Business First Bancshares, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Demi and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Business First Bancshares 3rd Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. All lines 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 1 or your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Matt Seeley, Senior Vice President, Director of Corporate Strategy and FP&A. You may begin.

Thank you. Good morning and thank you all for joining. Earlier today, we issued our third quarter 2026 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 on our slide presentation and earnings release. I'm joined this morning by Business First Bancshares Chairman and CEO Jude Melville, Chief Financial Officer Greg Robertson, and President of B1 Bank, Jerry Vascocu. 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, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Monday mornings come with plenty of competing priorities. We know that, and we appreciate you spending part of yours with us. When we spoke in July, we told you we expected a stronger second half, loan growth picking up, deposits rebounding, and continued progress on margin. I'm pleased to say the third quarter delivered on each of those. I describe it as simply a quarter in which good execution turned into good results. Loans grew a little over 7% annualized, led by the Houston pipeline we talked about last quarter, and deposits grew at a similar pace, which gave us the opportunity to pay down higher costs, broker funding, and borrowings. Margin expanded another 12 basis points on a core basis, and expenses stayed in check. Added up, these incremental improvements produced our strongest core profitability in several years. And with our shares trading below what we believed the business-first franchises were, we continued buying back stock while still growing tangible book value. The one area where progress came slightly slower than we'd hoped is credit. Non-performing loans moved down only modestly this quarter, primarily due to timing on resolutions already in motion. We expect to show further progress on non-performing loans in the fourth quarter. One thing worth noting is that while we had an uptick in NCOs, these were primarily loans previously discussed in this forum, the bulk of which were already fully specifically reserved for as we worked on resolution over the course of the year. Just as important, though less visible in the numbers, we completed the progressive conversion in August. Conversions are rarely as easy as they look from the outside, and I want to thank our North Louisiana clients and teammates both in North Louisiana and throughout the company for making this one as smooth as any I can remember. It positions us to hit the ground running in a region where investment activity continues to build. Looking ahead, the set of opportunities across our footprint is as broad as I've ever seen it. North Louisiana is now home to not only Meta's largest data center, but also in the northwest corner of the state, Amazon's roughly $20 billion commitment. The opportunities in Houston and Dallas speak for themselves. and Southwest Louisiana keeps delivering steady growth, something we expect to continue as SpaceX's $100 billion investment gets underway. We were pleased to add a six-person lift out of a commercial team in Tyler, Northeast Texas' largest city, giving us the opportunity to begin filling in the I-20 portion of our footprint between Dallas and Treeport. Finally, our financial services group, now serving more than 200 banks with the addition of American Planning Corp., is growing revenue at better than 20% annualized. Our job is to pursue these opportunities with the same discipline that got us to this point. And if we can do that, we expect to see continued improvement in core profitability, not over the rest of the year, but into 2027. Again, thank you for your time and attention. And with that, I'll now turn it over to Greg.