Good morning, everyone. I would like to first highlight a very recent recognition our company received.

Last week, we were named CenterState CEO Business of the Year with over 50 employees here in Central New York. This is one of the most prominent recognitions in Central New York.

I believe it is a great illustration of the activity, commitment, visibility, investment, and impact we're having. The results we're about to discuss come in no small part due to all of the above.

A major thank you to all of our teams across banking, insurance, employee benefits, and wealth management. Great things are happening in Upstate, and great things are happening at our company.

Now, on to results. We're off to a very good start in 2026.

Organic growth is visible across all of our businesses. Strong new business efforts, combined with the benefit of supportive interest rate environment and market values, resulted in 9% total revenue growth.

Our balance sheet, as always, is a source of strength for us and our clients, with excellent liquidity and credit metrics. Expenses and return on investments remain a focus.

All in all, 17% growth in operating diluted earnings per share compared to last year's period is a result we feel very good about. Focusing on each specific business.

Banking and corporate is benefiting from organic growth, expanding margin, and our recent branch acquisition in one of the most attractive markets in the Northeast. 29% bottom line improvement year-over-year is peer-leading.

Market share gains have been and will continue to be the main source of growth for us. Employee benefit services is expanding at expected pace of mid-to-high single digits.

We're starting to see some tangible results of our recent investments. Insurance services had a difficult comp from last year due to the timing of contingency payments, which, as a reminder, came in the first quarter of 2025 versus our typical pattern of mostly second quarter event.

This, however, has not changed our expectations for overall insurance performance during the year. Wealth management services also experienced mid-single digit revenue growth and high single digit bottom line growth, in line with our expectations.

In summary, we did have a very good start to 2026. Organic activity is strong.

Targeted inorganic discussions are active across all of our businesses. We have excellent capital and liquidity and look forward to continued strong performance throughout the year.

Marya will provide you with more details on the financials. Marya?

Thank you, Dimitar, and good morning, all. As Dimitar noted, the company's first quarter performance was strong.

Including acquisition expenses, GAAP earnings per share of $1.08 increased 15 cents or 16.1% from the first quarter of the prior year and increased 5 cents or 4.9% from linked fourth quarter results. Operating earnings per share and operating pretax, pre-provision net revenue per share were record quarterly results for the company.

Operating earnings per share were $1.15 in the first quarter, as compared to 98 cents 1 year prior and $1.12 in the linked fourth quarter. First quarter operating PPNR per share of $1.61 increased 21 cents from 1 year prior and increased 3 cents on a linked quarter basis.

These record operating results were driven by a quarter-over-quarter decline in operating noninterest expenses and a new quarterly high for net interest income. The company's net interest income was $134.7 million in the first quarter.

This represents a $1.3 million or 1% increase over the linked fourth quarter and a $14.5 million or 12.1% improvement over the first quarter of 2025 and marks the eighth consecutive quarter of net interest income expansion. The company's fully tax-equivalent net interest margin increased 6 basis points from 3.39% in the linked fourth quarter to 3.45% in the first quarter, driven by lower funding costs.

During the quarter, the company's cost of funds was 1.20%, a decrease of 7 basis points from the prior quarter, primarily driven by lower deposit costs. Operating noninterest revenues increased $3.2 million or 4.2% compared to the prior year's first quarter and decreased $3.2 million or 3.8% from the linked fourth quarter.

The increase in operating noninterest revenues compared to the first quarter of 2025 was reflective of increases in banking, employee benefit services, and wealth management services noninterest revenues, partially offset by a decrease in insurance services noninterest revenues due to changes in the timing of collections of contingent commission revenues. Operating noninterest revenues represented 37% of total operating revenues during the first quarter, a metric that continuously emphasizes the diversification of our businesses.

The company reported a $5.6 million provision for credit losses during the first quarter. This compares to $6.7 million in the prior year's first quarter and $5 million in the linked fourth quarter.

During the first quarter, the company reported $133 million in total noninterest expenses, a decrease of $5.5 million or 4% from the linked fourth quarter and an increase of $7.7 million or 6.2% from the prior year's first quarter. The decrease from the prior year's fourth quarter was due in part to seasonal factors and the absence of certain one-time items described last quarter as well as acquisition expenses associated with the Santander branch acquisition.

$3.9 million of the increase in total noninterest expenses from the first quarter of 2025 was attributed to salaries and employee benefits, primarily due to the incremental costs associated with acquisitions and de novo bank branches opened between periods along with the impact of annual merit-based increases. Occupancy and equipment expenses increased $2.2 million from the prior year's first quarter, driven by incremental costs associated with the opening of 15 de novo bank branches and 3 regional headquarters along with the 7 branches acquired from Santander in the prior year's fourth quarter.

Additionally, acquisition expenses of $0.4 million were incurred in the first quarter of 2026 associated with the pending acquisition of ClearPoint Federal Bank and Trust. Ending loans increased $181.4 million or 1.7% during the first quarter and increased $710 million or 6.8% from 1 year prior, primarily due to organic growth in the overall business and consumer lending portfolios.

The company's ending total deposits increased $978.1 million or 7% from 1 year prior and increased $483 million or 3.4% from the end of 2025. The growth in total deposits during the first quarter was primarily reflective of seasonal inflows of municipal deposits.

The increase in total deposits over the past 12 months included the $543.7 million of deposits assumed from the Santander branch acquisition. Moving on to asset quality.

The nonperforming loans ratio decreased 4 basis points and the net charge-off ratio increased 2 basis points from the linked fourth quarter, while the loans 30 to 89 days delinquent ratio increased 5 basis points from last quarter, aligned with typical seasonal trends. The company's allowance for credit losses was $90.2 million or 81 basis points of total loans outstanding at the end of the first quarter, an increase of $2.3 million during the quarter.

The increase was primarily attributed to reserve building in the business lending portfolio, reflective of organic CRE growth. The allowance for credit losses at the end of the first quarter represented 7 times the company's trailing 12-month net charge-offs.

We are pleased with the first quarter results, which reinforces our commitment to expand operating leverage and scale as a diversified financial services company. Looking forward, we believe the company's diversified revenue profile, strong liquidity, and historically good asset quality provide a solid foundation for continued earnings growth.

With that, the financial expectations that we provided earlier this year for full year 2026 remain consistent. That concludes my prepared remarks comments, and Dimitar and I will now take questions.

James, I will turn it back to you to open the line. Thank you.

Good morning, Dimitar and Marya. How are you guys doing?

Morning, Steve.

Morning.

Morning. Nice quarter here, and maybe just starting on the loan side, good commercial loan growth.

Just kind of curious where you are on the pipeline. I apologize if I missed it, Dimitar, as I hopped in in the middle of your prepared remarks.

Just curious, color on that aspect of the loan book to start.

The commercial pipeline is in excellent shape. I think it's actually the highest it's been.

It is meaningfully higher than last year at this time. Of course, there is a fair amount of uncertainty as to the timing and the pull-through of the pipeline, but right now activity is very good.

It's been very good, it's been building. We have a little bit less payoffs than we did last year so far.

I think you all know that that impacted us meaningfully last year, right now we're in pretty good shape.

Okay. Then on the auto side here, strong quarter for that.

I know you were upbeat on it. Just kind of curious what you're seeing going forward in terms of pricing and where it could go for the rest of the year.

For us, again, as a reminder, the auto piece for us is really a function of really pricing and kind of overall demand in the market, because we don't really do anything as it relates to credit. That piece for us is pretty constant.

As long as they fit in the credit box, then the question is where are we on pricing. We entered this year with probably a little bit more of an aggressive stance on that, kind of expecting rates to trend down over time, I think we gained a little bit more market share than certainly last year.

Kind of learned our lesson a little bit last year. Last year, we were down meaningfully in the first quarter, that business, and this year we didn't want to start deep in the hole.

With that said, again, for us, activity is strong, demand is okay, pricing is now a little bit better than it was in the beginning of the year. We'll see where we open up the end of, but our guidance and kind of our goal for that business continues to be mid-single digits.

Okay. Got it.

Then on the fee side here, you mentioned the contingent piece more in the second quarter. Kind of as I eyeball going back, it looks like that contingent benefit you typically get is about $1.5 million, $2 million.

Is that about fair for the second quarter?

Hi, Steve. Yep, that's in the range.

Okay. Got it.

Then just one more on expenses here. Good to see where they came in.

Just updated thoughts here on the cadence of expense growth throughout the year and where you're looking for things to settle

out. Our guidance stays intact on that side.

If you look at it year-over-year, we're running a hair above 6, that includes the impact of acquisitions from last year. I think as we get in the latter part of this year, and we kind of are comparing truly apples to apples, if you will, in terms of expenses we had in de novo expansion last year and acquisitions, that rate will, my guess is and my hope is and my expectation is that it will continue to go lower from 6.

Again, it's all within the range. We're going to drive it as low as we can.

Our goal is not to spend money, our goal is to make money. That's going to continue to be a focus for us.

Great. I appreciate all that color, and I'll step back in the queue here.

Hey, good morning. Really good NIM expansion this quarter.

I thought it was interesting that the investment yields actually went down 4 bps. Maybe refresh us on your NIM expectations for the year and talk about how the portfolio balances may be used to pay down borrowings or fund loan growth or where you expect the securities balances to go.

Thank you.

Yep. Hi.

NIM did outperform our Q4 guide as we expanded 6 basis points in Q1. For us, this is a result of strong loan growth, ongoing repricing efforts.

We also had a steeper yield curve than we've had in recent quarters. We're pleased with these results.

Looking forward, we expect for Q2, 3 to 5 basis points of expansion. We are going to continue to capitalize on the loan and deposit efforts, fully realize the late 2025 cuts.

Just to note here, Q2 NIM will be partially aided by an FRB dividend, just for your notes there. In terms of looking at the overall portfolio, if we see an opportunity, we will pay down borrowings, but we see a steady state for now.

Again, want to reiterate the guidance of 3 to 5 for Q2, and are pleased with how our book looks at the moment.

Okay. Thank you.

just to follow up on the NIM discussion. The expectation is loan yields kind of flat to up, or what kind of direction on the loan yields?

Then the deposit costs performance has been excellent. Is there any more room for it to come down, or you kind of have to shift acquiring deposits within the de novo branches?

Can you just talk about deposit costs going forward?

Sure. Good morning, Manuel.

For us, the environment continues to be most supportive on the asset side. As we think about the trajectory for margin here, it will be predominantly driven by the asset side.

Now, there will be quarters, like this quarter, where we're absorbing some of the hit on the asset side while you're trying to reprice deposits. For us, frankly, being flat in loan yields in the quarter, having absorbed 2.5 cuts essentially, was pretty good.

Going forward, again, we expect that, given where new production is, which is right around 6, and given where the back book is, which is right around 5.68, that should give you 30-plus basis points to work with there as we continue to reprice the book. On the deposit side, we've discussed that we have pretty active deposit management across the board.

We were able to pull through as much as we could out of those deposit changes for the quarter. Clearly, if there's no cuts, there's more limited opportunity to do that.

Could there be another couple of basis points? I think that's possible.

Also, keep in mind in the second quarter, we're going to be sitting on a little bit more of liquidity, at least for the first 45 days or so, that is municipal-related, and those tend to be higher cost deposits. There's just natural, mechanical ins and outs of deposit costs for the quarters, depending on the municipal flows.

I appreciate that commentary. Shifting over to capital deployment, you had a little bit of a buyback this quarter.

Can you just talk about your appetite there and any other kind of updated thoughts on M&A? Where are you sitting at fee businesses versus whole bank?

Obviously, the de novos progressing. Could we just have a checkup on that?

Sure. Our company is fortunate that we generate a fair amount of capital, and it's really up to us to decide how we allocate that.

We're fortunate that we have 4 businesses that we can allocate it across. Our first priority is always going to be organic growth across those businesses.

For the bank, that's kind of easy to ballpark because that's tied to the growth of the balance sheet. For the other businesses, it's a little bit harder because it's really in the expense base that we're making investments, they're not necessarily directly, immediately from the capital account.

That remains our first priority. As I mentioned in my remarks, we continue to have active and very targeted discussions across all of our businesses on the inorganic side.

As for us historically that's been, let's call them, singles and doubles, kind of a string of pearls in some of the nonbanking business strategies. Occasionally on the bank side, as we tend to like things that we can meaningfully grow and expand and create returns for shareholders, they tend to be on the lower end as well in terms of size.

We prefer to use cash, as you all know. Sometimes we may have to use stock, and sometimes we want to buy back that stock if we end up using stock for an acquisition.

That said, the buyback this quarter was really kind of opportunistic in the sense of, one, we need to clean up some of our equity dilution to provide kind of a neutral outcome to our shareholders. Then secondly, there was clearly some disruption with the prices during the quarter, we took a little bit of advantage of that, knowing where the earnings of the company are kind of projected to be versus what the market price might be at a point in time.

We're going to continue to be opportunistic. I think if you look at our price to earnings projected forward, assuming all of you are correct, it's pretty attractive compared to historical measures.

It's pretty attractive compared to the overall index. We think that our stock is reasonably attractive to look at if there's moments of further disruption.

I appreciate that. Thank you.

Hey, good morning.

Morning,

Matt. ): A few questions for me.

Just thinking back to some of the strategic initiatives, taking market share in some of the economically more vibrant areas in your footprint. Could you just maybe give us some idea where we are on that priority and where you've kind of made the most progress, whether it's Rochester, Buffalo, Eastern Pennsylvania, New Hampshire?

Just wanted an update there and then maybe some thoughts around local investments, whether it's chip manufacturing or otherwise, and are you starting to see any tangible impacts yet?

Sure. Thanks, Matt.

We've really been on this journey of revamping the organic capability of the company, going back multiple years. It started before I was at the company and started in Albany, and that was a very successful initiative.

We now have a very vibrant and sizable business in Albany. Then we basically recreated the same thing in Central New York, and then in Western New York as well.

Where we sit today, what's really, really encouraging from my perspective is I look at where the growth has come or it's coming in a particular quarter. This quarter and the past quarter, it was broad-based.

It was across every single one of the regions. Now, we've had quarters in the past where the capability of the team and diversification would be in a way where we might have a great quarter in Pennsylvania, and we might have an excellent quarter in Western New York, and we might have an excellent quarter in Syracuse.

That's what's kind of been, and New England as well. It's been really good consistently.

It's been a nice spread of effort. It has been a nice spread of activity level across all the markets, expectations and presence and, again, incentives and just focus of the teams.

We're pretty well, I think, established in terms of our talent acquisitions across those markets. There's a few other targeted areas that we may look at.

I've said this before, and then there's some sort of disruption that occurs that allows us to take another swing and add some of the best players in those markets. We had something like that happen in New England recently, we expanded that team.

We'll continue to be on the front foot of those opportunities. Kind of a long-winded way of saying it is across the board.

It is consistent. We feel really good about our opportunities, our people, our talent, our execution, our brand.

Those are things that are hard to replicate. It's not the pricing.

It's not structure. It's none of that.

It is the hard things that we've been focused on. We feel really good about that.

As it relates to Central New York and some of the activity here, I think, as the major project here in Central New York is underway with Micron. I think the thing to just kind of keep in mind, this is a long-tail event for us and everybody else here in Central New York.

It's going to play out over a decade-plus. With that said, some of the tangible things are starting to show up.

There's going to be 4,000 workers coming on site pretty soon. Now, they're transient, are they going to open banking accounts with us?

Probably not. They probably already have banking accounts from the multiple sites they do work across the country.

Are they going to consume a whole bunch of things in and around our markets, which is going to help our customers? Absolutely.

That's going to be kind of the initial impact. Then we're going to have some people that are more permanent around these facilities.

It's not just Micron. It's all the suppliers around it.

It's some of the onshoring we've talked about from Canada and some other markets. That's going to continue to be the case.

We're in a good spot. Maybe this is helpful to you to all kind of ballpark what this could be, again, over multiple years.

If you look at the size of the investment in chips and kind of advanced technology manufacturing that is to occur in Central New York, and you compare it to those investments across the rest of the country, and you look at the size of the investment versus the GDP of each one of those areas, it is only here in Central New York where that impact is literally 250% of the GDP of Central New York. It is very large.

It's going to be a very long time, but is a very large impact. ):

Great. I did not realize it was that large of an impact to local GDP.

Dimitar, I didn't think I quite heard you on the ClearPoint deal. Is that closed yet, or when is that expected to close?

Then during the quarter, were there any other kind of notable fee income business lines acquisitions that didn't get its own formal 8-K?

No, nothing different on the fee income side in terms of acquisitions during the quarter. As it relates to ClearPoint, we and ClearPoint are prepared to close.

We have everything lined up in terms of our own preparations. There's really not a lot in terms of conversions or technology or people impact, it's a very straightforward execution with low risk.

However, we're still waiting on regulatory approval. That could be any day, or it could be later.

We don't quite know how these things work. Whenever we receive that, we'll be prepared to close pretty shortly after.

): Okay. The

last one for me, just on expenses. In the press release, you had mentioned kind of the usage of AI.

I'm curious how and where you're using this and any notable applications that have, perhaps saved you money or helped on the revenue front? That's all I had.

Thank you.

Thanks, Matt. I do want to let people go to the rest of their days, because we can spend a lot of time, as talking about AI.

I will say that we've been on this journey for literally 2 years now. I will give credit to one of our retiring directors, Sally Steele, who pushed us into being much more front-footed than probably we were going to be back in 2024.

We've been at this for quite a while. As we've talked about, our goal has been to continue to scale the company without necessarily growing the expense base and the headcount, and really take activities that are less value-added to our customers and focus our people on high value-added activities.

All that said, I am a believer in what Alex Karp said at Palantir, which is AI's impact needs to be transformational, which is doing 5 times as much with half the cost. Until I really see that and can really look all of you in the face and tell you that this is what's happening and this is why the margin is going to go where it's going to go, we're going to be a little bit quieter on this, and we're just going to keep working in the background.

):

Understood. That's all I had.

Thank you.

Hey, just wanted to jump back in. The expense level, it's seemingly annualizing to below your full year guide.

Where are kind of some of the increases across the year as you invest in your businesses?

I think, Manuel, a couple of things there, as you think about expenses. One, there's less quarter there's less days in the quarter in the first quarter, so that that naturally is going to lead a few more payroll days, it's a meaningful add in expenses.

We also expect that there will be some continued opportunities for whether it's talent acquisition or maybe some smaller kind of roll-up acquisitions that we're going to ultimately try to absorb with minimal cost, but along the way, they might produce some costs. We, again, not knowing what's in the future for us, it's a little bit a little bit hard to know.

Also, medical is a is a swing factor as well. We had a pretty good quarter in medical expenses, and that could reverse pretty quickly.

There's a lot of things that kind of go into that expense base, and a couple of million dollars can be an easy delta in a quarter and actually moves the numbers in terms of growth rate quite meaningfully.

Hey, Manuel, just to add to that. I was just going to go through that we are staying in consistent with our guide that we've provided.

Again, 4% to 7% growth, mid-single digit, and the dollar amount there is anywhere between $535 million and $550 million, with an average of about $135 million a quarter, which you saw it come in under at $133 million in terms of core expense base in Q1. We're on track to stick within those guardrails.

To Dimitar's point, we're diligently reviewing and ensuring that what we are spending on and what we're investing in is focused first on growth from the perspective of talent acquisition and business acquisition and, obviously, also tech and occupancy. Just to give you a little more color.

That's great. I just have two kind of specific modeling questions.

What is the dividend benefit in the second quarter that you expect? Do you have a rough idea of that yet?

Then the other piece was what was the repurchase price on the buyback? You're being opportunistic.

I just want to kind of get a feel for what price is your appetite.

I think on the buyback, Manuel, it was in the low $60s. I think as it relates to the dividend, we'll probably have to follow up with you separately.

That's great. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody, for joining us for our first quarter, and we look forward to speaking with you again in July. Have a great day.