Equity Bancshares, Inc.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Equity Bank Shares' first quarter earnings call. My name's Lydia, and I'll be your operator today. After the prepared remarks, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions. If you'd like to participate in the Q&A, you can do so by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I'll now hand you over to Brian Catsby, Director of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us today for Equity Bank Shares' first 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. Thank you for joining Equity Bank Shares Earnings Call. Joining me today are Rick Sims, our bank CEO, Chris Navratil, our CFO, and Christoph Lukowski, our Chief Credit Officer. We are excited to share our company's strong beginning to 2025. In the first quarter, we achieved strong earnings, margin expansion, and built up our reserves to strengthen our balance sheet for whatever comes next. During the quarter, we were excited to announce the merger with NBC Corp, expanding our presence and our market share in Oklahoma as we continue to grow in this strategic area. As we announced on the call a few weeks ago, this will be impactful to Equity Bank in many positive ways. It gets us into a market we have been working on for several years. And this will give us access to a new metro market to help us continue to build our organic production in lending, treasury management, and all other commercial products. We can't express how excited we are to bring the current management teams of NBC Oklahoma including H.K. Hatcher, Glenn Foretzka, Scott Bixler, Dennis Thilmer, and Jeff Greenlee to our teams. As we wrapped up 2024 and looked ahead to 2025, we brought in additional capital with plans to grow both through mergers and acquisitions and organic production. In the first quarter, we executed on both fronts, loans increased by $131 million, an annualized growth rate of 15.5 percent, while the MVC merger is expected to add approximately $900 million to assets to our pro forma entity. Following the completion of the MVC merger, we retain approximately $67 million in capital from our common stock raise in December. in addition to capital built through earnings, ready to deploy for strategic growth. While banks are typically sold rather than bought, we are seeing active conversations at a level we haven't experienced in recent years. We have numerous opportunities that could yet be announced this year. We closed the quarter with a TCE ratio of 10.13% and a tangible book value per share of $31.07. Compared to quarter one, 2024, our TCE ratio is up 36% and our tangible book value per share is up 24%. Providing top-notch products and services through exceptional bankers continues to be our guiding principle as we aim to grow Equity Bank. I can't be more excited about what's ahead for our company. We started the year with a strong balance sheet, motivated bankers, and a solid capital stack to execute our dual strategy of organic growth and strategic M&A. We began to see the results in Q1 and look forward to maintaining this momentum throughout the year. I will now ask Chris to walk us through our financial results.