Business First Bancshares, Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Business First Bank Shares Q3 2024 earnings call. Just a reminder that today's call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to hand things over to Mr. Matt Seeley, Senior Vice President, Director of Corporate Strategy and FP&A. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining. Earlier today, we issued our third quarter 2024 earnings press release, a copy of which is available on our website, along with the slide presentation that we'll refer to during today's call. Please refer to slide three of our presentation, which includes our safe harbor statements regarding forward-looking statements and these non-GAAP financial measures. For those of you joining by phone, please note the slide presentation is available on our website at www.b1bank.com. Please also note our safe harbor statements are available on page seven of our earnings press release that was filed with the SEC today. All comments made during today's call are subject to the safe harbor statements in our slide presentation and earnings release. I'm joined this afternoon by Business First Bank Shares Chairman, President and CEO, Jude Melville, Chief Financial Officer, Greg Robertson, Chief Banking Officer, Philip Jordan, and President of V1 Bank, Jerry Vaskegu. After the presentation, we'll be happy to address any questions you may have. And with that, I'll turn the call over to you, Jude.

Okay, thanks, Matt, and good afternoon, everybody. To begin, I want to be sure to say thank you to everyone currently on the call or listening to it or rereading the transcripts at some point in the future. We know you have choices to make and we appreciate your making us a priority today. I can be relatively brief as the quarter was straightforward and generally positive. Primary theme I'd like to highlight is the improvement in operating leverage achieved through a combination of continued expansion of our net interest margin and expense control. Poor expenses were down about a million dollars length quarter, even while we continue to make the technological investments that we detailed in previous quarterly calls. Our core margin expanded 12 basis points linked quarter to 3.46%, driven by roughly flat deposit costs, down one basis point linked quarter, paired with increased aggregate portfolio loan yields as new and renewed loans pricing held steady at 8.46%. Secondary theme I'd like to highlight is the continued diversification of revenue from the investments we've made over the past couple years and sources of non-interest income, including SSW, our asset management company, Waterstone, our SBA loan service provider, our FIG group, and our nascent internal swaps desk. A new chart on page 15 explains the primary sources of that increased income, and while we expect the components of that income to shift quarter to quarter, we're pleased that the aggregate impact is incrementally positive to income and has been consistently over the course of 2024. Third, we demonstrated discipline in the management of our balance sheet, again growing deposits at a rate faster than loans, also growing risk assets appropriately in line with retained earnings, leading to increased capital levels and tangible book value growth even outside the impact of positive AOCI movement. We believe we've positioned the loan and deposit portfolios favorably considering the current rate outlook and anticipate continued incremental improvement in our NIM due to this positioning and the hard on the ground work of our banking teams. Finally, on a broader topic of adding value to the franchise beyond just the numbers, We were pleased to successfully close the Oakwood transaction on October 1st, bringing the percentage of our asset exposure in the Dallas and Houston markets to the mid-40s as a percentage of the overall loan book. Thank you to the Oakwood team for their positivity and their energy, and thank you also to our regulatory partners for reviewing the merger in a professional and timely manner. We also recently announced the promotion of Jerry Vaskeku to the position of President of the Bank while I remain Chair and CEO. Jerry's made an impact serving with us for a couple of years already and had an extensive career with growing regional banks before joining our team. We believe we'll have many opportunities before us in the coming years and want to be sure that we are positioning our internal operations to continue their coordinated performance even while we expand interaction with our external constituencies. This will be especially important as we move closer to the $10 billion asset level, a transition that we want to be certain we approach proactively. With that, I again thank you for calling in, and I'd like to close by congratulating our team and our loyal clients on another successful quarter. I'll now turn the call over to Greg for further detail.