All right. Good afternoon, everybody. I appreciate y'all joining us today. My name is David Feaster with Raymond James. I'm a member of our bank research team here. I appreciate having Banc of California here with us today. This is the third largest bank headquartered in California, with about $33 billion in assets today, primarily focused on Southern California. The bank's a little over a year into the transformative acquisition of PacWest, and it provided significant scale and increased financial flexibility, which in their gain in share across their footprint. We're joined this morning by President and CEO Jared Wolff, Director of IR and of. We're going to host this like a fireside chat. I'm going to moderate it, but this is y'all's meeting. If you guys have questions, please jump in, interrupt us, ask. So with that, let's just jump right into it. So Jared, maybe higher level. We're 14 months post-close, completed the transformative deal with PacWest. These types of deals are not easy, right? As you well know, you've gotten through the hardest parts at this point. The integration's completed. Most of the cost saves are in. You exceeded your initial targets. Could you just touch on what are your priorities today going forward, and where are you most focused? Thank you, David, and thank you for having us. We really appreciate being here. It's quite an event, quite a conference. One of the reasons we did this transaction, and last year there was so much transformation going on, it's important now that we're growing to get back to the purpose of it, was really to fill the void that exists in California for small and medium-sized banks. Over the last 24 to 36 months, there's been a number of banks that have left the market and have created a significant opportunity for banks like ours that serve small and medium-sized business in a relationship-oriented way. If you just go down the list of the banks that are no longer there, First Republic, Silicon Valley, Signature, CIT, OneWest, PacWest, it's a significant number of banks. Silvergate is no longer there. HomeStreet, obviously, has been retreating. First Foundation, it's just a number of banks that have really exited the market and created a huge opportunity for us. California is the fifth largest economy in the world. Los Angeles is the engine that drives that economy. And we now have a significant market position. We're the largest independent bank headquartered in Los Angeles, and as you mentioned, the third largest bank headquartered in California. So our opportunity is really to take market share and become a leading business bank in that important market. Could you elaborate on that? California, Southern California, I think it's underappreciated. You read headlines. The investors I talked to, I think, underappreciate the economic strength across your footprint. Could you just touch on the pulse of the local economy from your perspective, what you're seeing, and maybe just your outlook for the state going forward? I mean, there's some pretty big major catalysts on the horizon. Yeah. So California certainly has its challenges. I'm a native Californian, and I've lived all over, but settled back there. We're not without our challenges. But for all of the rumors of its challenges and truth about some of its challenges, California is still home to more small businesses than any state in the country. More small businesses start up in California than any state in the country. It's home to more jobs than any state in the country. More venture capital is invested in California than any state in the country. So there are a lot of good things going on, specifically in Los Angeles. The Olympics are coming in three years, and the World Cup's coming in a year and a half. And so there's a lot of positive things going on. Unfortunately, we had these devastating wildfires. For those that are familiar with California, the two pockets that were most affected were the Palisades, which is at one end bordering the beach on the west side, and the other was really at the opposite end, the eastern end, Altadena, which is east of downtown Los Angeles. Those areas were devastated. But the most part of Los Angeles in the middle was not affected. After Hurricane Harvey in Houston, after Katrina in New Orleans, there was an economic boom that took place over the next several years from construction. Even though we have the Olympics coming and we have the economic boom from the World Cup, we think there might be some stimulus as well from repair from these wildfires that unfortunately happened. Maybe digging into the lending side a bit. For the past 12 months, it's been mostly focused on optimization of the balance sheet, right? That's kind of been the primary focus. Running off non-core assets, reducing wholesale funding. You made a lot of new hires. You added talent in key areas. As you're shifting towards growth, like we've discussed on the call, what are some of the key initiatives that you're focused on? Where do you see the most opportunity to drive growth near term? So our business is set up today around our commercial and community bank, which is 80 branches throughout California, Colorado, and some in North Carolina. That's in-market relationship lending through relationship lenders and regional presidents. And then we have our specialty businesses, which are not geography-based, which are our HOA business, our SBA business. We have lender finance. We have a venture business, which is capital call lines of credit, and then lending into life sciences and tech companies. And we have a warehouse business. We also have treasury management, which wraps all of that, which is our treasury management specialists helping bring in deposits anywhere in the country. So we see growth in a couple of areas. First of all, we see it in our warehouse business. At the end of last year, we were about $1.4 billion. We think that could be $2 billion by the end of the year. It'll be slow in the first quarter and then grow through it. First quarter is typically slow. We see lender finance growing. We bought back a big portfolio from Ares that we were servicing at the end of last year, and we expect that business to grow as we fill the void there. Our fund finance business has been growing as we've seen a lot of exits, a lot of positive exits. So there's more capital being reinvested, more funds being raised for AI and other purposes, and we see our fund finance business growing. And then generally in our community bank, we're seeing fairly good pipelines early this year. A couple of reasons for that. We think that there was a lack of activity last year and at the end of last year due to the election overhang, and then also the Fed's, the question was, when are they going to stop cutting rates. When those two things were resolved, there was some certainty around where we're headed politically and also the Fed's cut profile, and that stimulated some activity, so we had fourth quarter annualized growth of about 6%. We said this year we expect to see growth in the mid to upper single digits, just basically continuing that trend and maybe a little bit better than that. Kind of along the same lines, you alluded to it, right? I mean, there was a lot of uncertainty in the market. Today, you listen to the fourth quarter earnings calls. There's a lot of hope. There's a lot of optimism across the industry. Could you touch on customer sentiment from your perspective? What you're seeing? It sounds like it may have started to translate from hope and optimism into the pipeline, but just kind of curious what you're seeing there. Yeah. We're seeing people getting back to business, a little bit more business as usual, and a willingness to start reinvesting. So you can take the real estate market, for example. We have a $6 billion multifamily portfolio centered in California, all stabilized multifamily in areas that have a shortage of housing that are very dense areas that we lend into, and we also build in those areas. A lot of folks, their loans were maybe 10-year loans with five-year fixed rates. Those loans were in the fours when they were fixed. They came off their fixed rate, went into the eights, but they were not refinancing. They were waiting. They were not transacting, and we started to see an uptick of transaction activity in that portfolio specifically because people had certainty around rates, and they were willing to start fixing their rates again. And so that's an example of some of the optimism and certainty that we're seeing. I would say in other areas, generally, we're seeing revolving line of credit utilization really hit a low for about the last 18 months last year, and we're starting to see a little bit of uptick in that as well. We have a lot of fund finance commitments that have not been utilized that we expect to see utilized in the coming year. Could you touch on, we touched on, we were talking about yesterday, the payoffs and paydowns, right? Just being an indicator of economic activity. Could you just touch on the competitive landscape a little bit? Where are you seeing competition come from, and where are you winning business? So the comment that we were talking about yesterday with payoffs and paydowns is that one of the things that happened last year is that payoff activity was much slower than expected. So we were left with a lower yielding portfolio than we anticipated. And obviously, on the lending side, loan growth was slower than expected. So you have fewer new loans that you're originating at higher yields, and you're left with a lot of loans that are at lower yields. Payoff activity has started to pick up, which to me is a sign of economic activity. It means there's somebody on the other side of that transaction, which is good. Volume is starting to happen again. Paydowns are different. Paydowns are when people are coming out of debt, but payoffs are when generally it means there's a transaction. So we're starting to see signs of that. I'd say the competitive landscape is moderate. We're starting to see pricing competition on loans a little bit more. But by and large, we find that we have an opportunity to compete heavily by competing against the largest banks in our market. If you're familiar with Southern California and California generally, Union Bank went out of business, a bank I didn't mention that was bought by U.S. Bank. First Republic, as we all know, is bought by Chase. If you're a Union Bank client, which is a bank that we competed with heavily, is an important regional bank in California, you didn't choose U.S. Bank. You ended up with U.S. Bank. If you were a First Republic customer, you ended up at Chase. We benefit a lot from the dislocation that occurs when those clients need for the first time to ask for something from that new bank that they ended up at. They end up more often than not not being happy. They're not with the relationship manager they remember. There's something different that happened. A specific example is U.S. Bank put all Union Bank customers through BSA again. So they caused them to do something which they didn't expect to have to do. That caused a lot of disruption. It created opportunity for us. I'd say that we're competing heavily with the larger banks in the market. And again, we're trying to fill the void of the smaller banks and regional banks that have largely left the market. We are seeing some new entrants. We're seeing PNC. We're seeing KeyBank. Flagstar has been coming in, and that's fine. Again, it's the fifth largest economy in the world, and LA is the largest county in the country. You touched on a lot of disruption. And I alluded to earlier, you've attracted a lot of talent over the past several years. In the past, you described Banc of Cal as a talent magnet. And just given the broader capabilities that you've got and the culture and the scale you have now, I got to imagine that's pretty attractive to a lot of local bankers, especially because you're so active on the lending side. Are you still having success attracting talent? Where are you looking to add today? Are there new lines you're interested in expanding into, or is it more just deepening within existing lines? So there are no new business lines that we're looking to add at this time, but we're looking to expand key areas. We likely will announce tomorrow the hiring of our new Chief Accounting Officer, Karin Hall from Silicon Valley Bank. She was actively looking for a new place, interviewing with a lot of places. We were interviewing her and decided to make the decision to hire her. I'm really excited that she's coming on. She's a very senior leader. I say we expect because until we announce it, she's not really here, but we file our 10-K today or we're filing it today as it's due today, and she'll be here tomorrow. So excited about that. Andi de Vries joined us from JPMorgan a year ago, and great hire for us on the IR side. We're hiring a lot of bankers in Los Angeles to just capitalize on, again, the void that we see. We're bringing them over from competitors. We're not for everybody, though. And so I would say we're very careful in our hiring, and there's a lot more people we could hire than we are hiring, but the ones that we're hiring are making a big impact. That's great. Maybe shifting gears to deposits. You've worked extremely hard over the past for a long time to improve the deposit franchise since you took over. And you've had a lot of success increasing the NIB composition, driving core deposit growth broadly. Core deposit growth is not easy to do today, as you well know. And your guidance calls for mid to high single-digit growth, kind of in line with the loan growth targets. Could you just touch on some of the deposit growth initiatives that you have in place and where you're having the most success driving core deposits? Sure. So for those not familiar with the story, I spent most of my career at PacWest. I was at City National for a while, and at PacWest, I was president. I oversaw a lot of deposit growth there. We ran with just under 50% NIB for quite some time until we bought CapitalSource. When I joined Banc of California in 2019, we were at 12% non-interest bearing. Five years later, we were at 38%-40%. We bought PacWest. We merged. We were on a blended basis down at 23% non-interest bearing. We ended last year at around 28%-29%. We expect to get around 30% for this year, reach that number, get there comfortably, and then our next target will be 35%. We focus on going after businesses, and as I mentioned, we're pretty much a pure play commercial bank. We focus on serving businesses through very tailored treasury management solutions, and it doesn't matter what sort of rate environment you're in to help people with their treasury management. They're not looking for rate. They're looking for services that help them manage their company efficiently. We want to feel like we're an outsourced part of their company so that their bookkeepers, their accountants, their controllers, their CFOs know us well. They have us on speed dial. We're helping them transact on a daily basis with wires and ACH and checks and whatever they might need. Our technology is designed to be very efficient and to help them, and so we're focused on bringing in new accounts. Every quarter, we publish in our investor deck a slide which shows the new relationships that we have brought over to the bank since the last quarter. That's kind of the metric that we focus on the most because to grow the bank, we can't rely solely on our existing clients. You've got to bring over new relationships from other banks, and that's how we're winning, is if we're able to bring over that core deposit relationship that is their primary operating account. I know I'm winning a new relationship to our bank, and so that's what we focus on the most. Obviously, Fed cuts has helped create opportunity to rationalize deposit costs across the industry. You've been very active working to reduce funding costs at Banc of California. Could you just touch on the competitive landscape for we touched on the lending side? Could you touch on the deposit side, what you're seeing, where you're having opportunity and success repricing deposits lower, and whether you're receiving any pushback from clients? Like how well received is this? Is there much pushback? At the end of the fourth quarter, our average cost of deposits was 226, and our spot rate at the end of the quarter was about 10 basis points lower than that. We have several hundred million of expensive deposits that we acquired in the acquisition that are still up for repricing that are maturing through the end of the second quarter. So that's going to be some of the low-hanging fruit that we still have. And then it's going to dry up a little bit, and we have to keep pushing on our existing deposit base to make sure that we're rationalizing our deposit costs the right way. I would say that in terms of client pushback, we got some, and we were careful in what we did. Because it was a new deposit base, it was a new combined company. I was probably more timid than I otherwise would be about making sure we didn't have any outflows of deposits because I didn't know what else might happen, what I might lose, where the instability might be in the deposit base. Now that I've seasoned and I understand it better, I think we have the ability to be a little bit more aggressive when we're sitting at 87% or 88% loan-to-deposit, and we have a low percentage of broker deposits. That being said, we value our relationships. We're not looking to push customers out. And so finding that line of where you're not alienating your customers is always important. I think our team is really good at it. We like to talk about the complete relationship if we're helping you on the loan side and we're helping you on the deposit side, the prices should be fair on both sides, and we're constantly reiterating that. As we're successful bringing in non-interest bearing deposits and new relationships, it creates the opportunity for us to let go some of the less relationship-oriented deposits that all banks have in terms of higher cost money market and retail-based type of CDs. Kind of putting all of what we just talked about together, I mean, there's pretty strong visibility into margin expansion, right? From remixing and repricing loans, continuing to work deposit costs down at existing stuff, but continuing to drive core deposit growth. When I look at consensus, expectations are fairly wide. I guess, how do you think about your ability to drive margin expansion going forward and just kind of the trajectory and pace of expansion? We got into 320-330 for the year coming off of fourth quarter of about 304. The levers that we have, the most important lever that we have to drive our margin is growth of non-interest bearing deposits. It moves the numbers faster than anything else. But as I mentioned, we do have a fairly healthy chunk of deposits that are going to be repricing through the first two quarters of the year. That's going to give us some leverage on the margin side. On the loan side, where loans are coming on at higher rates than loans that are going off, I think that is going to probably taper out over time, and so we're going to get less incremental benefit from the loan side. And we'll get some incremental benefit from the deposit side, probably on an ongoing basis for a little while while our deposit costs still, even at 226, they're not overly elevated, but I think we have room to go down. And again, growth in NIB will help that. But I think overall, our margin should settle in in the middle of that range. And then it's going to be about growth, and it's going to be growing the balance sheet to help achieve the PP&R and overall numbers we're looking for. Maybe touching on the expense side. I mean, we've got a high degree of confidence, like we just talked about in the revenue growth outlook. Looking at expenses, you've harvested more savings from the deal than we expected, than you guided to, which is great. I have gotten some investor questions on the expense outlook. You guided to $190 million-$195 million per quarter. Obviously, this includes customer-related HOA deposits tied to rates, right? I was hoping you could just elaborate a bit more on the expense outlook, where you're investing today, how you think about managing expenses all the while driving positive operating leverage. So I'd say that the range that we guided to was very conservative. We're likely to be on the lower end of that range for the foreseeable future. And we would only achieve the upper end of that range if we showed meaningful growth that more than offset any increase in expenses. And so that would be a back half of the year type of number if we showed really, really good growth through the year. But we might show good growth through the year and not need to get to that higher expense number. So it was intended to be a pretty conservative target. We're making a lot of investments in the company right now, but that's already embedded in our numbers. We're investing in our financial modernization for technology. We're investing in the cloud, and we're constantly investing in tools that will drive customer relationships to the bank. We have to deliver on the promise that we're selling about how we can give somebody a better banking experience for a commercial client. And you can't stop investing in that. We try to be smart in how we do it. We think about what do we want to invest in and how do we think this will drive behavior as opposed to if you build it, they will come. We're going to do some analysis before we ever build anything and before we invest in it. And I think so far that's proven to be helpful. We also have to invest in tools that allow our clients to be more efficient in terms of nCino, Salesforce, things that help see the client on a single screen that drive our ability to serve clients. We've got to stay practical with that. And then we've invested in our payments business. One of the things that we can improve is our fee income. We have a couple of initiatives there. We're driving credit cards. We issue credit cards to our own clients. We're not Capital One, but we have a large initiative to drive credit cards to our existing client base. There's about $3 billion of spend that we've identified that is not running on our rails. That's running on others' cards that we think we can capture a portion of that to help drive incremental fee income to the bank. That's great. We're invested. That's one of the initiatives we're investing in. That's great, and you brought it up earlier. I did want to ask about the wildfires. Obviously, devastating to so many people that were impacted. You guys have done a lot in contributing to relief efforts and rebuilding. Obviously, you're going to be lending into that as part of the rebuilding as well. When we first talked initial estimates, we're just four commercial and three residential properties impacted, all of which had insurance. I guess, could you just touch on some of the rebuilding efforts in prior disasters you alluded to? Have you started to see any of the deposit flows or any other impacts from this starting to manifest themselves yet? So thanks for the question. Tragedies are a time to step up, and we're a leader in Los Angeles and in California. And so we certainly felt like it was incumbent upon us to take a leadership position, and we created a wildfire relief fund, donated $1 million into that, and we'll be making sure that that money goes to first responders and those most in need that we can support. We are not a home mortgage lender. We're not a consumer lender. We happen to have a home mortgage portfolio, one that we buy off our warehouse lines, but we don't originate mortgages. So the insurance funds are not coming directly to us. However, we're getting them anyway. We have a client who had a home mortgage with First Republic. The check was made payable to First Republic, and my friend and his wife as trustees of their family trust. Their account was not set up at Chase in the name of their family trust. And of course, as you could imagine, they tried to deposit the check, and it was not the easy experience in a time of crisis you would expect. And so we got a phone call and said, "We'll take care of you. You got to get it deposited there because it's made payable to Chase or First Republic. So we'll help you get it deposited there, but then we'll open your account." We will benefit from some of the disruption, unfortunately, but we're there to help people. And so we will benefit from it. There are a lot of conversations in Los Angeles right now about what's going to happen and how it's going to get rebuilt. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning about land being sold for asking or higher prices in the Palisades. That area will become one of the most attractive residential corridors in the country whenever they're done. But this is not months or weeks or quarters. This is going to be years and maybe a decade of kind of development before it's all done, unfortunately. But we expect to be a beneficiary of that and to help contribute on the construction side and other development that happens. Maybe just touching on capital. You've got an extremely strong balance sheet. You're very well capitalized. Capital continues to decrease. We're getting close to your internal targets. How do you think about capital priorities here? Current valuation buybacks, in my opinion, are an absolute no-brainer. I know there's a lot of conversations about various different things. How do you think about capital return at this point, and what is your comfort level in returning capital here, and what are your priorities? Whenever there's a dislocation in valuation, as there seems to be right now, there was an article this morning, and we have heavy reference to the KRE, which has had huge outflows. So it's caused a dislocation in our price. You got to buy your stock back, and you got to figure out a way to do that. There have been questions about whether we want it. We have $2.2 billion of HTM that is, I would say, suboptimal earnings. Now is not the time to touch that. What you want to do is you want to make sure that you are buying back your stock at a time when you can really have a big impact. We have preferred stock, and we have common stock. The preferred is trading at 7.75, excuse me, as a 7.75% yield. It's got a par value of $25. We'd have to tender for it. It's not maturing until 2027, and then our common is attractive today, in my view, based on where we're going in our growth and capital and tangible book. We need regulatory approval to buy back our preferred. We need regulatory approval to dividend money up from the bank to the holding company. Our CET1 at the bank is close to 14.5%. I mean, we have a ton of capital sitting there that's unproductive, and so that's something that I think we have in our sights. There's a lot of uses for capital. These are not mutually exclusive. There's a lot of ways to use it. We're reinvesting in our company. We have a reasonable dividend, but I think that if you have the opportunity to do a buyback, that's something that's interesting to me. As I mentioned, we need regulatory approval so people can think about whether or not that might be something we're looking to advance. We got about three minutes left. I can keep going, but I did want to see if anybody in the audience may have a question. If not, let's wrap up with credit. When I talk to generalist portfolio managers, it seems like credit's probably one of the biggest hang-ups to get them to increase sector allocations. Basically, where are we at in the economic cycle? And that is a really hard question to answer. So I'm not asking you that. We've been waiting for this credit cycle to manifest itself for a couple of years now, right? We're starting to see signs maybe more of a normalization. But I just wanted to get your sense of the credit backdrop from what you're seeing, the health of your clients, and just what are you seeing broadly across your footprint from the credit perspective? We're seeing general optimism, as I mentioned, from economic activity. We're not seeing any specific sectors that are showing broader weakness. I'd say the office market is still a blemish that nobody wants to touch. I don't know how it's going to get resolved. I am confident it will get resolved. If we think about, go back to just COVID and what happened to retail. Retail didn't go away, but it evolved. It was kind of nobody would touch it for a while. It kind of evolved, and now retail has stabilized, and there are things we would lend into in retail. Office is going to take a lot longer, but I imagine that it will evolve into something that maybe looks a little bit different than we are today, but it's a large problem hanging out there. But it's not on the books of most banks that look like us. A lot of it is in the much larger banks. And I think the rate environment has helped them kind of take little clips at it and just keep blending it through the quarters for several quarters. And I think they're still in the process of doing that. We tried to take as much credit noise as we could in 2024 out of the game for 2025 by being aggressive. We had our first full-scope regulatory exam after the merger, and so we knew that was a time to get appropriately aggressive on credit. Take the marks we can in a year where there's not a lot of growth, and try to make sure that 2025 doesn't have any noise from credit so we can grow comfortably in 2025. I think that's the path we're on now. That's great. Well, we got a breakout session downstairs. Jared, thank you for joining us. David, thank you very much. Thank you all. Appreciate it. all. Appreciate it.