Old National Bancorp Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

Great question. At the end of the day, we still believe this is a people business. As much as we want to focus in on technology and ways we support our clients digitally, where we think we are best is when there is a relationship involved, and that's a people-driven business. Paying attention during any kind of integration to the people is the most important thing we can do. My predecessor, Bob Jones, used to say, "People are the most important asset," and we fully embrace that. Culture. I was telling the last group, we were talking about being on the road, and last year I made 52 market visits during our Bremer integration. Much of that was centered in on the legacy Bremer footprint, bringing our two teams together, out seeing in front of clients. Still spend a lot of time in Chicago.

That's the most important thing we can do, I think, as CEOs, is to be a culture champion. When we do our engagement surveys, that's the feedback we get from our team members. They love our culture. My job is to be able to be there to support our team. I still spend a lot of time, too. I think about we've been interviewing a lot of people lately, and I personally still spend time interviewing a lot of folks that want to join the organization, and that could be a relationship manager in an existing market, maybe a new market. It could be a leader we're trying to hire that's several layers down from myself, but I still spend a lot of time, and I'm not there to test them for their technical knowledge. I'm there to test them for the culture part.

Are they going to be additive to our culture? Are they going to make our organization even better? While that has been our focus historically, it continues to remain our focus. Despite investments in technology and the new AI world. I think for the longest time, I think honestly, as I think about, I know we'll get to kind of the AI questions here in a little bit, but that is the moat around our clients, is that relationship. As long as we have that, we have the ability and the right to win.

That's a really great question. We think about that an awful lot. As we become bigger, is there that tipping point, where necessarily so you have more layers and you have maybe a little more bureaucracy in your organization. I like to believe as long as I'm CEO, whether that's today at roughly $75 billion or tomorrow at some bigger size, that people focus and that culture focus won't change. It's who we are in our DNA. It's what makes a special and unique place to work. It's what attracts talent to us. I think we all have to guard against that. I joke about hiring Tim Burke, who's our President and COO, a little over a year ago, and I made him come to Evansville six times, and I made his wife come twice. All eight of those times were interviews, including his wife.

We want to make sure that we bring people to the organization who share our similar values, but also make our culture better. Tim was sitting in Cleveland. I think all things being equal, he would've rather stayed in Cleveland, but it was important for him to be at the headquarters so we could spend an awful lot of time together and focus on culture. I think those are the things we're going to continue to do in order to be successful.

Yeah, I would just start with we still feel really good about the guidance we gave at the last quarterly earnings conference call. We started out believing the year was kind of a mid-single digit year. We believe that is the normal run rate for our business. If you think about GDP plus two to three points, we think that is the right place for us to run. We are going to grow as fast as the markets, then we are going to steal a little bit of share. We continue to steal a little bit of share away from everybody. The first half of the year ran a little bit faster than we would have anticipated. I think that is chalk it up to, again, having great people in the right place at the right time to go off and execute. Pretty vibrant markets. We surprise ourself.

We are still sitting at record pipelines when we ended the quarter. I know there is lots of questions around the macro environment today that we can talk about, but despite that, I think we feel really good in our guidance. Now, we did project out the back half of the year to be more normal-like. So more mid-single digit, but overall for the year, we would run ahead of where we originally anticipated when we were thinking about 2026 at the end of last year.

Yeah. It is really interesting. We have had a generational succession in our commercial business. We had a number of senior-level officers retire in the last year. A natural planned succession that we had lots of insight into, including Mark Sander, who was the President and COO, who joined us out of the First Midwest partnership. So we were able to bring Tim Burke. He was able to think about what staff we needed as a $75-plus billion organization. So we were able to promote a bunch of people internally. We also brought some fresh faces in. One of the things that I asked Tim to think about, as we become a bigger organization, we need to make sure we have the systems and accountability in place to run a bigger geography, more people. So Tim has done that himself.

He has brought in a leadership team that is capable of doing that has been there, done it before, coming out of some super regionals and some national organizations. I think that kind of fresh energy into our business. I joke a little bit. You have more energy at the middle part of your career than you do at the end of your career. We had, again, a handful of retirements in our commercial business. We have replaced them all. We are stronger today. That is nothing to take away from the folks that retired. They are all amazing folks. They remain my dear friends. But we have this incredibly strong new leadership team in our commercial business, and I think they are doing a really good job of going out and hiring and attracting talent.

They are doing a really good job of ensuring that we bring the best of Old National to our existing clients and new clients. I think that is allowing us to go off and actually do better than we would have maybe anticipated at the start of the year. The economy is good. Obviously, there is some uncertainty around kind of that macro backdrop. We have rates now, and we can talk about energy prices, and we could talk about trade uncertainty. But that has been there for the last couple of years, right? I think it is just we are executing better today than we had been. I give a lot of credit to our leadership team, but I give more credit to the team we brought in to continue to go off and be in front of our clients.