South Plains Financial, Inc.

Following the presentation, the conference will be open for questions and instructions to follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Steve Crockett, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of South Plains Financial. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining our earnings conference call. With me here today are Curtis Griffith, our Chairman and CEO, Corey Newsom, our President, and Brent Bank's Chief Credit Officer. The related earnings press release and earnings presentation are available on the news and events section of our website, spfi.bank. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that any forward-looking statements are subject to risk, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these anticipated future results. Please see our safe harbor statements in our earnings press release and in our earnings presentation. All comments expressed or implied made during today's call are subject to those Safe Harbor statements. Any forward-looking statements made during this call are made only as of today's date, and we do not undertake any duty to update such forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Additionally, during today's call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful in evaluating our performance. Reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures can also be found in our earnings release and in the earnings presentation. Curtis, let me hand it over to you.

Thank you, Steve, and good afternoon. I would like to start by extending our deepest sympathies to all of those impacted by the floods in the Texas Hill Country over the 4th of July weekend, as well as the more recent flooding in our Rio de Janeiro, New Mexico market including our employees and customers. This has been a tragic event for those regions and across the states, and we will do our part to help those impacted through this challenging time. Turning to slide four of our presentation, our second quarter results are a testament to the hard work of our dedicated employees, who I always thank for their commitment to the bank and our customers. Their efforts have positioned us for success as we continued to achieve margin expansion through the second quarter as our cost of funds declined once again. Additionally, we believe the credit quality of our loan portfolio remains solid as we aggressively manage the portfolio and proactively address challenges with our customers. As Corey will touch on, our proactive management of our loan portfolio has also contributed to a higher level of early paydowns once again this quarter, which has been expected. Despite this headwind, we achieved modest loan growth in the quarter and continued to have a healthy loan pipeline. We also continued to build capital through the quarter, which positions us for continued growth. I'm very proud to say that our bank sits on a strong foundation and we believe is positioned to weather potential economic headwinds that may arise from the uncertainty created by the ongoing tariff negotiations and ultimate tariff rates that will be enacted. That said, Texas continues to perform well, having delivered healthy economic growth through the second quarter. Against this backdrop, we believe that we are in a strong position to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves and are pursuing a strategy to increase the assets of the bank centered on both organic growth and M&A. As Corey will cover, our organic growth strategy is focused on expanding our lending capabilities to accelerate the pace of loan growth over time. Our community-based deposit franchise continues to provide a stable, lower-cost funding source for loan growth across our markets, and our team has done a terrific job growing our loan portfolio over the past five years. We believe that we have opportunities to accelerate that growth as well as continue to push for core deposit growth as we seek to balance our liquidity goals. M&A has also been part of our strategy to grow the bank and an area that we have experience, most recently having acquired West Texas State Bank in 2019, which expanded our reach into the Permian Basin. We remain interested in further growing through an accretive acquisition and have already begun to see the pace of industry transactions accelerate, most notably Huntington's announced acquisition of Veritex on Monday, which reflects the current political and regulatory environment. We believe this improved climate for deals will also help sellers' expectations become more realistic. While we are closely watching the market and are always open to having conversations, we have not yet found an opportunity that makes sense for the bank and our shareholders. We continue to have a strict criteria for a deal and are only interested in acquiring a bank with the right culture, an asset liability profile that meets our needs, a stable deposit base, and at a valuation that makes sense. We can be patient given the organic growth opportunities that we have across our markets. Importantly, we believe that we are in a strong position to capitalize on opportunities to drive growth as the bank and the company each significantly exceed the minimum regulatory capital levels necessary to be deemed well-capitalized. At June 30, 2025, our consolidated common equity Tier 1 risk-based capital ratio was 13.86%. and our Tier 1 leverage ratio was 12.12%. We have the capital to support our customers as they continue to expand their businesses. Given our capital position, we remain focused on both growing the bank while also returning a steady stream of income to our shareholders through our quarterly dividend and keeping a share buyback program in place. Now let me turn the call over to Corey.