First Western Financial, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the First Western Financial Q2 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star 1 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Tony Rossi.

Thank you, Josh. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for First Western Financial's second quarter 2025 earnings call. Joining us from First Western's management team are Scott Wiley, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Julie Korkamp, Chief Operating Officer, and David Weber, Chief Financial Officer. We will use a slide presentation as part of our discussion this morning. If you have not done so already, please visit the events and presentations page of First Western's investor relations website to download a copy of the presentation. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this conference call contains forward-looking statements with respect to the future performance and financial condition of First Western Financial that involve risks and uncertainties. Various factors could cause actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors are discussed in the company's SEC filings, which are available on the company's website. I would also direct you to read the disclaimers in our earnings release and investor presentation. The company disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements made during the call. Additionally, management may refer to non-GAAP measures, which are intended to supplement but not substitute for the most directly comparable GAAP measures. The press release available on the website contains the financial and other quantitative information to be discussed today, as well as the reconciliation of the GAAP to non-GAAP measures. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Scott.

Thanks, Tony, and good morning, everybody. We executed well in the second quarter and saw positive trends in many areas, including loan and deposit growth, expansion in our net interest margin, well-managed expenses, and stable to improving asset quality. The market remains very competitive in terms of pricing on loans and deposits. But we continue to successfully generate new loans and deposits by offering a superior level of service, expertise, and responsiveness, rather than winning business by offering the highest rates on deposits or the lowest rates on loans, as other banks are doing. We continue to maintain a conservative approach to new loan production with our disciplined underwriting and pricing criteria. However, as a result, the additions we made to our banking team over the past few quarters as well as generally healthy economic conditions in our markets, we had a solid level of loan production, which was well diversified across our markets and as industries and loan types. We were also able to successfully lower deposit costs, as well as redeploy the cash we generated from the sale of two OREO properties into new loan production and securities purchases, which contributed to the expansion we're seeing in our net interest margins. We continue to maintain disciplined expense control despite the inflationary environment as we capitalize on the previous investments we made in both banking talent and technology that have enhanced our business development efforts and overall level of efficiency, including a higher level of mortgage banking income. We also had generally stable asset quality during the second quarter. As a result of our financial performance and balance sheet management strategies, we had a further increase in our tangible book value per share, and we used our strong capital position to repurchase some of our shares during the second quarter, which was accretive to our tangible book value per share. Moving to slide four, we generated net income of $2.5 million, or $0.26 a diluted share in the quarter. This was lower than the prior quarter due to a number of one-time gains that positively impacted our financial performance in the first quarter. as well as the higher level of provision that we recorded due to the strong loan growth that we had late in the second quarter. On a pre-provision net revenue basis, once the one-time items from last quarter are excluded, we had an increase during the quarter. In addition, it was about $5.1 million in Q2, down slightly from Q1, including those one-time revenue adds in Q1, but up about 36% year over year. With our prudent balance sheet management, our tangible book value per share increased by about 1% this quarter. Now I'll turn the call over to Julie for some additional discussion of our balance sheet and trusted investment management trends. Julie?