CBTX, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the CBTX Q2 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. If you have a question during the session, you need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Justin Long, General Counsel. You may begin.

Thank you. Good morning. I'm Justin Long, the General Counsel of CBTX, and our management team would like to welcome you. to our earnings call for the second quarter of 2022. We appreciate you joining us. We issued our earnings press release yesterday afternoon, a copy of which is available on our website, along with the 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 Bob Franklin, our Chairman, President, and CEO, Ted Paget, our Chief Financial Officer, Joe West, our Chief Credit Officer, and Joseph McMullen, our Controller. At the end of the remarks, we will 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. We are pleased to present our second quarter results for 2022. During the second quarter, we have continued to see a fairly strong economy and consequently a nice growth in our loan portfolio. We have also seen some of the benefits of our low price deposit base that provides us even while beginning to experience some pressure to the upside on pricing. During the quarter, we did see some net interest margin expansion. and we expect that trend to continue as the Federal Reserve pursues higher interest rates. We are very proud of our team that continues to produce while we work hard towards our merger with Allegiance Bank. distracting, but our team has continued to serve our customers while also doing the hard work it takes to make sure that we have a successful merger. During the second quarter, shareholders of Allegiance and CBTX approved the agreement for the merger, and we received approval of both the FDIC and the Texas Department of Banking. While we wait patiently, For the approval of the Federal Reserve, we continue to work diligently with our counterparts at Allegiance to provide for a smooth transition for our customers, employees, shareholders, and communities which we serve. Despite these positives, we must remain vigilant for the changes to the economy. The Fed has told us that it intends to slow the economy through a series of interest rate hikes to try and get a handle on inflation. We know that higher interest rates can lead to strains on the economy and certain asset repricing. However, we must continue to adjust our underwriting to accommodate a slowing economy. We do benefit from operating in the state of Texas, where we continue to see both job and population growth, but we are not immune to what is happening in the rest of the nation and the world. We think that our timing of bringing two well-positioned Texas banks together is a good one. We continue to work to be more efficient as one organization with a strong, low-cost deposit base and a granular, well-priced loan portfolio. Although we are cautious about the next several months as the economy adjusts to inflation and higher interest rates, we are very optimistic on the long-term future of our bank. Now I'll return the meeting over to Ted Pygott, our Chief Financial Officer.