Home BancShares, Inc.

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Home Bank Shares Incorporated fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. Purpose of this call is to discuss the information and data provided in the quarterly earnings release issued after the market closed yesterday. Company presenters will begin with prepared remarks, then entertain questions. Please note that if you would like to ask a question during the question and answer session, please press star then one on your touch-tone phone. If you decide you want to withdraw your question, please press star then two to remove yourself from the list. The company has asked me to remind everyone to refer to their cautionary notes regarding forward-looking statements. You will find this note on page three of their form 10-K filed with SEC in February 2025. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode, and this conference call is being recorded. If you need operator assistance during the conference, please press star then zero. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Donna Townsall, Director of Investor Relations.

Good afternoon and welcome to our fourth quarter conference call. With me for today's discussion is our Chairman John Allison, Stephen Tipton, Chief Executive Officer of Centennial Bank, Kevin Hester, President and Chief Lending Officer, Brian Davis, our Chief Financial Officer, Chris Poulton, President of CCFG, and Scott Walter of Shore Premier Finance. The fourth quarter capped off a bell ringer of a year for home. And our team is excited today to share some of those details with you. Our opening remarks today will be from our chairman, John Allison.

Thanks. And thank you all for joining Home Bank Chair's fourth quarter earnings report and our 2025 year-end conference call. I want to thank all of our team members for leading home to one of the most successful years in our 26-year history. The numbers really speak for themselves. They're the best numbers we've ever produced. Thank you for all you do and continue to make home one of the top performing banks in America. If we're not the best, we're certainly one of the most consistently profitable performers year in and year out. We're certainly a contender. For the full year of 2025, the company earned a little over $475 million in net profit. That's an 18.2% increase over 24. And we ran a 2.05 ROA and a 41-29 efficiency ratio have record revenue of $1,090,000,000. We had earnings of $2.41 EPS. That's a 20% increase over 2024. We purchased for the year 2,890,706 shares for 81.3 million. And so far this year, we've bumped back about 96,000. For the fourth quarter of 25, we reported $119,000,000 in profit That's 18% increase over the 2024. It was about 100 million, as I recall. PPNR was 167,723,000, good numbers, and a 2.06 ROA. And for the first time in a while, efficiency ratio of sub 40 at 39.53. That interest margin of 4.61, and we built reserves to about 1.90. Revenue was $282.1 million in ROTCE of $16.65. We were purchased 540,706 shares for $14.7 million for the fourth quarter. As I said, the numbers speak for themselves. We're excited about our now-style line with Mountain Commerce and our entry into the great state of Tennessee. Having been a founder, I know what it takes to build a good financial institution with all the ups and downs, and I look forward to working with Mountain Commerce's founder, Bill Edwards and his outstanding team. I walked in the same shoes as Bill in building our company. Our transaction is triple accreted and both sets of shareholders will be accreting the benefits of the merger on day one, not some BS on back, but from day one. I just want to talk a little bit about the past and what's happened to bank values and bank stocks. In 1998, We sold our bank for 22.5 times projected earnings and 4.11 times book. It was a really good bank doing an ROA of 150 plus, but not as strong as home runs today, but really a good bank. What's happened to the value of bank stocks? I understand that was the days of pooling, and now we're on tangible book, but it trades at about 10 times earnings. Where did the money go? Bank stocks have been about cut in half. We have allowed people to self-inflict the damage to ourselves and our industry, not just once, but over and over and over again by dilution, dilution, dilution. We have already run nearly all of the generalists completely out of the bank space. Donna and I were recently at a major bank conference and a young, sharp female analyst from a well-known national company said, I can't get a single PM, portfolio manager is what she was referring to, of my company to even look at a bond. She said, including your bank, Johnny, as good as y'all are, they say no banks, period. So what has created that? What has led to the fact that generalists want nothing to do with a bank space? I think it's an attitude. I think it's because banks have done bad deals that management and boards of directors allow, both in the purchase of long-term low-rate securities, that cost shareholders hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, plus management teams paying too much on acquisitions and deluding their shareholders into oblivion. We're forcing the good long-term investors completely out of the space. We were told that a three or four-year earn-back to tangible growth was acceptable to the investors. That could not be farther from the truth. It should never have been done, and it should never be done again. When does the poor shareholder ever get back to at least even? Add that to poor operating performances of many of the companies, coupled with a three to four year diluted deals and hedge funds that will trade you over two bits. We have inflicted the pain into the entire industry. Look at what bank stocks have done over the past decade. Some dividends are the same and some are the same price they were 10 years ago. That's pretty sad. Look at bank stocks when you look at one. If you think about selling, look at the bank stocks and see what their history is for the last five or 10 years. I know you don't want to hear the facts, but it is what it is. All while the larger banks are performing much better than the small caps and mid-cap banks. Banks wanting to grow through acquisitions whose bank stock multiple trades below the multiple they're paying for the bank they are acquiring are almost always setting themselves up for dilution. Instead of buying, They need to improve their performance and buy back their own stock. Why would a bank trade at 1.3 a book, pay two times a book? Again, they would be better in most instances to buy back their own stock and improve their performance rather than diluting themselves with a deal that obviously does not work from the start. The math is not complicated. They either work or they don't work, and most don't. Home has never intentionally done a diluted deal. Our happy bank transaction did not perform as well early as we expected, but it was certainly not because the math in the deal did not work. It was circumstances beyond our control. But it's much better today, and the bad is mostly behind us. The industry's poor performance opened the door to invite HOCO into our world. If you think that's a bad deal, we have no one to blame except ourselves. It is a good wake-up call for every one of us to recognize the insanity of what we are doing to our shareholders, our industry, and our future. The shareholder is who we work for. They are our owners. I've watched banks dilute them into infinity because they did not know what they were doing. They will never give you an earn-back report. When's the last time someone sent you an earn-back report on the M&A deals over the years? They don't because they can't. simply because they don't work as intended. The CEO gets a bigger salary because he now runs a much bigger bank, so his salary goes up and the shareholder gets screwed one more time. I've labeled this shareholder abuse. We have to clean up our act, or we will continue to lose the investment community, and they will leave the bank space. It took us a while to screw it up, and it'll take a while to turn it back around. But we need to start today and save our future and realize who our bosses are and who we work for. No more dilution from this point. I know I've made a lot of poor performers unhappy and a lot of serial diluters very unhappy by telling the truth. But remember, it's not your money or you would not dilute your shareholder because you'd be diluting yourself. That's why I like founders and owner-operators. They are the best partners in the bank space. The CEO of a bank. should only make more money when he's responsible for increasing the EPS of the bond and make the shareholders a higher solid EPS increase. Including dividends, home was up 68% over the last five years. Maybe not the best, but certainly a contender. It appears the stars are lining up in this Trump-led economy, and we don't need to miss this opportunity. Mike's had a foot on the throat by the past administration and that foot has been removed by president Trump's administration. I'm speaking out as a large shareholder and an owner operator with the majority of my network tied up in this company. We care about performance and we know who we work for. And my entire executive team is vested in the stock. The same as I am. This is not our job. It's our future. We try to distinguish ourselves from the pack by being one of the 10 or 12 best-performing banks in the country. But at the end of the day, the investors see us as a bank. They paint us with the same brush during all four quarters of 2025. After removing the credit card companies, the auto finance companies, home was first, second, or third of all banks over $10 billion in ROA, sporting a 2.05 for the entire year. In spite of all the craziness in the bank space, home has had a record year because we did not make those ridiculous, stupid mistakes because it's our money and our future. Donna, I think I have probably said enough and made enough people mad today, but it is what it is. Back to you.