Good morning, and thank you for joining our call today. We've got a lot to cover.

I'm going to start with our quarterly earnings update, and then we will close with the details of our acquisition of Peach State Bank, headquartered in Gainesville, Georgia. We had a great start to 2026.

For the first quarter, we realized net income of a little over $84 million, translating into EPS of 69 cents. On an operating basis, our EPS was 70 cents, representing a 19% increase from the first quarter of 2025.

Annualized loan growth of 4.5% for the quarter and an expansion of our net interest margin of 3 basis points helped to drive these results. Credit also performed very well this quarter, with total charge-offs of 22 basis points, only 10 basis points excluding Navitas.

Nonperforming assets as a percentage of loans were 50 basis points, down 1 basis point from Q1 2025, and special mention and substandard loans totaled only 2.9% of total loans, down 2 basis points from Q1 of 2025. Our operating return on assets was 122 basis points, an 18 basis point improvement year-over-year, and our operating return on tangible common equity was 13.1%.

Given our high capital levels, we continued to return capital to shareholders, both via a 25 cent quarterly dividend and the repurchase of $37 million of our common stock. We also announced the intention to redeem our remaining $100 million in sub debt in the second quarter, only 20% of which qualified as Tier 2 capital.

Even with the dilution from our repurchase activity, tangible book value per share grew at an annualized rate of nearly 6% for the quarter and by 10% year-over-year. We were also excited to have been recognized by J.D.

Power as the top-ranked bank for retail client satisfaction in the Southeast during the quarter. This is the 12th time the United team has received this recognition.

I'm very proud of the dedication and genuine care that our teams across the footprint demonstrate every day. It's because of them that we are the most recognized bank for customer satisfaction in the Southeast.

I'll now turn it over to Jefferson to cover our first quarter's performance in more detail.

Thank you, Lynn, and good morning to everyone. I will start on page 5 and talk about our deposit results.

On an end-of-period basis, our customer deposits grew by $237 million, or 4% annualized, mostly driven by DDA growth in the quarter. We were also very pleased that our cost of deposits moved down 9 basis points to 1.67%, and that our cumulative total deposit beta stands at 39% in this downcycle, which exceeded our goal.

On page 6, we turn to the loan portfolio, where our growth continued at a 4.5% annualized pace. Our growth came primarily in the HELOC and C&I categories, which are two of our current areas of focus for growth.

Turning to page 7, where we highlight some of the strengths of our balance sheet, we believe that our balance sheet is in good position from a liquidity and capital standpoint to be ready for any economic volatility. We have very limited broker deposits and very limited wholesale borrowings of any kind.

Our loan-to-deposit ratio remained low and was unchanged at 82% this quarter, with a solid end-of-period deposit growth. Our CET1 ratio was flat at 13.4% and remains a source of strength for the bank.

On page 8, we look at capital in more detail. As I mentioned, our CET1 ratio is 13.4%, and our TCE was also flat at 9.92%.

We were active in our buyback again in the first quarter, buying back $37 million in shares, which equated to 1.1 million shares in the quarter, or just under 1% of our shares outstanding. Moving on to spread income on page 9, spread income was down in Q1 mainly due to having two less days in the quarter.

On a year-over-year basis, our spread income was up 10%. Our net interest margin increased 3 basis points in the quarter to 3.65% and up 29 basis points compared to last year.

The first quarter is the fifth quarter in a row of margin expansion. We continue to experience a margin tailwind from our back-book repricing and from the mix change towards loans away from securities.

In the next year, using just maturities, we have about $1.4 billion of assets paying down in the 4.63% range. Because of this continued impact, I would expect the margin to be up between 3 and 5 basis points in the second quarter.

Moving to page 10, noninterest income was $43.7 million in the quarter. This included a $5.2 million gain on an interest rate cap that was hedging a sub debt issuance that we intend to redeem on April 30th.

Excluding the cap gain, noninterest income benefited from a strong mortgage quarter and was offset by seasonally lower service charges. We opted to sell less Navitas loans than usual.

Last quarter, we sold $41.6 million in Navitas loans compared to $8.3 million this quarter. Our GAAP expenses were $157.3 million in the first quarter, and our operating expenses were $151.6 million.

We had a small amount of our normal merger charges, but we had two more unusual and offsetting nonoperating expenses. First, we had fully accrued for the FDIC special assessment that came after the Silicon Valley failures.

That said, the FDIC refilled its fund faster than expected and is not asking for the full assessment. We had taken the original assessment as a nonoperating loss, and so the release of the assessment of $1.9 million comes through nonoperating as well.

We also had another nonoperating charge in the first quarter related to a change in our payroll process necessitated by changes in legislation. We had paid our employees on a current basis, and we changed this to paying our employees in arrears.

As a result of the transition in payroll timing, some of our employees would have gone nearly a month without a paycheck, we paid an additional check to bridge the gap. Aside the one-timers, expenses were $151.6 million, relatively flat compared to the fourth quarter.

Moving to credit quality on page 12, net charge-offs were 22 basis points in the quarter, improved from last quarter and flat to last year. We also saw relatively flat NPAs and a nice improvement in past dues as credit quality remains strong.

I will finish on the quarterly results on page 13 with the allowance for credit losses. Our loan loss provision was $10.9 million in the quarter, which was in line with our net charge-offs.

With the loan growth, our allowance coverage of credit losses moved down slightly to 1.15%. With that, I'll pass it back to Lynn.

Thank you, Jefferson. Now let's move into a discussion of our Peach State Bank announcement, and I'll start with a bit of history.

United began de novo in Gainesville, part of Hall County, in 2005. Over the past 20 years, we've enjoyed strong organic growth there, with now $827 million of deposits in the county.

Peach State was founded that same year, 2005, and has also enjoyed strong organic growth. Total assets for the company are $788 million as of the end of the first quarter, with $713 million in deposits.

Hall County is a rapidly growing part of the overall Atlanta MSA, and after this transaction, the combined bank will have the number one deposit share in the county. Culturally, we fit well together.

We know each other personally. We work in the community together.

We go to school together. We go to church together.

Peach State shares the same passion for customer service as United. There's a tremendous amount of mutual respect between the two teams, and I'm very excited to see them come together and continue to win in this market.

Jefferson, let me turn it back over to you now to cover the financial aspects of the transaction.

Okay. First, Peach State has approximately $800 million in assets, or about 3% of our assets.

The deal value is about $100 million and will be a 50-50 cash-stock mix. We are paying 1.9 times tangible book value and 6 times cost-saved earnings.

Given our overlap, we are estimating 40% cost savings. While the deal is 50-50 stock and cash, we plan on repurchasing the $50 million in shares issued by year-end.

As structured, we estimate the deal to be 9 cents accretive in 2027, and with the planned buybacks, we estimate the deal to be 12 cents accretive. With that, I'll pass it back to Lynn to conclude.

Thank you, Jefferson. This is a great example of what we want to do in the M&A space.

It is in-market, manageable size, a history of strong performance, great upside potential, and an attractive way to leverage capital and continue to grow our business and our brand. I'd like to now open the call to questions.

Hi. This is Jake Morton?]

on for Russell Gunther. My first question is on deposit costs.

How would you expect them to trend from here in an interest rate scenario where the Fed remains on pause, on a standalone basis and including Peach State? Is there room for you to bring these down further, or should we expect some pressure going forward?

I'll take that one. Thanks for the question.

I would expect our deposit costs to be relatively flat. We have some tailwind from CD maturities, but we are seeing competition out there, and we do want to grow our deposits this year.

I think if you layer in relatively flat deposit costs, that's a good place to start. The deal, being only 3% of our assets, doesn't change those numbers meaningfully.

Got it. Thank you.

I appreciate the color there. My second question is, do you have the spot cost of deposits at the end of the quarter, and also can you talk to the competition that you were seeing in your market and where is it most aggressive, which specific product, and also competitor-wise, if you could talk through that?

Thank you.

Thanks. Great question.

The spot cost is relatively close to the quarterly average, not a major difference in spot versus quarterly average. I may pass to Rich to talk about deposit competition of what we're seeing.

Yeah. Good morning, Jake.

In terms of competition, in terms of past quarters, I would say it's slowed down a little bit. We're not getting a lot of special requests on pricing from the market, I'd say it's kind of normalized.

We're in six states, we have a lot of different competitors, no single one.

Awesome. Thank you.

That's it for me. I'll step back.

Thank you.

Hey. Good morning, guys.

Thanks for taking my questions. Just wanted to start on loan growth.

Obviously, really strong results in both C&I and commercial real estate. You did have some continued paydown on the construction side.

I guess my question is, are we getting towards the end of the kind of more accelerated paydowns here, because it seems to me just given the growth that you've had and the momentum you've had in both C&I and CRE, that loan growth could actually accelerate from here? Just wanted to better understand that, and then if you can talk to some of the competition, just given all the dislocation in and around your markets from the deal activity that we've seen.

Thanks.

Sure. I'm writing these down.

We were pleased with Q1 loan growth. It's usually a seasonally low quarter for us, we were very pleased.

In terms of the geography, South Florida led with Matt Bruno, and South Carolina, Coastal Georgia were second, with North Florida in third. In terms of the commercial lines of business that led the way was middle market, ABL, Navitas, and then lastly, on the retail side was HELOCs.

In terms of paydowns, we actually saw the biggest amount of paydowns in hospitality, which we think is a good thing. Don't see a big pickup.

Normal, we do a lot of construction CRE lending, it's just kind of the normal flow. I don't see a material change there.

In terms of loan growth going forward, we remain optimistic. We think it'll be in the 5% to 6% range, providing nothing else goes on unusual in Iran.

Then lastly, on hiring, would talk about that, because that's influencing things. In Q1, we saw a net increase of 10 revenue producers, and we're aiming for 10% annual growth on that in 2026, and we have nine more to hit the goal, and we think we'll get there or get close by the end of Q2.

All right. Really really helpful.

Maybe just as a follow-up, just on expenses. If I exclude kind of all the moving parts, looks like you guys had really good kind of expense control.

Maybe you can just talk about some of the hiring efforts that you guys might have in place as we contemplate the next couple quarters, and then if you could just touch on maybe some early investments on AI and what you guys are doing and what we can expect there from an expense build? Thanks.

All right, great. Rich just spoke about the kind of numbers of the new hires that we're very excited about.

I think if you think about our expense growth, we're targeting this 3.5% range, but now we have these hires that you might add on to that. I think the hires could add about $1 million to $1.2 million a quarter.

We're not factoring in the better growth that could happen later in the year, but that should happen sometime late '26, early '27. We're excited about our ability to grow our producers, and it could have some effect on expenses in the near term.

I would agree with that. In terms of, you got to see a little bit of a lag with the new hires.

You kind of expect it to start kicking in in 5 months to 6 months reasonably when you hire them. We're expecting to see late in Q2 some help from Q4, which is also a good hiring quarter.

Michael, you mentioned the AI. Far, I would say our AI investments have been very good and have a strong payback.

For example, most of our AI at this time is coming in through vendors. On the fraud side, all of our vendors are heavy users of AI, and our fraud losses have actually dropped by 50% over the last 2 years, partially because of that.

That's not even counting the benefits to our clients, which would be on top of that. Our contact center, where we have chatbots and other AI-enabled tools, we're seeing the ability to take more calls with the same number of agents.

The same in our programming. We're doing more programming work today without adding programmers, as they're using AI.

As we think about the next steps in agentic AI, I think there's clearly possibilities for some of our kind of more mundane processes, for example, flood and other things, where we could get some benefit from AI. That's at just the conversational stage now.

Far, I would say, our history is any expense build, we come out of that, we more than have realized savings on. All right.

Great. I appreciate you guys taking my questions and all the color.

Thanks. Good morning.

Just wanted to touch on M&A for a second. You guys have talked about being pretty focused, in-market, small banks.

Obviously, Peach State fits the bill there. Given the environment we're in, do you see a pipeline of activity where you could potentially, sort of announce another deal in lockstep with this one?

Any reason to think that this would take you out of the market for any period of time?

Great. Thank you.

Great question. No, we would not have any issue, I don't believe, in doing another deal while Peach State is active.

Certainly given the size, given the regulatory environment, given our history, if we saw the right deal, which would have similar metrics and conditions to Peach State, I'd be more than happy to move forward with that. Then

just the comment around the accretion in 2027, kind of adjusted for share repurchase. I guess it's sort of semantics, but the repurchased shares, presumably that would be over and above what you would plan to do anyway, right?

That you kind of balance that, if that question makes sense.

I guess I'll start with that. The reason we presented it that way with showing the effect of repurchase, our original intent was to do the entire deal all cash.

In our view, and I understand it's different than a share repurchase, but at the same time, if I'm evaluating a share repurchase at 11, 12 times earnings versus buying a bank at 6, hey, why not buy the bank at 6 times earnings? I guess that was in our mind, and that's kind of the way we presented it.

I think that's well said. I don't have a lot to add to that, but I will say we have $63 million left on our authorization.

We have been active in the buyback already with $67 million over the last two quarters, it's a great question. I think Lynn hit it on how we're thinking about the deal as a use of capital.

Makes sense. Thank you.

Hi. This is Hannah [Wynn?]

stepping in for Catherine Mealor. Thanks for taking my question, and congratulations on the acquisition.

Thanks.

Thanks, Hannah.

My first question is kind of a follow-up on the buyback activity. You've bought back around 30 million shares in the past two quarters, and with the merger announcement, you mentioned that repurchasing shares could offset the dilution.

I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the timing and the amount of buybacks we can expect moving forward from here.

That's a great question, and I do think we will buy back the $50 million by year-end. We are somewhat price-sensitive, I don't want to guarantee that we're buying back shares in any given quarter.

I don't know if I would put that in the model for Q2, but I do think we are creating about $30 million of excess capital every quarter. That is the amount that we will be contemplating purchasing on a given quarter.

It depends on the price and some other things we might have going on. It might not be an every quarter thing.

Can't help you so much on the modeling there, but I think by year-end, we will get the 50 in.

That's great. Thank you.

Then my other question is about your fee outlook. Your fees came in strong this quarter, and I was kind of wondering where you expect these to go from here.

I expect a modest growth rate in our fee income. We have some nice growth businesses within here.

Our treasury services, that's been growing well. We've made relatively significant investments in our wealth area that we're very excited about.

Our mortgage business has been going really strongly. We also have seasonal strength coming in mortgage and Navitas as we go into the second quarter and SBA.

I think you will see a nice growth rate off of this seasonally low first quarter.

Great. Thank you so much.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for the time.

A couple of follow-ups, maybe just some conversations that have already been covered to some degree. Lynn, you said this was kind of the exact type of deal you guys would look for given culture and deposits and so forth.

How about from a size perspective? Would you guys lean towards these smaller types of deals moving forward still, or would you like to do something a little more sizable if that were available?

What would be your preference there?

Yeah. We have typically done deals 10%, probably at the most, 15% or less of our size.

We just find that the institutions that size, they tend to align with us better on employee experience, client experience, community involvement, and we can be more additive. Yes, if Peach State had been twice as large, would we be excited about it?

Absolutely. There's just limited number of those larger, call them $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion banks.

Certainly, we would be interested in those as well. This one is, I think, really unique, again given the history of the two companies together, the growth in Hall County.

It's really rapidly growing county, number one job-creating county, I believe, in Georgia. To be able to have that kind of team together and the share together made it really attractive.

Makes sense. I appreciate that.

Then on the hiring target, I think if I heard Rich correctly, you guys might actually kind of hit your stated target for the year by the end of 2Q. Would you anticipate ramping up that plan further, or would it more be, hey, let's let these people ramp up over that 5 to 6 month timeline before we add incremental expenses on continual hiring?

Stephen, that's a great question. Certainly we want to hit goal, but we would be opportunistic.

If we saw the right people out there with the right experience and the right size portfolio, we would certainly look to do that.

I would just say too, the seasonality, as you get in the year, just with bonuses, those kinds of things, first quarter, second quarter are strong, starts to slow down in the third, and fourth quarter, it's more difficult. I think Rich getting out to an early start has been a great thing.

That cadence makes a lot of sense. Okay.

Then maybe just last thing for me would be kind of an overall NIM trajectory from here, maybe for Jefferson. I know you said spot cost deposits was kind of the same as the quarterly average, and maybe expect NIM to stay flat from here.

Would you expect a little bit of incremental upside on the loan repricing? I think you called out $1.4 billion in fixed-rate assets.

I do. I had mentioned that.

I think we'll get 3 to 5 basis points of margin expansion in the second quarter. I think that we are slightly asset-sensitive, and the outlook for no rate cuts doesn't really hurt us.

We're relatively flat, but slightly asset-sensitive. I think this back-book repricing story continues.

I think this mix change towards loans away from securities continues. We do have a wider margin in our model throughout the year, but we do have a nice 3 to 5 expectation in the second quarter.

Got it. Thanks.

Sorry if I missed that earlier. Appreciate the time, guys.

Hey. Thanks.

Good morning. I wanted to go back to Peach State Bank for a second.

Would you only buy banks that have excess deposits, and that seems like an attractive feature of this transaction? Is that something that will guide your M&A interest going forward?

I would say no to that question. We liked that it had a low loan-to-deposit ratio.

We think we can put those deposits to work. That's the one good thing about having the 82% loan-to-deposit ratio is that we can also buy banks, small banks that are loaned up as well and give them some more capacity for growth.

That was a nice-to-have in this acquisition, but we also think we can help out high loan-to-deposit ratio banks as well if that type of bank came about.

Got it. Thanks for that, Jefferson.

Then for the new hires that you have, is there a deposit mandate with these folks, and how will that play out as '27 comes into focus? Sir,

certainly on the loan side, we are requiring a depository relationship whenever we do a loan, we'll start there. These people all have existing clients, and so we're hoping that the first thing they can bring over is the deposits.

It's easier than the loans. We see that pretty fast, and that's all part of the package.

Sounds great. Thank you all very much.

Appreciate the information this morning.

Thanks, Chris. Thanks.

Hi. This is Kyle on for Dave Bishop.

Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to follow up back on fee income.

Wanted to go into mortgage banking. Saw some nice trends there.

I was wondering how sustainable that might be going forward and any initiatives in place to enhance that line item?

I'll start maybe, and then pass it to Rich on the initiatives. We have one thing working for us and one thing working against us as we go into the second quarter for mortgage.

First, mortgage rates dipped to the 6% range at the end of February, which helped promote a little mini refi boom that helped out this quarter. Also we're going into the second and third quarters, which are the strongest seasonal quarters for mortgage, you get a little bit of an offset as you go into Q2.

I'll pass to Rich for initiatives.

I'd say on the mortgage side, obviously, we're expecting, as Jefferson said, a stronger Q2. The challenge in mortgage is interest rates drive so much of it.

That's a little bit hard to say. We do have a few more shorter on-balance-sheet products that have driven some interest, we'll continue looking at that.

Thank you. Maybe a final question.

Saw a slight uptick in NPAs this quarter. I was wondering if you could provide some color on what drove that, and then maybe just a broad view of the credit quality trends?

This is Rob. Thanks, Kyle, for the question.

I sort of anticipate asset quality to be stable, and I would expect NPAs to kind of fluctuate up and down. If you look back, maybe 10 basis points up or down over time.

There wasn't any one credit that moved into NPA this quarter that's a highlight or anything. It's just standard movement in and out of nonaccrual.

Awesome. Thank you.

That's all I have. I'll step back.

Great. Thank you, and appreciate everybody joining the call.

Again, any other further questions, reach out to Jefferson or myself, and we look forward to talking to you again soon. Have a great day.