You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: Joining you today from First BanCorp.
are Aurelio Aleman, president and chief executive officer; and Orlando Berges, executive vice president and chief financial officer.
Let's start by moving to Slide 4.
We closed 2021 with another record quarter for the company, clearly reflecting the strength of the franchise and also combined with the improved economic backdrop in our operating markets.
During the quarter, we generated $73.6 million in net income or $0.35 per diluted share and importantly, I think a record $104.9 million in adjusted pre-tax pre-provision income.
Asset quality continued to trend the improvement trend that we had during the year, now non-performing assets reaching a decade low of 0.76% as a percent of total assets, driven by repayment of several non-accrual loans and REO sales and obviously less migration.
The ratio of the ACL for loans and finance leases to total loans decreased to 2.43% during the quarter driven by combined factors such as reduction in the residential mortgages as well as reductions associated with improvement in macroeconomic factors and their impact on qualitative reserves.
In terms of expenses, the efficiency ratio continued to trend down now to 52%.
I have to say this is a historical low compared to 53% registered during the third quarter.
On the capital front, we continued executing our capital plan, returning capital to shareholders.
During the fourth quarter, we raised the common dividend by 43% to $0.10 per share.
We repurchased 4.6 million common shares amounting to $63.9 million.
And we also executed the announced redemption of $36.1 million of outstanding preferred shares.
Happy to say that we ended the year with a very strong capital position, 17.8% common equity Tier-1, leaving ample room for further capital deployment initiatives during 2022.
Let's move to Slide 5 to provide some detail on the deposit and loan performance.
The loan portfolio slightly decreased in the quarter by $75 million, mostly driven by $73 million reduction in SBA PPP loans.
Also, we have four -- we experienced four large commercial repayments of relationships from Florida and Virgin Islands, which amounted to $125 million.
And we also experienced a reduction of $112 million in the residential mortgage loans that sit in the portfolio.
These reductions were partially offset by, I would have to say, quite strong auto and commercial origination both in Puerto Rico and Florida.
And despite this slight repayment, the commercial portfolio grew by $59 million, turning the corner, hopefully, as we continue to move on into 2022.
Loan originations for the fourth quarter were also quite strong with $1.4 billion, including credit card utilization activity.
It's really the best quarter we have had this year, again with strong originations in Puerto Rico and Florida.
And to say that we closed the year with a very strong pipeline, actually the stronger pipeline coming into the first quarter of the year.
Definitely, loan portfolio balances remain impacted by excess liquidity and these pay downs.
I think with rate markets moving up, this should diminish.
On the other hand, loan originations continue to be strong.
And we're very focused on our strategy for growing the portfolios centered around increasing consumer and commercial books while continue to focus in the conforming residential mortgages that as we have done over the past year.
In terms of deposits, core deposits continued to grow, but as expected, at a slower pace compared to prior quarters.
Over the next few quarters, we expect a reduction of approximately $150 million of government deposits from the recent bankruptcy settlement.
That should happen probably second quarter, I will say.
Excluding brokered and government deposit, core deposit did register an increase of $64 million during the quarter.
I'd like to take an opportunity, before handing the court to Orlando to provide a summary of the year, so let's move to Slide 6.
Definitely, the core results for the company reflect the transformational progress that we have in multiple fronts in 2021.
We generated $281 million of net income or $1.31 per diluted share compared to 102.3 in prior year.
We registered a 30% increase in adjusted pre-tax pre-provision income.
And we grew total loan originations and renewals by 20%, excluding PPP and credit card activity when compared to 2020.
I think moreover, new money, commercial and originations, including closed and unfunded commercial and construction loans grew by 50% when compared to prior year.
I think it's important to comment that over 75% of the construction loans that we already made in 2021 are expected to partially fall in 2022.
So they did not fund it in 2021.
And importantly, during the year, we returned capital equivalent to 112% of earnings, again in the form of repurchase of common, redemption of preferred and dividends.
Key to the efficiency ratio, we completed the timely integration of the acquired operations during the year.
We executed on all the operational efficiencies that were planned as part of the transaction and did achieve the established financial targets of the transaction.
Again, the transaction allowed us to expand our footprint, strengthen our leadership position in the market in Puerto Rico.
Importantly, we have invested significantly in our digital capabilities.
The pandemic triggered an accelerated adoption of digital channels, which did continue to grow significantly, digital engagement improving across all our digital functionalities.
We also, during the year, reengineered the auto lending origination process by deploying a fully digital platform to our dealer network, allowing us to offer a complete digital experience.
I have to say that additional investments in technology and digital operations are planned for 2022 in order to continue improving our competitive position in an increasingly digital environment, which we have great progress in 2021.
On the macro front, we are in the initial stages of a growth cycle in Puerto Rico.
The recent announcement of the resolution of the debt restructuring process should allow for the government to focus their efforts toward supporting economic growth initiatives and capitalizing on a large amount of obligated disaster relief funds that need to be deployed.
Like other jurisdiction, COVID cases increased recently, driven by the Omicron variant.
However, our quite high vaccination rate provides for an important safety net to withstand any impact in the healthcare infrastructure and economic activity.
We are confident that the positive backdrop in our operated that should result in increased loan demand in 2022.
Aurelio mentioned, we had very strong 2021 results.
Net income was $281 million, $1.31 a share.
That good results included improvements of $130 million in net interest income and $10 million increase in other non-interest income.
Remember that the Santander operation, the acquisition was completed on September 1, 2020.
So we had four months of Santander versus this year we had the full year.
And as he also mentioned, it reflected on pre-tax pre-provision improvement, significant improvements.
We went from about $300 million in 2020 to $392 million in 2021, so a significant pickup.
Fourth quarter results were also very strong.
We also made reference to $73.6 million in net income, $0.35 a share.
The provision for the quarter was in fact the net benefit.
We had a $12.2 million benefit, very similar to the $12.1 million we had in the third quarter.
And again, it's overall driven by improvements in macroeconomic variables, which is both the actual and the expected and I'll touch a little bit more on the reserve later on.
The expenses for the quarter were $2.6 million lower than in the third quarter.
However, we had an increase in income tax expense, with a higher level of income resulted in a change in or an increase in the mix of taxable to exempt income.
And effective tax rates went up by 7 basis points for the full year, resulting in an increase in taxes on the -- throughout the year.
Net interest income for the quarter was $184.1 million.
It's slightly lower than last quarter, but margin improved 1 basis point to 3.61%.
The yield on the portfolio, the GAAP yield on the portfolio was 6.34% for the quarter, very similar to the 6.33% we had last quarter.
And loans, if we look at the mix of earning assets, loans continue to represent approximately 55% of average interest-earning assets.
The overall cost or the cost of interest-bearing deposits, excluding broker, it's now 30 basis points, which is 3 basis points lower than last quarter.
We look at what's happening now, the recent increase in market rates will provide us an increase in yields for variable rate loans.
Approximately 40% of our commercial portfolio is tied to LIBOR and another 19% is tied to prime.
And we have already seen a little bit of pickup on three-month LIBOR, which is the main variable that is used.
The other factor, significant factor, is the reinvestment of maturing securities should also provide some pickup.
If we look at current rates versus what we were reinvesting, we foresee an increase of somewhere between 40 and 50 basis points on reinvested money as compared to the fourth quarter.
Clearly, this doesn't mean that the whole portfolio will go up by this amount, but will help in start getting that overall yield of the portfolio up.
If we assume the mix of interest-earning assets remaining at these levels and the trend -- the expected trend on interest rates, we do foresee some increases in margin in the next few quarters.
However, as Aurelio mentioned, we had the reduction in the mortgage portfolio as we continue to originate much higher percentage of conforming paper.
Therefore, margin mix gets a little bit affected.
Non-interest income for the quarter was fairly similar, slight increase as compared to the third quarter.
We had increases in fee income and service charges on the assets, which was offset by some decreases in the revenue of mortgage banking activities.
We ended up selling less of the conforming portfolio based on the level of originations that we had done in the prior quarter.
On the expense side, expenses for the quarter were $111 million -- $100.5 million, which compares to $114 million in the third quarter.
In the fourth quarter, merger expenses were $1.9 million.
Our costs what remains, which is mostly related to four additional branch consolidations that we'll be completing during the first half of 2022.
Last quarter, merger and restructuring expenses were $2.3 million.
And at this point, we basically have completed everything related to merger expenses.
There shouldn't be any component of this going forward.
Overall, as you all know, expense levels have been decreasing in the last couple of quarters as conversion- and integration-related expenses have been eliminated and we have continued to achieve or implement the savings from the integration of the acquired operation that we have discussed in the past.
However, in reality, expense levels have been running at a lower clip than what we expected to be a normalized level.
And two main factors, one of the main one has been the level of personnel vacancies that we have had throughout the last few quarters.
At this point, we're running twice as high in vacancies from a normal level, in part related to the funding support the government has provided and has created some market shortage.
To compensate, we have -- at the end of 2021, we started raising the minimum salary to branch and call center personnel.
The impact of that increase will be approximately $1.4 million per quarter starting now in this first quarter of 2022.
And we expect that this increase in minimum salary, combined with some of the other ongoing recruiting efforts, should help bring some back normality due to the vacancy levels.
Once vacancy levels are normalized, compensation expense should increase somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.5 million per quarter.
Obviously, we don't expect to achieve these levels until later in the year, most likely toward the end of 2022.
The expense levels also, we have had the benefit of the increase in property prices in the Puerto Rico market, which has provided us the opportunity to improve the disposition value of the OREO properties.
That has been offsetting OREO operating expenses.
In fact, we achieved $2.3 million net gain in OREO in the third quarter and additional $1.6 million net gain this quarter.
Traditionally, this is not what happens.
There is always the operating cost of handling and disposing reprocessed properties, but the market has provided some opportunity.
This will be -- realistically this will eventually go back to more normalized levels.
The other component in expenses that we are currently in the process of completing -- the reconfiguring centralized facilities to complete the physical integration of all the operating units, that's ongoing, but not completed yet and it's going to take a few months before it's completed.
And also, as we have mentioned in the past, we continue with several technology projects that are underway.
Most of these costs are not yet reflected in the quarterly expenses.
That's why we still believe that on a normalized basis, expenses will be in that $117 million to $119 million range.
But clearly, we won't see that until later in the year.
The first couple of quarters of 2022 should run at a lower clip.
Efficiency ratio in the quarter as a result -- that Aurelio made reference was 52%, which is lower than anticipated.
However, even normalized expense levels will take us to our target ratio of 55%.
So we feel comfortable on the expense levels and efficiencies achieved, not considering any further improvements in -- on the income side that should also help the ranges.
On asset quality, just to touch up on Aurelio made reference to, the non-performing asset decreased by $14 million, as you saw, continued the trend.
On NPA, the non-performing assets in total, that stand below 1% at 76 basis points of assets.
And then $6.8 million of that reduction was in nonaccrual commercial construction loans.
We ended up selling a $3.1 million non-performing construction loan in Puerto Rico.
Inflows continued to be low.
They were $2 million lower than last quarter, $15 million this quarter as compared to $17 million last quarter.
On the allowance, Aurelio also made reference to the allowance, at the end of the quarter was $180 million.
It's $20 million down from the third quarter.
Looking at allowance just on loans and finance leases was $269 million, which is $19 million down.
Basically, the allowance reduction reflects improvement and continue to be projected on macroeconomic variables that are on all the variables that are used to calculate ACL.
However, we are monitoring closely the impact of the Omicron variant.
The number of cases have increased significantly, especially that impact on customers in the hotel, transportation and entertainment industry.
And we are considering those as part of the qualitative assessment that we do on the establishment of the reserves.
The ratio of the reserve continues to be strong.
Aurelio mentioned that we stand at 2.43% in the last quarter.
On the capital front, just to touch it again, we continue with the execution of the capital plan.
For the fourth quarter, common stock repurchases and the redemption of the preferred shares were $100 million.
Throughout 2021, we have repurchased 16.7 million common shares and redeemed the $36 million in preferred, totaling $150 million in capital actions for the year on top of the $65 million that were paid in dividends.
However, even with the execution of the capital strategies, the strong earnings are maintaining our capital ratio significantly well capitalized.
As you saw in the chart, Tier-1 common equity moved slightly up from 17.7 at the end of the first quarter, which is just before we started with the capital repurchase to 17.8 at the end of the year.
And Tier-1 capital just decreased 2 basis points from 18% to 17.8%.
So we continue to have ample space for capital action, as Aurelio mentioned before.

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q4 earnings per share $0.35.
net interest income decreased slightly to $184.1 million for q4 of 2021, compared to $184.7 million for q3 of 2021.

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