Good morning and welcome to the First Financial Bancorp Q4 and Full Year 2012 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. (Operator instructions.) Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Ken Lubbock, Vice President Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Mr. Lubbock, please go ahead.

Thank you, Keith. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us on today’s conference call to discuss First Financial Bancorp’s Q4 and full year 2012 financial results. Discussing our operating and financial results today will be Claude Davis, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Tony Stollings, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started I would like to mention that both the press release we issued yesterday announcing our financial results for the quarter and the accompanying supplemental presentation are available on our website at www.bankatfirst.com under the “Investor Relations” section. Please refer to the forward-looking statement disclosure contained in the Q4 2012 earnings release as well as our SEC filings for a full discussion of the company’s risk factors. The information we will provide today is accurate as of December 31, 2012, and we will not be updating any forward-looking statements to reflect facts or circumstances after this call. I will now turn the call over to Claude Davis.

Thanks, Ken, and thanks to all of you for joining the call today. We were pleased to report Q4 net income of $16.3 million or $0.28 per share and full-year net income of $67.3 million or $1.14 per share. Return on assets was 1.03% and return on equity was 9.06% for the quarter and 1.07% and 9.43% for the full year representing a slight improvement compared to our results for 2011. Included in the results for the quarter were approximately $1 million of pre-tax expenses related to the execution of our efficiency plan, or $0.01 per share. These were offset by $1 million of gains related to the sale of investment securities during the quarter. With regard to the efficiency plan we announced on the Q3 earnings call, our implementation plans remain on track as to timing and realization of the $17.1 million in annualized cost savings. I would like to reiterate that we do not view this initiative as a one-time event. We continue to review our operational cost structure for additional opportunities, and more importantly are working to build a culture of efficiency within the organization that leaves us well positioned to be a high performing company over the long term. In January we paid our most recent variable divided based on the Q3 earnings per share of $0.28 and the Board has declared our next variable dividend to be paid in April based on Q4 earnings of $0.28. Based on yesterday’s closing price of $15.25 this represents a yield of 7.3%. During Q4 we began to buy back shares in connection with the share repurchase plan we announced last quarter. In November and December we repurchased approximately 461,000 shares at an average price of $14.78, and bought back an additional 84,000 shares during January at an average…

Thank you, Claude. Our adjusted pre-tax, pre-provision earnings as shown on Slides 3 and 4 of the supplement were $28.6 million for the quarter or 1.81% of average assets on an annualized basis. Adjusted pre-tax, pre-provision earnings which exclude certain items related to covered loan activity as well as significant nonrecurring items increased approximately 17% quarter-over-quarter as a result of positive trends in most of the major categories of income and expense. Total interest income increased $1.3 million compared to the linked quarter due primarily to higher interest income earned on investment securities and loan P income during the period, including a $2.2 million prepayment fee related to the early payoff of a commercial credit. Net of the prepayment fee, the decline on interest income on loans was primarily the result of an 8.3% decrease in the average balance of covered loans outstanding, and to a lesser extent a decline in the yield earned on the portfolio. The impact of interest income on the covered loan activity was partially offset by a $78 million or 2.6% increase in average uncovered loan balances on a linked quarter basis. However, the impact to interest income continues to be muted as loan originations during the quarter were recorded at an average yield of 4.05% or approximately 70 basis points lower than the average yield on loans that paid off during the period. Excluding the impact of the prepayment fee, the yield earned on the uncovered portfolio during the quarter was approximately 4.73%, a three basis point increase compared to the linked quarter. Higher interest income from investment securities resulted from a $141 million or 8.8% increase in average balances compared to the linked quarter, partially offset by a ten basis point decline in the portfolio yield primarily due to the current reinvestment rate…

Great, thanks Tony, and Keith will be happy to open the call for questions now.

Yes, thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions.) And the first question comes from Scott Siefers from Sandler O’Neill. Scott Siefers – Sandler O’Neill : Good morning, guys. So the first question, Claude, I just want to make sure I understand what you’re saying clearly on the share repurchase outlook. So obviously this was a pretty aggressive quarter, Q4, for share repurchase. So it sounds like it might be a little more evenly spaced out going forward, so was it just taking advantage of price as opposed to something that we should expect to be consistent with that level going forward?

Yes, that’s right Scott; that is, if the Q4 level continued we would be significantly more than the 1 million share annual number. So what you should expect at least, and we look at it quarterly as a Board. And so at least at this point what you should expect is something that’s more consistent with an annual run rate of 1 million shares. Scott Siefers – Sandler O’Neill : Okay, perfect. I thought that was the case but I appreciate you clearing it up. And then Claude, either for you or Tony, I just was hoping you could chat in a little more detail or give a little more color on exactly what the strategy’s going to be with the securities portfolio and then the base of short-term borrowings as well which jumped up a little here in the quarter.

Strategy in terms of, are you looking at level or mix or… Scott Siefers – Sandler O’Neill : Yeah, both – kind of just what you’re planning to do over the course of the next year with the securities portfolio and the base of short-term borrowings.

Sure, yeah. In terms of the size of the portfolio I don’t think we see it potentially increasing from here. You know, whether it decreases or not I think will depend on loan growth and what we see in that context. The borrowings piece we had signaled a little bit last quarter that we were going to add roughly $300 million to the portfolio and fund it with borrowings, so that was the plan. And that borrowing number will again adjust up and down depending on what deposit growth looks like over the balance of the year. We may do some laddering of the funding base just to mirror the portfolio but the portfolio has a pretty high cash run off as well. I don’t know, Tony, if you’d add anything?

No, I think those are all good points, Claude. And as Claude said we are considering laddering out some of the funding base there so you might see that 17 basis point pick up a little bit but I wouldn’t see it being considerably different than what we’ve talked about. Scott Siefers – Sandler O’Neill : Okay, that’s perfect. Thanks a lot.

You bet, Scott.

Thank you. The next question comes from Christopher McGratty with KBW. [John Barr] – KBW : Good morning, it’s [John Barr] filling in for Chris. Just on that point, what you’re buying on the securities book, is it different from what you have on the books right now?

It’s not really different. It’s a mix of fixed and float, predominantly fixed but we are mixing in some floaters in there as well. And it is north of 90% agency-backed so it’s pretty typical of what you’ve seen us do in the past.

Yeah, no substantial credit risk in the portfolio. [John Barr] – KBW : Okay. And on the mortgage banking business I know you’re still ramping up. Should we expect additional costs in the next couple quarters in ’13? And also if you can talk about trends you’re seeing in that business in terms of volumes, the mix versus re-fi and purchase and gain on sale margins? Thanks.

Sure. I wouldn’t expect a substantial increase in costs. We’ve been building that really throughout 2011 and more substantially in 2012, so most of the cost run rate in that business you’ve already seen in the last couple of quarters. It’s more the fact that as you bring on a lot of mortgage loan officers it takes them time to build volume as well as it’s taken us time to rebuild our awareness so that we’re doing mortgages in the way we’re doing them again, especially in our metropolitan markets – so just building that brand takes time. And we feel good, especially in Q3 and Q4 that we’ve really begun to see that pick up in the context of volume. One of the things we’ve tried to focus on in that business when we reentered it was to have a heavier way to purchase versus re-fi. Now, in a low rate environment like this there’s still going to be a lot of re-fi business but ours, as an example, was roughly 41% purchase, 59% re-fi; and I think if you were to look at the mortgage banker indexes, the re-fi volumes for the industry have been running in the low- to mid-70% range for the industry. So we’ve been about 10 to 15 points better most of the year of our purchase volume versus our re-fi volume as compared to the industry, and that’s what we think we need to do long term to build that franchise. [John Barr] – KBW : Thanks, Claude. What’s a good effective tax rate for ’13?

I think it’s going to be pretty consistent with what you’ve seen for the year. I’m not anticipating any huge changes there right now. [John Barr] – KBW : Okay, thanks. And the last question I had: Tony, I know you’re serving as CFO and Chief Risk Officer right now. I’m just wondering from a timing perspective when you’re anticipating adding an additional person for the Chief Risk Officer position and whether you expect that to be an internal or external hire. Thanks.

Certainly. Obviously it’s a process that we’re currently going through. As with any kind of search we do you don’t know timing until you identify the person that you think is right for the role. Certainly we hope it will be nearer-term versus longer-term, but we need to go through the process. And whenever we do something like this we always have a bias toward internal as a way of promoting internal talent but we’re also going to make sure we get the right person for the job. So if that’s not the right person internal then we’ll certainly do an external search. So at this point it’s still only about a week and a half in process and hopefully sometime during the quarter we’ll be able to give everyone an update on that plan. [John Barr] – KBW : Thanks.

You bet.

Thank you. (Operator instructions.) Alright, there are no more questions at the present time so I’d like to turn the call back to management for any closing remarks.

Great, thanks Keith. And I would just close by again welcoming Tony to the call and thanking all of you for your interest in First Financial. Thank you.

Thank you. This concludes the conference. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.