First Business Financial Services, Inc.

Good afternoon, welcome to the First Business Financial Services fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all lines are in a listen only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to First Business Financial Services Inc CEO Corey Chambers. Please go ahead, Sir.

Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us. We appreciate your time and your interest in First Business Bank. Joining me today is our President and Chief Operating Officer Dave Seiler and our CFO Brian Spielman. Today we'll discuss our financial performance along with some operational highlights followed by a Q&A session. I'd like to direct you to our fourth quarter earnings release and investor presentation, which are available through our website at ir.firstbusiness.bank. We encourage you to review these alongside our other investor materials. Before we begin, please note this call may include forward-looking statements, and the company's actual results may differ materially from those indicated in any forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements are listed in the earnings release and the company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K, and as may be supplemented from time to time in the company's other filings with the SEC, all of which are expressly incorporated herein by reference. There you can also find information related to any non-GAAP financial measures we discuss on today's call, including reconciliations of such measures. We are pleased to report an outstanding quarter. You'll see that we had some unusual items which boosted our reported earnings by about 28 cents. Even stripping that away, our earnings were excellent, up 15% from the third quarter and 24% from Q4 2023. Our operating model continued to do what it's built to do it produced strong loan growth, a strong and consistent net interest margin and thus strong revenue growth, as well as positive operating leverage. As a result, we posted record earnings on both a pre tax pre provision basis, in addition to the bottom line, our priority is always to grow shareholder value. and we saw continued growth and tangible book value per share which was up 23 annualized from the third quarter our efficiency ratio improved to its lowest level since fourth quarter of 2013. these results capped off a solid year and at the end of the call I'll cover how we performed overall for the first full year of our current five-year plan now I'd like to pass it over to Dave to walk you through some of the business activity that drove our strong fourth quarter results.

Dave?