Equity Bancshares, Inc.

We'll begin momentarily. Thank you for your patience. Thank you. Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the fourth quarter 2021 Equity Bank Shares Incorporated 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 the session, you will need to press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you require any further assistance, please press star then zero. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Chris Navratil. Sir, you may begin.

good morning and thank you for joining equity bank shares conference call which will include a discussion and presentation of our fourth quarter 2021 results presentation slides to accompany our call are available via pdf for download at investor.equitybank.com by clicking the presentation tab you may also click the event icon for today's call posted at investor.equitybank.com to view the webcast player if you are viewing this call on our webcast player please note that slides will not automatically advance Please reference slide one, including important information regarding forward-looking statements. From time to time, we may make forward-looking statements within today's call, and actual results may vary. Following the presentation, we will allow time for questions and further discussion. Thank you all for joining us. With that, I'd like to turn it over to our Chairman and CEO, Brad Elliott.

Thank you, Chris, and good morning. Thank you for joining our call and your interest in equity bank shares. Joining me is Eric Newell, our CFO, Greg Kossover, our Chief Operating Officer, and our President, Craig Anderson. In reflecting back on 2021, it is rewarding to review all the things we have accomplished in light of all the obstacles that we had to navigate. I can't tell you how proud I am of our team for what we've accomplished this year. Let me run through a few of the highlights. We negotiated and closed on the merger of American State Bank and Trust, the largest merger in the history of equity bank shares, as well as the state of Kansas. We completed the conversion of Almena State Bank in January of 2021 and finished the year by purchasing and converting three branches in the St. Joseph, Missouri market from Security Bank. We successfully executed a second round of PPP program for our customers, adding 20.8 million of fee and interest income in 2021. We saw the benefits of our approach to remain open for our customers throughout the pandemic in our DDA account growth. While some of our competitors took an approach of closing their branches to customers throughout portions of 2021, notably we have continued to open three times the amount of DDA accounts we did pre-pandemic. We hired a new leader and expanded our ability to offer SBA loans to customers. For most of 2021, we were the number one lender in Kansas for SBA loans and in the top of all of our regions. This is an area we will continue to grow our fee-based businesses have accelerated after several years of focus on improving and introducing new products and services. We'll continue to keep an eye on our expenses and find ways to accelerate positive operating leverage. Our commercial credit card program has continued to expand as expected and brings new income to us each month. We've added a new division to offer HSA cards and hired seasoned team to lead this initiative. We think this business will start generating revenues in 2022 and accelerate dramatically in 2023. We're committed to our capital management measures. We have maintained our share repurchase program and initiated a common stock dividend in the third quarter. With so many other items we could hit on as well. but I will leave some of those for Greg and Eric to talk about later. What an exciting year. We are ready for 2022. I'll let Eric take you through the numbers, and then we'll walk through some of our areas of focus for 2022.