Home Bancorp, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Home Bank Corp's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing this card key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to HomeBank Corp Chairman, President and CEO, John Bordelon, and Chief Financial Officer, David Kirkley. Please go ahead, Mr. Kirkley.

Thank you, Anna. Good morning and welcome to HomeBank's first quarter 2025 earnings call. Our earnings release and investor presentation are available on our website. I'd ask that everyone please refer to the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements in the investor presentation and our SEC filings. Now I'll hand it over to John to make a few comments about the first quarter. John?

Thanks, David. Good morning, and thank you for joining our earnings call today. We appreciate your interest in HomeBank as we discuss our results, expectations for the future, and our approach to creating long-term shareholder value. Yesterday afternoon, we reported first quarter net income of $11 million, or $1.37 per share, which was a healthy 13% increase from the fourth quarter and a 20% increase from a year ago. Net interest margin expanded for the fourth consecutive quarter to 3.91%, and our return on assets increased by 17 basis points to 1.29%. First quarter margin expansion was driven by a 13 basis point decline in the cost of interest-bearing liabilities, stable yields on interest-earning assets, and loan growth. Loans grew by $29.1 million in the first quarter, or about 4% annualized, and we've continued to see good growth so far in April. There have been a lot of headlines recently concerning the economy and tariffs that may change the direction of the economy quickly. But for now, we're sticking with our guidance of 4-6% loan growth in 2025. Deposits increased in the first quarter at a 7% annualized rate due to seasonal inflows of public funds and continued effort on our part to fund our loan growth with core deposits. Non-interest-bearing deposits increased 21.9 million, which equated to 27% of total deposits at the end of the quarter. CDs also increased, and we've had good success using our CD product to attract and retain customer deposits since the end of the pandemic. At 27% of total deposits, CDs are a larger percentage of funding than we are used to seeing, but we expect that percentage to decline as rates eventually fall. We continue to optimize our Houston market, which has been a tremendous success since we acquired it three years ago. We have a strong team in place and believe there are opportunities to upgrade and expand our physical footprint that will drive even more business. In 2024, we opened an LTO and hired a commercial team for Northwest Houston. And just recently, we purchased a full-service branch building in Napa, Tennessee that we are renovating and hope to move into by the end of the year. The entire executive team recently completed business for every branch in every market, where we had the opportunity to talk to employees and customers. Each market would then host a Cajun-style crawfish bowl with the executives serving the employees. These bowls included delicious crawfish with all the fixing, music, games, raffles, and camaraderie with all of our employees. These visits have long been a tradition at HomeBank where we believe in the concept of servant leadership. They started back when we were small enough that everyone knew each other and felt like they were part of a family. As we've grown, we've found that these gatherings are a great way to maintain that family culture and generate enthusiasm. The time in the branches gives management an opportunity to answer questions from frontline staff and meet customers both big and small. Our employees that have worked elsewhere are amazed that the executive team will spend this quality time with all our employees. As I've said for the last few quarters, and despite the recent headlines and volatility in the markets, We feel very good about HomeBank's outlook and our ability to continue to outperform. We've been doing this for a long time, and we have a strong track record of performing above our peers in all kinds of economic environments. We continue to focus on customer service, expanding relationships with new and existing customers, and maintaining our solid credit culture. This focus helps us to maintain strong performance through COVID and the rapid increase in rates. We remain confident in our outlook and think that the NIM and earnings will continue to expand in 2025, even without any rate cuts. With that, I'll turn it back over to David, our Chief Financial Officer.