Amerant Bancorp Inc.

Greetings, and welcome to the Amerit Bank Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. You may be placed into question and queue at any time by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to your host, Laura Rossi, Executive Vice President and Head of the Vice Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Laura.

Thank you, Kevin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to review Ameran Bancorp's fourth quarter and full year 2025 results. On today's call are Carlos Gafiliola, our Senior Executive Vice President and Interim CEO, and Sharimar Calderon, our Senior Executive Vice President and CFO. As we begin, please note that discussions on today's call contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Exchange Act. In addition, references will also be made to the non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the company's earnings release for a statement regarding forward-looking statements, as well as for information and reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP measures. I will now turn it over to our Interim CEO, Carlos Zafiriola.

Thank you, Laura, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss Ameren's four-quarter and full-year 2025 results. As we begin today's call, I would like to turn to slide three and frame our discussion around the clarity of our direction and the discipline execution underway across the organization. Our strategic direction remains clear. In December, the Board approved our three-year strategic plan. Our plan is built on a disciplined and sequenced roadmap in order to stabilize, optimize, and on a disciplined and sequenced roadmap and grow the organization. This strategy reflects our confidence in Ameren's future and our ability to significantly enhance shareholder value in the coming years. We believe human capital is a key enabler of our strategic plan. We intentionally focus on our strategy on leveraging Amerint intrinsic values, which encourages teamwork, support, talent development and retention, and promotes effective challenge at all levels of the organization. We're investing in the development of our teams, promoting via talent recognition and ensuring that our workforce remains stable, supported, aligned, and empowered to contribute to our long-term success. As part of the stabilization phase, our immediate priorities are focused on strengthening the foundation through the following high-impact areas. Credit transformation. We concentrated on restoring predictability to our loan portfolio's credit performance. We have taken a decisive approach to review our loan portfolio and worked diligently on the resolution of our credit issues to improve asset quality. We're focused on aligning our credit portfolio with our strategic objectives, such as targeting exits from non-core markets and large exposures, as well as avoiding migration into criticized pockets. At the same time, we made significant progress to improve our risk selection practices by making disciplined decisions aligned with our risk appetite. Our second point is balance sheet optimization or growing WISER. We identified components that expanded Ameren's assets above the $10 billion watermark and reduced non-core funding by quarter end to right-size our balance sheet and improve key metrics. Our third initiative is operational efficiency, assessing processes and leveraging our technology tools to improve productivity, reduce cost, and enhance client experience. We have initiated several actions resulting from our cost review process and will continue to provide updates in the following quarters. Notably, we have launched an AI project aimed at discovering use cases that will assist in optimizing our processes. We remain confident in the results of our ongoing efforts to strategically reposition AMRIT. Accordingly, we have approved a share repurchase program recognizing the intrinsic value of our shares. Our continued momentum will allow us to advance with clear direction and stability, position the organization for sustained growth and long-term value creation. To our investors, clients, and team members, thank you for the continued partnership and confidence in our future. We believe we have the right people, the right plan, and the right focus. We are aligned, we are committed, and we are executing with discipline. I'm confident in where we're headed and proud of what we are building together. Before I turn it to Shari, I want to briefly address recent events in Venezuela, considering our historical customer base and upcoming opportunities there. Our view on these events may impact Amherst is positive. We almost have $2 billion in deposits, significant AUM, and close to 50,000 customers in this country. we see meaningful opportunities for growth in a market we know exceptionally well across both individual, wealth, and deposit flows, as well as commercial banking relationships. We expect commercial activity to pick up again after the administration recently announced plans to restore U.S. oil extraction licenses and return them to American companies. We suggest that a key sector of soon. We believe Ameren is well positioned to support international oil industry participants through account onboarding, payment processing, and transactional services tied to activity between operators and subcontractors. We have also seen an incremental value and trading flow of Venezuelan bonds through our broker-dealers since early January. We are closely monitoring the situation in the country, connecting with current and potential customers, and assessing opportunities. We will continue to provide updates as appropriate. With that, I will turn it to Shari to review our financial results for the quarter.