At United, we are guided by our core values of integrity, hard work, teamwork, and caring. These values have driven our success throughout our history, and I am proud of the impact we continue to make for our stakeholders each and every day. To uphold our commitment to delivering excellence in service to our customers, communities, team members, and shareholders well into the future, we must protect our long-term value through a strong environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) program. Providing effective risk management, acting with integrity and transparency, and planning for long-term sustainability are central to United. Our ESG Management Committee is comprised of senior leadership. They set the strategy that guides our important efforts and sustain a successful approach across each ESG pillar. And every year, we progress in the execution of our agenda.

Our climate strategy continues to develop and advance, and in 2022, we made great strides in preparing our institution for anticipated regulatory requirements.  We began work on calculating scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions, which will serve as a critical baseline as we continue to implement efficiency upgrades across our brick and mortar locations, and we are integrating climate risk into our overall enterprise risk management program.

Our commitment to our communities continues to be a top priority and an important part of who we are as a Company. We support thousands of community organizations each year through 30,000+ volunteer hours, millions of dollars in charitable contributions, and approximately $200 million of community development loans.

Our work to ensure our company is diverse, equitable, and inclusive continues to yield strong results. 2022 was highlighted by the creation of an internal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) metrics dashboard to be used as a tool to measure progress toward achieving DE&I benchmarks. While we must always strive to improve, these metrics illustrate our company is a place where women thrive and where people of color are experiencing broader career advancement opportunities each year.

We also are increasing the diversity of our employee base. Tenure is on the rise among our diverse employees, and they are being promoted at comparable rates to our overall workforce.  In addition, we are working toward our goal to be reflective of our communities with regard to race and ethnicity.

ESG is central to our mission and will remain a core tenet of our business strategy because we believe it makes us a better, more resilient company. We look forward to continuing to progress in our efforts to ensure our communities are great places to live, work, and play for many more years to come.

Richard M. Adams, Jr.