Equity Bancshares, Inc.

Hello, thank you for your patience, everyone. The equity bank share quarter two 2024 earnings call will begin shortly. Thank you. Hello everyone and welcome to the Equity Bank Shares second quarter 2024 Earnings Call. My name is Ezra and I will be coordinating your call today. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, it would be star followed by two. I will now hand over to your host, Brian Catsby. Director of Corporate Development and Investor Relations to begin. Brian, please go ahead.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us today for Equity Bank Share's second quarter earnings call. Before we begin, let me remind you that today's call is being recorded and is available via webcast at investor.equitybank.com, along with our earnings release and presentation materials. Today's presentation contains forward-looking statements which are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed. 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 the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Brad Elliott.

Good morning, and thank you for joining Equity Bank Share's earnings call. We are pleased to take you through our second quarter results, including a set of new record high watermarks, integration of the Bank of Perksville merger, and the announcement of our acquisition of Kansas Land Bank shares. Joining me today are Rick Sims, our bank CEO, Chris Navratel, our CFO, and Krzysztof Szlukowski, our chief credit officer. It was another exciting quarter of improving operating performance for our company. Excluding the impact of BOLI, repositioning costs, and merger expenses, we outperformed market expectations. With the momentum of rebalancing our portfolio last year and the Bank of Kirksville transaction in the first quarter, we realized expansion in both net interest income and net interest margin. We closed the quarter with a loan deposit ratio below 80%. Strong capital ratios and significant liquidity to continue to drive earnings growth in 2024, both organically and via strategic M&A. During the quarter, we completed the integration of systems from the Legacy Bank of Kirksville locations. and announced and received regulatory approval of our acquisition of Kansas Land bank shares. The Kansas Land transaction officially closed on July 1st, 2024, 71 days after announcement. We continue to emphasize shareholder return through our quarterly dividend, as well as active participation in our share repurchase program. During the quarter, we repurchased 152,982 shares under our current authorization of up to a million shares. At the close of the quarter, we have capacity to purchase an additional 637,427 shares under the authorization. During the quarter, we announced the promotions of Rick Sens to Bank CEO and Julie Huber to COO. These promotions strengthened the management team while reinforcing our operating structure. We are confident they will continue to excel in the expanded roles. As we emphasized at our investor meeting in June, we are bullish about where our company is positioned. We have an excellent leadership team motivated producers, and abundance of deployable capital to drive positive stakeholder returns. I look forward to continuing our positive momentum. I'll let Chris talk you through our financial results.