Christopher J. Murphy III, CEO, commented, "We are pleased to announce record net income for the second year in a row and we reached our 35th consecutive year of dividend growth. We were able to grow average loans and leases by $402.04 million or 7.82% net of PPP from 2021. Given such strong loan and lease growth, we added $13.25 million to our provision for credit losses during the year compared to a $4.30 million recovery of provision for credit losses recorded during 2021. Our tax-equivalent net interest margin was 3.45% for the year compared to 3.23% in the prior year. As mentioned previously, the expansion in our net interest margin has largely been the result of seven Federal Reserve rate increases during 2022. We are hopeful that these rate increases will successfully stymie historically elevated levels of inflation but anticipate pressure on our net interest margin as we move forward into 2023. Our credit quality remained stable as we had net charge-offs to average loans and leases of only 0.03% in 2022 compared to 0.16% in 2021."
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