Business First Bancshares, Inc.

Good morning and thank you for standing by. My name is John and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Business First Bankshare's first quarter 2026 earnings call. All lights have been placed 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 your telephone keypad. And if you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Matt Seeley, Director of Corporate Strategy. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. Thank you all for joining. Earlier today, we issued our first quarter 2026 earnings press release, a copy of which is available on our website, along with the slide presentation that we'll 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 morning by Business First Bank Shares CEO and Chairman 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 morning, and thank you for joining us today. We know there are plenty of things y'all could be doing on a Monday morning in a world environment as complex as the one in which we find ourselves, and we appreciate you choosing to spend this time with us. This was one of, if not the best, first quarters that we have had as a company. We continue to improve earnings, strengthen capital levels, and improve quality of our liquidity posture while consummating our second material acquisition in the past three years and making a number of non-acquisitive investments that will pay off over the course of the next few years. A highlight for the quarter was the addition of a substantial number of new teammates. As I just mentioned, we closed the progressive transaction on January 1st. In balance sheet terms, the acquisition adds over 700 million assets in nine branches across North Louisiana, deepening our footprint in an area in which we were already a market leader. Asset quality of the acquired portfolio is stellar, as is the makeup of the expanded client base. On a very promising note, since we announced the acquisition, construction on the Metadata Center project in northeast Louisiana has accelerated and been expanded, and we expect tens of billions of dollars of private investment in the region in which we are as well situated to capture the benefits as any financial institution, large or small. The morale among our former progressive teammates is high, and the working partnership is off to as smooth a start as any acquisition that we've had the honor to participate in, which bodes well for our ability to operate as one team over the course of this year, even before conversion is executed. We also added a material number of bankers organically. In our last call, I mentioned the addition of John Heine, our new market president, in Houston, former market president from Veritex Bank. To date, John has attracted an additional 11 teammates, including seven production officers, the majority of which are also former Veritex bankers. Also in Houston, we are honored to add Ben Marmon to lead our corporate banking activities in Texas. Ben was a long-time banker for Iberia and then First Horizons, serving in leadership capacities across South Louisiana and for the past five years as president of the FHN Financials Houston Market. These new partners have already begun building a pipeline of opportunities, and we anticipate them contributing meaningfully to our growth in the second half of the year as we seek to take advantage of M&A-led disruption in the Houston market. We announced and have begun a partnership with Covecta, a provider of agentic AI capabilities. I include this in my discussion on new teammates because over time, we anticipate this partnership leading to both our more efficiently leveraging the talent we have on board and to our minimizing hiring as we continue to grow. We are beginning this effort focused on our consumer workflows in which we have already identified over 300 policy rules for potential automation and anticipate expanding utilization of the partnership across broader use cases throughout the bank, including deposits and credit. This effort will take time to unfold, but we are more confident with each day that the potential is actionable and will prove to be meaningful. It's important to note that as we explore the potential of the GenTech AI, we remain focused on governance, validation, and human oversight. so that as models, policies, and industry requirements change, we retain our ability to manage that evolution in a disciplined and controlled way. A very positive note for the quarter is that even as we grow the team, we remain focused on cost control, with non-interest expenses for the quarter lower than anticipated. After accounting for the increased costs associated with the progressive current run rate, our core expenses were essentially flat quarter over quarter, as well as in comparison to last year's first quarter. We do anticipate the cost of the new hires adding incrementally to our expense rate over the second quarter, but note that the super majority of the hires were production-oriented, which should lead to further operating leverage improvements. As a key component of our positive earning results, we are pleased to note the contribution of our non-interest income, primarily through the Financial Services Group, and in particular their work providing interest rate swaps and SBA loan gains on sale. As you know, we've been working the past three years on diversifying our revenue streams with investments in this arena. in part so that we might be able to continue to produce consistent earnings even in quarters in which our spread income was not as strong as we hoped. The potential of this effect was put to test in the first quarter as loan volumes were lower than anticipated, due primarily to heightened loan payoffs and paydowns. In addition to the contribution to current earnings, we utilized the financial services group to successfully complete a fully self-managed private placement of subordinated debt, just after quarter-end, raising $85 million within our cohort of correspondent banking relationships. Of the $85 million raised, we utilized $67 million to redeem existing sub-debt, some of which had crossed the five-year mark and had already lost about $10 million in capital treatment. The successful debt raise is important in and of itself, but I'm most excited about the way in which we accomplished it, both utilizing and contributing to our growing network of community bank partners. In closing, we feel very positive about the first quarter on a number of fronts and anticipate it to be the start of a solid full year. We reiterate full-year loan guidance on loan growth based on our sooner-than-expected hiring of production officers, and we continue to forecast a 1.25 ROA end-of-year run rate. One of our guiding principles is belief in the compounding power of incremental improvement, and we see that principle in action in our first quarter results. Thank you again for being with us, and with that, I'll turn it over to Greg.