First Western Financial, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to First Western Financial's third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press star 1-1 again. I would now like to hand the call over to Lisa Fortuna, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Lateef. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for First Western's third quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining us from First Western's management team are Scott Wylie, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Julie Courkamp, 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 already done so, 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 involves 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 gap 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 gap to non-gap measures. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Scott.

Thanks, Lisa, and good morning, everybody. We executed well in the third quarter and saw positive trends in many areas, including loan growth, improving deposit mix, net interest margin expansion, trust and investment management fee growth, well-managed expenses, and improved asset quality. This resulted in another quarter of strong profitability. Pre-tax, pre-provision net income increased 15% in the third quarter, that's not annualized compared to the prior quarter, and 27% compared to the third quarter of 2025. We continue to maintain a conservative approach to new loan production with our disciplined underwriting and pricing criteria. The new banking talent over the past several years and increasingly over the past few months and our healthy economic activity across our markets fueled strong loan production that was diversified across markets, industries, and loan categories. As a result, our financial performance and balance sheet management strategies we continued to grow tangible book value per share this quarter. Moving to slide four, we generated net income of about six million or 60 cents per diluted share in the third quarter, both of which were 88% higher respectively than the third quarter of 2025. With our prudent balance sheet management, our tangible book value per share increased by 3% this quarter to 26.2%. $26.28. Now I'll turn the call over to Julie for some additional discussion of our balance sheet and trust investment management trends. Julie?