey and New York. We've been an active acquirer. We've done seven acquisitions since nineteen ninety-nine, and our focus has always been to help our clients and help our community. Here's, this is an interesting slide. This is our celebration montage. As you can see, some old pictures. We thought we'd share it with you for some of you folks that are big Kearny clients for a long time. You can see the middle picture and the top picture, that's the Kearny office, which is, the original office. It's now a little bigger than it was. The top right-hand corner is kind of funny, and that's a picture of our drive up, and we advertised that back in the day. Actually, in my prior life, we did the same thing. I found a similar picture, and then the last piece on this statement that's pretty interesting is that's a statement of conditions when we were a mutual company. We used to produce that on an annual basis, and all mutuals still do that today. A little more chronological information on our 140-year milestone this year. Obviously, 1884, we were founded. You can see we received our federal charter in 1941, and we did a bunch of acquisitions, South Bergen, Pulaski, West Essex. We did our first step, raising $218 million in 2005. We did a couple more acquisitions. We did the Central Jersey acquisition, the Atlantic Bank acquisition. We've grown the foundation, thankfully, to you folks who allowed us to do that. The $10 billion was put in a corpus in 2015. We completed this, our second step, $717 million stock offering in 2015. Then in 2017, we converted our charter. We did a couple more deals, Clifton and then Millington, and most recently, we introduced Private Client, which has done very, very well in 2021, and the investment service corporation, which continues to do very well. Fiscal year 2024 accomplishments. You know, it was, it's been a real challenging environment, as you know, with the inverted yield curve. I think really our focus has really been to do three things, and you can see it on the left-hand side, which is: support earnings, mitigate market risk, and position ourselves for the future. During the year, we repositioned the investment portfolio, and retired some high-cost funding and reinvested in higher-yield loans. We restructured our BOLI insurance portfolio. We executed a non-performing note sale, and we continued to really focus on outsourcing and optimizing our efficiency ratio. We looked at vendor spending. And then last but not least, we did a hedging program with the goal of stabilizing margin, and I think that's something you're going to see us continue to do, and most community banks continue to do that. One of my favorite pages is our digital transformation process this year. I talk a little bit in my letter about it. We launched our new mobile platform, and while it was slightly different, it really is a great platform, and I really think if you haven't had a chance to use it, you should try. It is as good as the big banks. It is simple to log in. You can use it on a tablet, on a mobile device. It's state-of-the-art, amazing product. We also launched through Q2, as you can see their logo there, our Gro product, which is our online account opening product. And that, again, also is amazingly fast, as good as the big banks. You can open an account very, very quickly. It's very efficient and, again, best of breed on that side. Going forward, I think you'll continue to see us, you know, invest in technology. That's where the business is going. And, you know, from tools for clients, but also from an efficiency standpoint, you know, eliminating manual processes is so important and getting people to use, you know, think about things and, you know, do different things as opposed to just doing manual process. You can see some of the partners that we have with the bank. You can see a couple ones I'll mention, which are interesting. Verafin, that's our BSA/AML platform. You've heard a lot of things about BSA/AML issues at bigger banks. That platform is state-of-the-art, fantastic. We're very pleased with it, and I think it is. It's really doing us a great service. The other piece that I think is kind of neat is the Mortgage Messaging. If you want to apply for a mortgage with us and you don't want to talk to somebody, you can just use it, our mortgage messaging platform. It's texting, and you can text your, your mortgage rep or the underwriter to see where your loan is going. Fiscal year strategic initiatives. So over the last couple of years, we've really focused on growing, you know, CRE, multifamily. I think now we're really focused on making a mix change on our asset side, in particular, C&I, owner occ CRE, construction, HELOC. All of these things will help support margin and, you know, help with interest rate risk. We're also going to broaden our footprint. We'll probably do some mortgage banking, out of the New York market, probably toward the Carolinas. The other goal there is really to deepen our relationships. We really feel that there's enough customer contact that we can grow our business just by growing our wallet share of our different clients. And our teams are really focused on using data analytics and doing really cross-marketing to our existing clients. Continue to focus. Can you go back? Thanks. That's all right. Continue to focus on operational efficiency and technology. I think that's a big thing. We've been doing it. We continue to do it. You know, we'll talk a little bit about AI in the future, but AI is going to bring things to the next level. Growth fee revenue, interchange. We really focused this year on trying to grow our interchange fee through our card base. Been working with Mastercard on that. And our investment service business is growing, and it continues to grow. We've gotten accolades from our partners, and I think we'll continue to be, you know, that's really a service that I think our customers enjoy. Lastly, again, digital products, that Q2 product that we talk about, that is they have an ecosystem that is unmatched, and we'll provide products and tools for both our clients and business customers position for earning growth in a declining rate environment. I think, you know, we know that hopefully the Fed is done with raising rates, and now he's going to start lowering rates. You know, we've been a liability-sensitive company for a while. So right now, I think we've been very direct and been very forward about positioning ourselves for rate cuts and the curve normalization. You know, we have a lot of core deposits that should reprice more rapidly than our assets reprice because they're fixed rate in nature. So we've been very disciplined on that, not to, you know, not to forget that, you know, the curve will normalize, and that will improve our profitability. On the asset quality side, you know, we've had a couple of quarters where the focuses have been on commercial real estate, office, and so forth. We have a very minimal exposure to this New York City office market, and on the rent-regulated piece, multifamily in particular, it's a very small percentage. I think 6% of our New York multifamily is rent-regulated. The rest is market-rate rents. Historical net charge-offs to average loans has always been very low. We've been lower than our peers, and that's really our credit culture. I attribute to that, to that, and that will continue. Operating efficiency, we are very disciplined on costs, optimizing resources, and that is gonna continue. I think going forward, the spends will be on people that make the cash register ring and business development people and technology, and we'll really continue to focus on cost. A good example of that, as you can see, is we use RPA or robotic process automation, which are basically bots. We have a bot on our website that learns and can take you to different spots on the website if you ask it questions. And we use bots to do manual processes and automate them from manual processes to automation. And AI, we're just dipping our fingers into AI. Lots to figure out there, but I think a lot of our software that you saw on the last page has AI embedded in it. I mean, AI, AI has been around a very long time, so I think you'll see us do more with AI going forward. Take a look at the highlights, the earnings. As I said, the yield curve brought on by the Federal Reserve has been a real challenging for us. The last two years have been pressuring our margin, and most community banks have seen that pressure, some more and some less. If you look to the chart on the last slide, our GAAP earnings for 2024 was a loss of $86.7 million. From a GAAP basis on EPS is $1.39. But if you adjust it out for our goodwill impairment, which, you know, unfortunately happened sometime in June, 95.3 million, you get roughly adjusted earnings of 28.2 million or $0.45 a share. The thing to note about goodwill is it's really an accounting entry. It has no basis or no effect on tangible book value, which is important. Regulatory capital or liquidity position. It's unfortunate it happens, but the timing of our stock price and our goodwill analysis just didn't go in our way. So, you know, we had to, you know, recognize that non-cash charge. You can see our net interest income for the year was $142 million. Our capital ratio is still strong, 14.79%, and our funding, $7.7 billion in assets, $5.2 billion in deposits, and net $5.7 billion in loans. Overall, common equity 4.79% as of June thirtieth has remained well above regulatory minimums. This is a really good slide on asset quality. You can see our track record. In the picture, you can see there are three big economic events, you know, the global financial crisis, the hurricane, and COVID-19. And if you look, that, the dotted line are not the top hundred banks, but more community banks. That's where their charge-off or their net charge-offs occurred over the last from 2006 - 2024. As you can see, pretty much our line, the gold line is the Kearny line, is well below that, or at least below it, that's really our credit culture. That's really being conservative and underwriting kind of the old-fashioned way, whether people like it or not. I think it's served us well, and there's a little note here that, you know, including all those things, our average charge-off for the period, if you do it on an annual basis, is nine basis points, where it's fifty basis points for the commercial banks that are not among the top one hundred. So, you know, that's been really good for us. I think it's gonna continue. You saw some good results this year, and I'm very proud of what we do on the credit side. Some financial metrics. If you look at the top left corner, you can look at our equity capitalization, and you can see, you know, back in 2019, we roughly had equity to assets around 16%... really 17%. Tangible equity to tangible assets around 14%. Fast-forward down to 2024, tangible equity to tangible assets, 8.43%, and equity to assets, 9.81%. So we've been really good stewards of capital. We've leveraged it down through growth and buybacks and dividends. And I think our capital levels are really pretty normalized and right around where our peers are. So I think, you know, that bodes well for us. If you continue to talk about capital and take a look at what we've returned to us and all of us on the line as shareholders, you can see back in 2019, we cumulative $502 million, $69 million in divs and $433 million in buybacks. If you fast-forward to 2024, just a shade under a billion dollars, $209 million in dividends, $709 million dollars in buybacks. And if you think about this, and I was thinking about this on my way in this morning, we have returned more capital or, yes, more capital to our shareholders than both our first and second step. So I think we've been excellent stewards of capital. I think it's something to be proud of, and I think we'll continue to focus on that in the near future. Let's take a look at deposits. Obviously, this is really the story of the day. This is what's created pressure for us and challenges. You can see, we saw some shrinkage on the deposit side. You saw non-interest-bearing shrink up a smidgen, which is good, because a lot of the other community banks that our peers saw a larger percentage of non-interest-bearing shrink and move into interest-bearing accounts. So a little growth on the interest-bearing DDA from 2,253 - 2,309. And then, you know, we saw pressure on savings, not unusual for this environment, and we also saw pressure on the CD side. Now we'll move over to the right side, look at loans. Slight shrinkage in loans year-over-year. You could see, you saw shrinkage, which is really designed, is on the multifamily increase side. We really tried to focus away from multifamily, and obviously has really nothing to do with the news. It's just something that we're starting to remix the assets. I think our multifamily business's underwriting is solid, and our portfolio is good, but we're going to move away from that. We're going to focus really on, you know, the home equity, the one to four family construction and C&I buckets. That's really where we're going to push over the next couple of years. Final couple of slides. The Kearny Bank Foundation, as I mentioned to you, in the previous slide, we got $10 million as a part of the second step. We've been really using it judiciously. We really feel that the edge as a community bank that we have over the big banks is what we do in the community. As you can see, last year, or in between last year and this year, we gave out roughly $735,000 to local charities in New York and New Jersey. And over the past five calendar years, it's roughly $3.6 million. It's been tremendous for us. You know, we all work and live in the communities that we give this money to, and I think it's important. It's the one edge we have as a community bank. You can see our focus is really on education. And in particular, we gave Junior Achievement of New Jersey $140,000. That is... Junior Achievement is one of the best organizations in the state. We help inner city kids with all kinds of things, get them into college, provide jobs for them. It's just a tremendous organization, and the whole entire bank is involved in New Jersey Junior Achievement. On the housing front, obviously, we do a lot of work with Habitat for Humanity, which is great, emergency housing. The community betterment, arts, culture, and stewardship. We do a lot of things with all these areas. I think it's really important not to forget the arts and the social programs. They're so critical to our children's future. And finally, the quality of life. One of my favorite things is we help seniors, veterans, and the disabled. I think a lot of the things on the veteran side gets lost, and I think that's sad, so we really push that piece. Almost to the end. Corporate responsibility, the company released the highlights, and we just released our highlights for our ESG, Environmental, Social, and Governance piece. Obviously, we've talked about a hundred and forty years of service in our communities. We launched our first employee survey just to measure our employees to see if we're doing right by them in terms of job opportunities, pay, and all these other things. It was tremendous results and, you know, our employees are very dedicated, and I want to thank them today for all of their efforts. Finally, one of the pieces that we've been focused on is Kearny Bank ChangeMakers. It's a great group of women that meet with business women in the industry and outside, and they talk about things to help their business, leadership, technology, all kinds of things. It's really a great program. So, we've really been working hard on corporate responsibility, you know, including environmental. We're working on reducing our carbon footprint, you know, and our responsible business practices. We really think our fiduciary responsibility is important. We really strive to do what's morally and ethically right, as a company, and, you know, our staff does as well. Non-GAAP reconciliation, you can see that's where we got the $0.45 this year at the bottom, compared to the GAAP $0.78. That you could take a look at, but, you know, we're not going to go through that. All right, I'm going to open it up to questions. At this point, Craig, there's no questions that are relevant to the business of the meeting. Okay. Let's take a look. Since there are no questions, I'm gonna ask the inspector, has the inspector completed her count and now report the 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 votes cast at the annual meeting. 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, 2025, received the affirmative vote of at least a majority of the shares cast at the annual meeting, and 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 at the annual meeting. Accordingly, each of the four 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 and report of the inspector of election has been accepted and approved and will be attached to the minutes of the annual meeting. Again, on behalf of the directors and the officers of Kearny Financial Corporation, I'd like to thank you all for your participation in today's meeting and your interest you've shown in the affairs of the company. This meeting is adjourned. This concludes the meeting. You may now disconnect.