South Plains Financial, Inc.

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. The related earnings press release and earnings slide deck presentation issued earlier today are available on the news and events section of our website, sbfi.bank. Please refer to slide two of the presentation for for our safe harbor statements regarding forward-looking statements. All comments expressed or implied made during today's call are made only as of today's date and are subject to those safe harbor statements in the presentation and earnings release. In addition, please refer to slide two of the presentation for our disclaimer regarding the use of non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of these measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in our presentation and earnings release. I'm joined here today by Curtis Griffith, our chairman and CEO, Corey Newsome, our president, and Brent Bates, Citibank's chief credit officer. Curtis, let me hand it over to you.

Thank you, Steve, and good afternoon. I'm very pleased with the results that we delivered over the past quarter and the full year and would like to thank our employees for their hard work and commitment to Citibank and our customers. Their efforts are the key to our success and they demonstrate every day the culture that we have developed over many years. At South Plains, our core purpose is to use the power of relationships to help people succeed and live better. I believe that we're here to help enhance lives by creating a great place to work, help people achieve their goals, and invest generously in our communities, because there is nothing more rewarding than helping people succeed and live better. This also helps us to attract the best employees. develop deep relationships with our customers, and ultimately deliver strong financial results for our shareholders. This can be seen by our achievements for the full year of 2025, as outlined on slide four of our presentation, where we delivered a 17.8% increase in diluted earnings per share, loan growth in line with our guidance, 33 basis points of NIM expansion, as our NIM was 4% for the fourth quarter, Tangible book value per share growth of more than 14% to $29.05. And as previously announced, we entered into a definitive agreement to acquire BOH Holdings and its banking subsidiary, Bank of Houston. While I am very proud of our results, I'm even more excited with the opportunities that I see ahead as we continue to execute our strategy to enhance our earnings. It is focused on expanding our lending team across our high-growth Texas markets, as well as pursuing accretive M&A opportunities. Through the past year, we made great strides on both initiatives, highlighted by our definitive agreement announcement in December to acquire Bank of Houston. As highlighted on slide five, We believe Bank of Houston will complement our existing Houston team and bring both meaningful scale and deeply entrenched customer relationships to South Plains in one of the fastest growing metropolitan markets in the country. More importantly, the Bank of Houston team, led by Jim Stein, holds similar values to those that we hold dear at South Plains. Deep customer relationships, disciplined credit standards, and a genuine focus on employees and communities. As we have consistently said on these calls, finding an acquisition partner with similar culture and values is a necessary factor to a successful merger, and I believe we've found that in Bank of Houston. I'm looking forward to partnering with Jim, who will continue to lead his team once the merger is consummated, while also joining the boards of both South Plains and Citibank. Jim will provide important continuity and leadership depth as we work to further scale our presence in the Houston market. Looking deeper into the Houston market, our existing team has worked hard to build a strong presence in Houston as our loan portfolio has grown at a 34% compound annual rate over the last five years. By bringing BOH into the South Plains family, we are projected to have more than $1 billion in loans in the Houston region, which is significant to us. Importantly, both institutions share a focus on commercial real estate lending, a segment where Bank of Houston has built a high-quality portfolio and where Bank of Houston and Citibank's credit culture and underwriting discipline are closely aligned. We believe the merger is a good strategic fit with low execution risk and a platform that enables us to both deepen and expand our customer relationships. Financially, this merger is also compelling. as we expect it to be approximately 11% accretive to our earnings in 2027, with an attractive tangible book value earn back of less than three years. We believe that BOH is a highly efficient, profitable company that has demonstrated consistent performance and that the transaction is structured to provide that we are very much alive. I look forward to officially welcoming the Bank of Houston team when the merger is completed. which we expect to occur early in the second quarter of 2026. While we expect VOH to be a tailwind to our growth, I'm also very encouraged with the progress we've made in recruiting talented lenders to South Plains as we continue to benefit from the dislocation that is occurring across our markets from the mergers that have taken place over the last two years, which Corey will touch on. Taken together, we expect our loan growth to accelerate to a mid-to-high single-digit growth rate in 2026, which should also drive a nice acceleration to the earning power of South Plains. To conclude, we believe we are in a strong capital position that will allow us to benefit from the many opportunities that we have in front of us. Given our capital position, we remain focused on growing Citibank while also returning a steady stream of income to our shareholders through our quarterly dividend and keeping a share buyback program in place. Last week, our Board of Directors authorized a 17 cents per share quarterly dividend, which will be our 27th consecutive dividend. Now let me turn the call over to Corey.