Kearny Financial Corp. Stock

Good morning, and welcome to the Annual Meeting of Stockholders of Kearny Financial Corp. Please note that today's meeting is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to Craig Montanaro, Director, President and Chief Executive Officer of Kearny Financial Corp. Mr. Montanaro, the floor is yours.

Thank you. The annual meeting will please come to order. Welcome to the Annual Meeting of Stockholders of Kearny Financial Corp. My name is Craig Montanaro, President and CEO of Kearny Financial Corp. and Kearny Bank. I will act as the Chairperson of today's meeting.

Next slide. On behalf of the directors and officers of the company, I would like to welcome you and express my appreciation to you for participating in this virtual meeting today. I'd like to recognize our Chairman, John J. Mazur, Jr. and the full Board of Directors, who joins me today.

Next slide. I'd also like to acknowledge our executive team who is also in attendance today.

Next slide. I would also like to acknowledge Gail Corrigan, our Corporate Secretary, who will act as Secretary of the Annual Meeting. Others present today include Adela Forsyth from Computershare, Marc Levy Esquire from Luse Gorman; and Andrey Dragun from Crowe LLP.

Next slide. In order to conduct an orderly meeting, please follow the rules of conduct, a copy of which is available on this portal. During the meeting, you may submit written questions by clicking the Q&A icon in the upper right portion of the meeting's center screen. We will address all questions that relate to the business matters conducted at this meeting immediately following our presentation of the proposals. The Board of Directors has previously appointed Adela Forsyth from Computershare to act as the Inspector of Elections at this meeting and any adjournments. The inspector has taken an oath to fairly and impartially perform her duties. The oath of inspector will be attached to the meeting minutes. The record of the company shows that there were 64,744,523 shares of common stock outstanding on the record date of August 22, 2025, and entitled to vote at this annual meeting.

We have previously received an affidavit from the secretary that a notice of Internet availability of proxy materials stating the place, day and hour of the annual meeting and the purpose for which it has been called was mailed on or about September 10, 2025, to each stockholder of record on the close of business on August 22, 2025. A copy of the affidavit will be attached to the minutes of this meeting. The company has delivered the inspector list of stockholders and all proxies that have been received.

Our records indicate that more than a majority of shares of common stock outstanding entitled to vote at the meeting are present in person or by proxy. The inspector is making an exact count and will submit a formal report on the number of shares presented and represented during the course of the meeting. Based on the preliminary count, a quorum is declared present, subject to the confirmation of that fact by the inspector's report.

The business to be acted upon on the annual meeting as stated in the proxy statement, notice of annual meeting is considered and act upon 3 proposals outlined in the proxy statement. Since no stockholder proposals were properly filed with the company secretary in advance of the annual meeting as provided in the bylaws, the business of this meeting is limited to the foregoing 3 matters in accordance with the bylaws. At the conclusion of the 3 items, we'll take a vote on all items. I will then make a presentation on the operations of the company.

We will consider proposals in order presented in the notice of annual meeting. The first item of business to be voted upon is the election of John J. Mazur, Jr., Raymond E. Chandonnet, John F. McGovern and Christopher Petermann as directors of the company for each of 3 years terms and Melvina Wong-Zaza for a 2-year term as described in the proxy statement. The second item of business to be voted upon is the proposal to ratify the appointment of Crowe LLP as an independent auditor for the company for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2026. The final proposal is considered is a nonbinding advisory vote to approve compensation paid to our executive officers as described in the proxy statement. Information about our executive compensation is contained in the proxy statement.

There is a question based on the Q&A icon that questions the qualifications of our directors being elected. For your reference, if you look at Page 7 in your proxy statement, you'll see the qualifications and the bios of all of our directors, including the ones being elected. Since there are no more questions, this concludes the discussion of all business matters. Any stockholder who wishes to vote or recast their vote at any time may do so by clicking on the link provided online. If you have already voted, there is no need for you to recast your vote.

[Voting]

Online voting is now closed. While the ballots are being finalized and confirmed, I will provide an update on the company matters.

Next slide, please. One more. The presentation we're about to make contains both forward-looking statements about the company as well as the non-GAAP financial measures. We refer to the information regarding forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures on Page 8 of our presentation, which is posted on our website.

Next slide. You have our company profile. Kearny Financial Corp., as you know, with ticker symbol KRNY, founded in 1884. Tangible book value per share of $9.77. Our market cap as of September 30, 2025, was $425 million. Assets, $7.7 billion; loans, $5.8 billion; deposits, $5.7 billion and capital, $700 million. Our profile has always been pretty strong. We're the 10th ranked financial institution in the state in terms of deposits, a market leader in that area. Our footprint, we operate 43 branches throughout 12 counties in New Jersey and New York. As an ongoing initiative, we are focused on branch optimization. You'll see and you've seen in previous press releases that we are closing 3 branches at the end of this month, and we'll have a network of 40 branches. We've over the last 148 years, our focus has been M&A. And since 1999, we've done 7 successful transactions. We're a very disciplined acquirer. We're focused on long-term growth and shareholder value creation.

Next slide. Fiscal 2025 highlights. As the line says, turning the tide from market pressure to strategic growth. We've successfully managed a bunch of challenges this year and last year. Obviously, the inverted yield curve, the commercial real estate overhang and the liquidity demands from an inverted yield curve and very high Fed fund rates. We're really focused on shifting the growth. It's really been a defensive posture for a while. Now we're back on the offensive focusing on organic expansion. We're going to get some advantages, and you'll see it in further slides as the decline in cost of funds improves our margin and a more favorable steeper yield curve will improve overall net income.

Credit management, we've always been a strong underwriter. We really focus on cash flow lending and our history of strong credit performance speaks for itself. On the strategic and technology side, this year, we launched an AI chatbot for our branches. That's really used to help them navigate policy guidance throughout the branches. It's on time, real time, and it reduces errors and improves quality of service to our clients. On the digital front, we launched a virtual agent that enables clients to access information, complete transactions and things like bill pay through a natural language. Finally, on the more digital front, we launched a new HR timekeeping application designed for small- and medium-sized businesses, strengthening our value proposition in a key growth segment.

Next slide, please. A little bit on net interest income and net interest margin. You can see sustained earnings growth and margin expansion. As you can see, we started the first quarter of 2025, our margin was 1.8%, and we've seen it grow nicely 20 basis to just at 2%, which is really good growth. And you can see our NII has grown from $32 million to almost $35 million, almost $36 million. So the margin trajectory is upward. It's -- and the earnings power are coming back, which is nice to see. If you look at the right side of the chart, you can see our earnings metric.

We'll take a look at pretax pre-provision net revenue. You could see it's roughly $7.2 million in the first quarter and then upwards of $9.9 million by the fourth quarter. You could see from a pretax pre-provision EPS per share, we went from $0.12 to $0.16. The analysts really look at that. That's a key metric. The only thing that's lagging a little bit is the EPS from $0.10 to $0.11, but we'll see that trend up over the next fiscal year.

Next slide. Track record on our credit performance. You folks have probably seen this slide. This goes back to 2006. You can see during a bunch of different areas -- eras, we've seen some challenges, but we've really outperformed most of the banks in the country. You could see in the global financial crisis, the blue line is most of the people in the country in terms of financial institutions other than the top 100, you can see our orange line stays below that trend line, including Hurricane Sandy. Even during the pandemic, we've been successful in navigating and having very solid credit quality. And you can see the line at the top says cumulative charge-offs of Kearny between 2008 and 2025 were $39.8 million, which is pretty exemplary in terms of actual charge-offs on a cumulative basis over almost 20 years.

Next slide. Talks a little bit about this coming year, which is some exciting times. You're going to see accelerated organic growth. We're really focused on taking our client base and deepening our wallet share, cross-selling, targeted outreaches, segmentation, our data analytics team, our marketing team and our business line leaders really out of our existing portfolio and in our own footprint.

Optimization on loan portfolio performance and resilience. This is really about relationship banking and really requiring every deal to have deposits and structuring deal profitability to hit our ROA and ROE targets. Strengthening core deposits, we're really focused on building core deposits and reinforcing our financial strength. We're out acquiring deposit gathering teams. You'll see that happen over the next couple of quarters that will help grow our core deposits.

Operational efficiency through technology. I talk a lot about technology in my letter. I'm a big believer in technology. You're going to continue to see more and more of that. Our business is going in that way. Technology is a great efficiency play and provides -- improves operations, client effectiveness, and it's very cost effective. And on our operational footprint, as we talked about, we're continuing to diversify our lending into many areas. We're focused on optimizing branches and boosting our community engagement as well in deposit growth.

Next slide, please. Positioned for earnings growth in a declining rate environment. So one of the things that's unique to us is that we've always been a relatively liability-sensitive institution. And we've really done a lot of work with derivatives and the balance sheet over the last couple of years so that we could take advantage of a more normalized yield curve. As you know, our low-cost deposits should reprice more quickly than our fixed rate assets. So that should produce some nice earnings power.

Proven asset quality. Again, we've talked about this before, minimal exposure to New York City office as well as rent regulated multifamily. It's really a fraction of our portfolio. And if you look at our net charge-offs, as in the previous slide, it's always been very, very nominal.

Finally, operating efficiencies and improvement. We're very disciplined on the cost front and allocating costs and managing expenses. If you look at our quarterly run rate of our operating expenses, it's very consistent, and that will continue to help improve our profitability and financial strength. Finally, AI, technology, RPA, you can lump them all together. That's where our business is going. It's less people, more technology. That will be the focus for our company and most in the banking business.

Next slide, please. This is a great slide, enterprise-wide efficiency standardization initiative. This is -- if you saw, we are partnering with a big company called The Lab Consulting Group, and their focus will really be on automation, and you can see here using AI and RPA to look at workflow and process improving, all kinds of things, avoiding manual types of intervention and really focusing on using our technology and best practices to improve our workflows.

On top of that, we'll be building KPI dashboards to monitor our performance and track what the automation is doing in terms of profitability, client satisfaction and so forth. And as a result, this will help us in terms of speed, accuracy and adoption of new products and services as well as client expectations. The impact to you folks on the line, obviously, reducing operating expense is always an important thing. This will give us the opportunity to hire more revenue generators and grow the revenue side of our business. Productivity is so important, faster execution, better client experience. That's really how the company is going to be successful going forward.

And obviously, one of the things by doing this automation and using this technology, we'll be able to have a scalable platform where we don't have to add people, we can add clients, but not adding people because the technology will replace a lot of manual intervention. And lastly, improving employee engagement. This is really about reducing error and client satisfaction.

Next slide, please. Finally, we don't talk a lot about this, but I mentioned it in my letter. We developed an investment services group about 3 years ago. It's on a very scalable platform. To date, we have 10 members that are licensed FAs along with additional 8 branch people. It's been very well received from our client base. It delivers tailored strategies and long-term value for our clients. As you can see, Total sales since its inception, excuse me, $486 million; gross revenue, $8.7 million; assets under management at this point, $369 million, and we service about 2,000 clients.

Again, the platform is great because it's a really traditional platform. It offers IRAs, brokerage stock, government securities, annuities, along with financial planning, tax estate, profit sharing and retirement plans as well as an insurance portfolio of long-term care, disability and life. We've won some awards, top 4% nationwide in terms of gross revenue among 485 institutions at broker-dealers, nationally among peers banks, broker-dealers, $1 billion to $5 billion -- I'm sorry, $5 billion to $10 billion, we're #5. And finalist in the Cara Group 2025 direct award emerging firm category. So we've really done well with this product, and we'll continue to see the fee income and this grow over the coming years.

Next slide, please. All right. The inspector has completed her count and will now report the certificate and report of the inspection of elections.

The report confirms that a quorum is -- has been in attendance at the annual meeting for all purposes. The report also shows that each director received more than a plurality of votes cast at the annual meeting.

The proposal to ratify the appointment of Crowe LLP as the independent registered public accounting firm for the company for the year ending June 30, 2026, received the affirmative vote of at least a majority of the shares cast at the annual meeting. And the advisory nonbinding proposal to approve our executive compensation as described in the proxy statement received the affirmative vote of at least a majority of the shares cast at the annual meeting.

Accordingly, each of the 5 directors has been elected. The proposal to ratify the appointment of Crowe LLP has been approved, and the company has received advisory approval of its executive compensation as described in the proxy statement.

The certificate and report of inspector of elections has been accepted and approved and will be attached to the minutes of the annual meeting.

Next slide, please. Again, on behalf of the directors and officers of Kearny Financial Corp., I'd like to thank you all for participating in today's meeting and for the interest you have shown in the affairs of the company. This meeting is adjourned.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's meeting. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.