CBTX, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Community Bank of Texas fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star then zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Justin Long, General Counsel. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. I'm Justin Long, the General Counsel of CVTX. Our management team would like to welcome you to the CVTX Inc. Earnings Call for the fourth quarter of 2021. We appreciate you joining us. We issued our earnings press release yesterday afternoon, a copy of which is available on our website, along with a slide presentation that we will refer to during this presentation. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that during this presentation, we may make forward-looking statements regarding future events our financial performance, or our business prospects. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ is available in our earnings release and in the risk factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K, our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and our other filings with the SEC, which can all be accessed on our investor relations website at ir.cbtxinc.com. Any forward-looking statements are made only as of the date of this call, and we assume no obligation to update any such statements. You should also be aware that during this call, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial information. A reconciliation of these financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures is included in our earnings release and investor presentation. I'm joined this morning by Robert R. Franklin, Jr., our chairman, president, and CEO, Ted Piegett, our chief financial officer, Jill West, our chief credit officer, and Joseph McMullen, our controller. At the end of their remarks, we'll open the call to questions. With that, I'll turn it over to our chairman, president, and CEO, Bob Franklin.

Thank you, Justin. Welcome to the earnings call for CBTX, Inc. for the fourth quarter of 2021. We are pleased to present our fourth quarter results of an eventful 2021. The first half of the year was marked by caution, but as we moved to the second half of the year, we saw increasing optimism as the country appeared to be better able to deal with the impact of the pandemic, which allowed us to better assess the continuing effects on our team and our customers. As the year progressed, the economic environment transitioned from a heavily COVID impacted economy to a more stable and recovering economy. Our Texas economy provided opportunities and showed its resilience, even with the emergence of the Omicron variant during the fourth quarter. Over the second half of the year, the economic environment transitioned, showing signs of recovery. Given the opportunity to have more face-to-face interaction with our customers and our prospects, our team began to build back our pipeline and show loan growth. The calling efforts of the third quarter produced good loans that were booked into the fourth quarter and solid relationship driven deposits. This team effort provides us good momentum as we move into 2022. During the fourth quarter, we were proud to announce that we had found an excellent partner in Allegiance Bank and that we would combine in a merger of equals transaction to close in the first half of 2022. We have filed the regulatory applications and our teams are working together, identifying ways to build a better bank together. As we work together towards closing, we continue to be very excited about the opportunities that our combined organization will have in the future. Additionally, we settled and ended the investigation by the Financial Institutional FinCEN and the order that we had with the OCC during the fourth quarter. We're pleased to have concluded this chapter and we believe the BSA program stands ready to be a leader for our merger partner and ready for our increase in size and scale. Our fourth quarter financial results reflect several one-time charges reflecting the settlements with the regulatory agencies and some of the costs associated with the actions we have taken in connection with the pending merger. Ted will speak more specifically to our financial results. Overall, we are excited about 2022 and the opportunities it will provide. We have liquidity. We have capital. We have an asset-sensitive balance sheet that should allow us to succeed in our Texas markets, which continue to do well. Now I'll turn this over to Ted Poggett, our Chief Financial Officer.