Amerant Bancorp Inc.

and welcome to the Amerint 3rd Quarter 2026 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 queue at any time by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star 0. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Laura Rossi, Executive Vice President, Head of Investor Relations. Laura, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to review Amer and Bancorp's third quarter 2026 results. On today's call are Carlos Iafigliola, our president and CEO, and Sharymar Calderon, our 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, we will also refer to 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 CEO, Carlos Iafigliola.

Thank you, Laura. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss Ameren Third Quarter 2026 results. This quarter represents another step forward in building a more profitable and resilient franchise. Our net income increased to $25.7 million, or $0.65 per diluted share, and our return on assets reached 1%. That progress reflects stronger net interest income and margin expansion, disciplined expense management, continued balance sheet optimization, and improving credit quality. Just as importantly, we continue advancing the strategic priorities that are moving up from stabilization towards sustainable growth. Following our annual board strategy session, our direction remains clear. Deliver on our financial and credit quality commitments, continue simplifying our operating model, focus investment toward the market and capabilities where Amarant has a distinct competitive advantage, and deploy capital and resources toward the most attractive opportunities. In that context, I would like to update you on the evolution of our four strategic initiatives during the quarter. First, Transform Credit. This initiative is about strengthening risk selection, portfolio monitoring, and credit operating model to enable profitable growth with greater consistency and predictability and within established risk archetypes. During the third quarter, the work completed early in the year began to show more clearly in our results. Non-performing loans continued to decline and classified balances also moved lower. We continue actively resolving criticized exposures while advancing workflow enhancements and automation of the credit approval process to improve data integrity, accountability, and consistency aimed at lending stakeholders. With the credit foundation strengthened, our focus is increasingly on pairing discipline underwriting with growth in more granular and higher quality relationships. Second, operational efficiency. This initiative is about simplifying how we operate, optimizing structural costs, increasing capacity, and creating a more scalable platform that can deliver consistent service and stronger returns. We continue discipline expense management while improving our earnings generation path. This resulted in a significant improvement in the efficiency ratio, narrowing the gap to the 60% we have been targeting. We are now moving from identifying opportunities to making clear decisions across the organization. This includes reviewing team structures, client coverage, and productivity of our channels. while advancing in digitization and deploying practical AI use cases. Third, client profitability. This initiative is about managing the full relationship return, not simply individual products, and directing our people and capital toward the clients and businesses where we can create the greatest value. During the quarter, We continue strengthening referral discipline and coordination across commercial banking, private banking, treasury management, and wealth management. Following the strategy session, we're taking this work further by assessing relationship-based unprofitability, aligning service models and pricing within client needs, and identifying targeted opportunities to cross-sell single-profit relationships. Grow the Bank. This initiative is about growing loans, deposits, assets under management, and fee income in the market and businesses where Aberrant has differentiated capabilities while remaining aligned with our risk appetite and return objectives. We are focused on building scale in priority verticals and client segments. including more granular CNI, residential lending, practice finance, logistics and wholesale, asset base and supply chain finance, and selected CRE opportunities with experienced sponsors. We will also continue to use our syndication capacity to manage larger, new, and existing exposures. Our international business remains a distinctive source of low-cost funding and an important platform for relationship growth. We remain focused on deepening wallet share across international clients through wealth, treasury management, and specialized personal and commercial lending solutions. As we continue to optimize our deposit mix by reducing higher-cost deposits and selectively exiting non-profitable single-product relationships The overall quality and economics of our deposit franchise will continue to strengthen. With this in mind, we have migrated certain low-cost interest-varying balances to DDAs, which improve our ratio of non-interest-varying deposits to total deposits without any impact to the retention of these accounts. In our domestic markets, we are prioritizing Florida, where our brand, market position, and client relationships give us a clear right to win and refining our branch and coverage model to support profitable growth. Taken together, these initiatives are producing measurable progress. Return on assets reach our target 1%, return equity improve, net interest margin expanded, and capital remains strong. These results are creating a new baseline for our company and reinforce our confidence that Ameren is moving in the right direction. Our strong capital position also provides us with the flexibility to continue returning value to shareholders. Accordingly, on October 21st, our board authorized a share repurchase program for up to $50 million through December 31st, 2027. Our priorities remain the same. Discipline, long growth, continued credit improvement, greater operating efficiency, Deeper and more profitable client relationships and thoughtful capital allocation. We have more work ahead, but we enter the final quarter of the year with a stronger foundation, clear choices, and growing momentum. With that strategic context, I will turn it to Shari to walk through the quarter's financial results in more detail.