Good morning and welcome to the WesBanco Incorporated Fiscal 2015’s Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] After today’s presentation there will be an opportunity to ask questions. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to John Iannone, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead sir.

Thanks Rocco. Good morning, and welcome to the WesBanco Inc's fourth quarter 2015 earnings conference call. Our fourth quarter 2015 earnings release which contains reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures was issued yesterday afternoon and is available on our Web site, www.wesbanco.com. Leading the call today are Todd Clossin, President and Chief Executive Officer and Bob Young, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Following our opening remarks, we will begin the question-and-answer session. An archive of this call will be available on our Web site for one year. Forward-looking statements in this report relating to WesBanco's plans, strategies, objectives, expectations, intentions and adequacy of resources are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The information contained in this report should be read in conjunction with WesBanco's Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2014 as well as documents subsequently filed by WesBanco with Securities and Exchange Commission including WesBanco's Form 10-Qs for the quarters ended March 31st, June 30th and September 30, 2015, which are available on the SEC and WesBanco Web sites. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements, which are not historical facts involve risks and uncertainties, including those detailed in WesBanco's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC under Risk Factors in Part I, Item 1A. Such statements are subject to important factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by such statements. WesBanco does not assume any duty to update forward-looking statements. Todd?

Good morning everyone. I would start off by welcoming John, first conference call, Head of Investor Relations, glad to have John onboard. Welcome to WesBanco's 2015 fourth quarter earnings call. As many of you know, WesBanco is a diversified and well-balanced financial services company, built upon a strong legacy of credit and risk management. We have meaningful market share across our geographies, maintained by exceptional customer service, solid and growing fee-based businesses, led by our proprietary mutual fund family, the WesMark Funds fronts and our century old trust business. On today's call, we'll cover several operational topics and review our financial results for the fourth quarter. Before we begin, there are several important takeaways this morning. We continue to generate strong loan growth including organic growth across our markets. While we continue to see significant consumer deposit inflows in our legacy markets from land owner leasing rights to the shale gas industry, we have limited direct and indirect credit exposure to the industry. We are seeing excellent execution against our growth strategies, as we continue to manage our Bank for the long-term success of our key shareholders. And we continue to focus upon driving positive operating leverage, as indicated by our strong and improving efficiency ratio. We're pleased about our results for the quarter and the year, as well as several milestones achieved during the year. For the fourth quarter of 2015, excluding merger-related expenses, we earned net income of $23 million and fully diluted earnings per share of $0.60. Full year 2015 earnings increased 15% from last year to $81 million, supported by total loan growth of $979 million, including 7% organic loan growth when excluding the impact of the ESB merger. We continue to maintain tight discretionary expense control over our investment spend, as we prepare for crossing…

Thanks, Todd and good morning. For the 12 months ended December 31, 2015 we reported net income of 80.8 million and earnings per diluted share of $2.15, reflecting the impact of merger-related expenses. Excluding these expenses from both periods as detailed in our earnings release, net income would have increased 24.2% to 88 million with earnings per diluted share of $2.34 as compared to 2.41 for 2014 calculated on the same basis. For the year 2015, return on average assets was 99 basis points and return on average tangible equity was 13.41%, both reflecting the impact of the ESB Financial acquisition we closed earlier in the year. Excluding merger-related expenses, these ratios were 1.08% for return on average assets and 14.58% for return on average tangible equity. For the three months ended December 31st, we reported net income of 23 million and earnings per diluted share of $0.60, increases of 39.3% from 16.5 million and 7.1% from $0.36 respectively in the year earlier period. Excluding merger-related expenses from both periods as detailed in our earnings release, net income would have increased 32.7% to 23 million, while earnings per diluted share would have increased 1.7% to $0.60. For the fourth quarter, return on average assets improved slightly both sequentially and year-over-year to 1.07% and return on average tangible equity was 14.68%, up slightly from the third quarter and up 91 basis points in the year ago period. Our remaining earnings related comments will focus primarily on the fourth quarter’s results. As a reminder, our earnings release published last night contains our consolidated financial highlights and reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures. Net interest income grew 11.6 million or 23.7% to 60.6 million in the fourth quarter, when compared to the prior year quarter as average earning assets increased 34.6%. For all of…

Yes, sir. Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Bob Ramsey of FBR. Please go ahead.

I guess the first question I have for you -- I know you just said you expect mid single-digit loan growth, funded impart by securities runoff, just wondering sort of how close those two are going to be and how we should think about the growth in earning assets over the course of the year?

Yes, well if you look at our -- what we just mentioned was mid single-digit loan growth is kind of the anticipation of that. We do have a fair amount of securities that mature on an annual basis. So, we'd have more than we need quite frankly to fund the loan growth. So, with those maturities portfolio some would be reinvested, but the majority of that would be expected to go into loan growth.

Okay. So, then it doesn’t sound then like earning assets will be more or less flat as really the story about mix shifts into loans?

Yes, I think when you're looking at that, we'll have to see how the year progresses, a lot of it is going to depend upon the amount of loan growth and what happens from an economic standpoint, the productivity of our lenders that we brought onboard and everything else, but the thought was that overtime our balance sheet growth would be moderated by a reduction in securities portfolios, right now, it’s about 32%-33% of our balance sheet and historically we have had that down into the mid-20s. So I’d like to get it back down there, but it’s hard to put a timeline associated with that. We’re looking closer return on assets and the actual balance sheet growth is kind of our focus.

And then the balance sheet is not growing, but you are shifting that mix. That should be an additional in net interest margin I think have used higher yielding assets. Just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the net interest margin outlook in 2016 and I appreciate the interest rate scenario sort of share with us what we could expect then. But what happens to the extent there is nothing further in terms of rate changes and so how has that changed the outlook?

The current outlook would have a few basis points of increase primarily in the second half of the year as your loan growth kicks-in, spring selling season into summer those are the higher quarters we typically experience. So the couple of 25 basis point rate increase is, it’s a top off as the windows would occur some analysts say March, others say June, would factor into that equation Bob, but not significantly. You have purchase accounting influencing the numbers in 2016 just as they did in’15. We think that purchase accounting will have about 4 to 5 basis point impact on 2016 where it had about 10 basis point impact in 2015. So you have that factor as well that limits to some degree, the ability to see margin enhancement or visibility from the mix shift on the asset side from investments to loans. So we would suggest that it’s a minimal amount of overall margin growth, with or without the two increases.

Okay, got it. And so then with earning assets relatively flat and a modest amount of margin expansion, it’s probably fair to assume net interest income is flat to very slightly up from 4Q levels?

In terms of the first couple of quarters, you have day count issues so you have 91 days in both the first and second quarter of 2015 versus 92 in the third and fourth quarter, I’m not telling you anything you can’t see on the calendar for yourself.

I appreciate the leap year reminder.

I think it’s fair to say that for the first couple of quarters, the fourth quarter is a good projection as to net interest income. And then again in the back half of the year, there is expectation for net interest income growth from both the Fed funds rate increases assuming a normal yield curve environment and as well the loan growth that Todd and I talked about.

The other thing I would mention is our plan is to shift from the securities portfolio overtime to the lending portfolio we saw that happen in the fourth quarter, loans tend to carry out a better yield associated with them in the securities portfolio and we think that is going to be a positive for us for a number of years to come yet. As we shrink that securities portfolio down 10 year Treasury's right at 2 on the button right now. And we think we could do better that on the lending side. So I think you’ll see the benefits of that, we continue to execute on the loan growth that we’ve been able to achieve.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Catherine Mealor of KBW. Please go ahead.

Thank you for the additional caller on the energy treasury that was really helpful. And so now you got about 1% of the book in direct, 2% in indirect a very small. But how do you think we should think about potential impact of just a local real estate market and the impact that this might circle this market as commodity prices remain low for a longer period of time. Are there any submarkets within the Marcellus shale region that you’re monitoring more closely and have you seen any signs of weakness in any of these markets yet or is it still too early to tell?

Yes, it’s a great question. I’ll tell you that the oil and natural gas in particular, it only ramp it up for a couple of years before the slowdown prices occurred. You never saw the ramp-up in real estate prices. Now rental property prices went up, I lived through that as I was relocating here, couldn’t find a place to rent and rent is double, but housing prices did not go up, because it was always viewed that the inflow of workers from Texas to other places were temporary and eventually they’ll be going back, so they weren’t buying houses. So you didn’t see a lift in the real estate values that you thought maybe in some other markets that you might have seen worth maybe a little more long-term increase in employment. So as a result of that with some of the slowdown as a result of prices coming down in natural gas, you have not seen a corresponding drop in values as well and as we talk to talent recruit talent in here it is interesting that you see the dynamics between our economy and others around the country and we have not seen the fall off that would have been expected as a result of some of the prices coming down. So, and the other thing I would mention to you too, while a big chunk of our deposit footprint is in the Marcellus/Utica shale area, if you look at our loan portfolio, it's split, a third West Virginia, a third Pennsylvania, a third Columbus Cincinnati and the Dayton area. So it's a very diversified commercial loan -- very diversified commercial loan portfolio, very diversified residential loan portfolio. So, the consumer book on a geographic basis is very decentralized, it's not all focused right here where a good chunk obviously of the deposit related to the Marcellus and Utica shale is occurring in these markets. So, I just kind of wanted to mention that difference.

And then on -- and one thing on the expenses, Bob you mentioned that we should be some level of expense increase from some of the investments you're making as you are near the 10 million in asset market. Is there any way to frame or size how much additional cost you expect to come over the next couple of years from that?

We have internally looked at the number of risk management individuals, the number of BSA/AML for staff members, compliance members, other departments that would be directly impacted and then some of the ones that would be less so, my own finance team, our profitability team. And I had said earlier that we had acquired several of those competencies and have been already in the run rate herein at least for a portion of 2015. For instance, we had doubled our BSA/AML staff from six to approximately 12 or 13. There will be additional investments. I don't think those investments are a significant portion of the increased investments over the next two to three years. Recall that the biggest impact is going over 10 billion is the Durbin impact and to a lesser degree by change in the FDIC insurance model for banks that are over $10 billion in size. The amount of dollars associated with staff increases themselves, I think you're really looking at less than a $1 million per year.

Yes we budgeted this out Catherine for this year and next year and without getting too terribly specific, what you're talking about a dozen people between this year and next year, six this year, six next year, that would be into what we call staff risk management those type of areas that we need to build and quite frankly we’ve added that number in the last three-four years as the bank's grown. So, I don't think you're going to see anything materially different in that side. And when it comes to software and program expense, things like that that we've been building in over the last couple of years. Going forward we don't see anything terribly significant and we're also I think attacking is probably the right word, attacking expenses on the other side. So, we want to make sure, just as when we added the commercial lenders over the last year, we were taking out expenses at the same time, and I would be expecting to continue to do the same thing because the positive operating leverage and the efficiency ratio is really what's driving the decision, and that also drive the timing, quite frankly of some of the investment spend to get ready to go for 10 billion, if you don't see the margin improve, you don’t see the rate increases go up things like that, then obviously that's going to impact what we're spending on the expense side. So, all those things will work together, but we don't anticipate or plan any big quarterly jumps in expenses over the next couple of years, it'll be a more gradual increase and if we execute the way we want to and we should and the way we've been executing, the revenue growth should offset that to keep the efficiency ratio very strong. And we watch that every month, we're very attentive to that ratio.

Okay, that is very helpful…

Relative to overall expense guidance, I had said in my commentary Catherine that the first couple of quarters would show similar paces of what we experienced in the fourth quarter of 2015. We typically have midyear increases on the salary side and growth strategy relative to marketing expense. So, a little bit more than that then in the back half of the year, the third and fourth quarter.

And this concludes our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Todd Clossin, Chief Executive Officer for any closing remarks.

All right, well thank you for joining us today. I know there're a lot of conference calls going on and there's a lot of M&A news announced in the last couple of days keeping everybody busy. But thank you for being on our call this morning. We're pleased with our performance for 2015. We’re excited about continuing to execute upon our growth strategies and we hope to see you at one of our investor events. So, have a good day. Thank you.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. We thank you all for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.