Business First Bancshares, Inc.

is on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on the telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question again, press the star one. I would now like to turn the conference over to Matt Philly. You may begin.

Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining. Earlier today, we issued our fourth quarter 2025 earnings press release, a copy of which is available on our website along with the slide presentation that we will reference during today's call. Please refer to slide three of our presentation, which includes our safe harbor statements regarding forward-looking statements and the use of 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 six 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 and CEO, Jude Melville, Chief Financial Officer, Greg Robertson, Chief Banking Officer, Philip Jordan, and President of B1 Bank, Jerry Vaskeku. 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. Good afternoon, everybody. We thank you all for being with us today. I'd like to begin our conversation with a brief high-level review of the work our team accomplished in 2025, which turned out to be, in my opinion, one of the most meaningful and positive years our franchise has experienced. I'll start with a few of the non-financial highlights. While they don't contribute much to the short-term modeling that this call invariably centers around, they are what enables future opportunity and therefore representative of the most important work that we do. Over the course of 25, we conducted two major core conversions and implemented a number of software platforms designed to prepare us for managing at this and future scale. We continued to develop multiple internal divisions focused on preventing and mitigating fraud, internal loan review, audit, and various ERM capabilities, contributing to both our ability to operate safely and maintenance of a positive regulatory relationship. We continued our practice of incrementally evolving our footprint, closing three banking centers and opening one. We made big strides developing our correspondent banking initiative into a significant part of the bank, contributing meaningful non-interest income, growing the client base to over 175 community banks. We announced and then at the turn of the year closed the acquisition of Progressive Bank in North Louisiana. We, and this may sound out of place on a call such as this, but we learned some lessons about working through credit issues for the first time in a number of years. Things that will ultimately make us better providers and managers of credit in the future. For the fifth year in a row, we were one of the winners of the American Bankers Best Banks to Work for Award, voted on by employees, and therefore one of my favorite awards to win. These non-financial accomplishments are important, and I'm proud of them, but they, of course, aren't alone sufficient. 2025 was also a year of accomplishment from a balance sheet perspective. Over the past 12 months, we've bolstered our capital ratios with tangible common equity increasing by 90 basis points and consolidated CT1, capital increasing 50 basis points year over year. We grew tangible book value 17.3%. We have as balanced a balance sheet as we have ever had, with limited concentrations in any lending category and significant geographic diversification. We grew loans and deposits in tandem, particularly in the fourth quarter as we got through some of the bigger non-financial projects and returned with more focus to production. We began purchasing shares back for the first time in almost six years and then positioned ourselves to have that tool as a viable option in the future. And we increased our common stock dividend for the seventh year in a row. Now, we recognize that all this non-financial and balance sheet activity needs to lead up to something else, something tangible. And over the course of 2025, we delivered strong P&L improvement beyond what we or the analysts forecasted. We grew ROAA beyond our stated 1% goal to a 1.06 core ROAA for the year and a 1.16 core ROAA in the fourth quarter. We delivered a 14% increase in EPS over the course of the year, and in the fourth quarter, a 20% year-over-year improvement. We grew our full-year core margin beyond our stated goals of 3.5 to 3.63. and we held non-interest expense growth relatively flat while growing revenue, generating positive operating leverage, posting a sub-60 efficiency ratio in the fourth quarter. In sum, we are turning the investments we've made over the past few years into momentum, which leads me to believe that even though 2025 was a pivotal year for B1, 2026 will be even more fruitful. With our major systems implementations behind us, we will focus more on optimizing the systems, which will lead to greater efficiencies. With a healthy footprint in place, we will focus less on expanding it and more on deepening it. By the way, over the past few weeks, we were pleased to begin to take advantage of some of the disruption in the Houston market by recruiting John Heine, formerly of Veritex, to be our new market leader. And he's already been able to add a couple of impressive bankers to the foundational team we have in place. Finally, we will focus less in 2026 on embarking upon new major projects and more on daily execution. We have a good team, we're in good markets, and we're focused on the right things. Sustainable ROAA, tangible book value accretion, EPS enhancement, non-interest revenue giving us greater revenue optionality, and non-interest expense discipline leading to continued efficiency ratio improvement. It's an exciting time, and we look forward to discussing it further over the course of the call. I thank you all again for your attention, and I'll turn it over to Greg.