Equity Bancshares, Inc.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Equity Bank Shares Inc 2025 Q2 earnings call. My name is Carla and I will be coordinating your call today. During the presentation, you can register to ask questions by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. I would now like to hand you over to your host, Brian Katze, Vice President, Director of Corporate Development and Investor Relations to begin. Please go ahead when you're ready.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us today for Equity Bank Chair'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 Shares Earnings Call. Joining me today are Rick Simms, our bank CEO, Chris Navratil, our CFO, and Krzysztof Slukowski, our Chief Credit Officer. We are excited to share our company's sustained strong beginning to 2025. In the second quarter, we achieved strong earnings, core margin expansion, and successfully closed our merger with NBC Bank on July 2nd. Limiting time between announcement and closure of our transaction has been a core competency of equity. Our work to receive all required approvals on this transaction within 60 days of announcement provides confidence to a seller and value to our shareholders. We are proud of our teams for putting us in a position to continue to excel in this space. We couldn't be more excited to welcome the leadership and team members of NBC Bank. HK Hatcher, Glenn Floresca, Jeff Greenlee, Dennis Siemer, and Scott Fixler. That team, coupled with Ken Ferguson joining our board, are excellent additions to Equity Bank's franchise. I look forward to all they can and will accomplish as we continue to expand our presence in the state of Oklahoma. While executing on our M&A strategy, our team has also remained hyper-focused on serving the communities in which we operate. I am very proud of all that Rick has accomplished as he and Jonathan Rue have worked to reset and retool our retail staff and philosophy. He has also made a lot of progress with our commercial teams. Originations are growing as are commercial product sales. Loan balances year to date are up $100 million, while deposits, excluding seasonal public funds, have held their ground. Our teams are motivated and armed with tools to meet the needs of our communities, and we look forward to continued execution on our mission. We closed the quarter with a TCE ratio of 10.63% and a tangible book value per share of $32.17. Compared to second quarter 2024, our TCE ratio is up 41% and our tangible book value per share is up 25%. Providing top-notch products and services through exceptional bankers continues to be our guiding principle as we aim to grow Equity Bank. We started the year with a strong balance sheet, motivated bankers, and a solid capital stack to execute on our dual strategy of organic growth and strategic M&A. We have executed through the first half of the year and look forward to maintaining this momentum throughout the year. I'll now hand it over to Chris to walk you through our financial results.