Business First Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:BFST) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call January 26, 2023 10:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Matthew Sealy - SVP, SVP, Director of Corporate Strategy and FP&A
Jude Melville - President and CEO
Gregory Robertson - CFO
Philip Jordan - Chief Banking Officer
Conference Call Participants
Feddie Strickland - Janney Montgomery Scott
Graham Dick - Piper Sandler
Operator
Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Business First Bancshares Q4 2022 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]
It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Matthew Sealy, SVP, Director of Corporate Strategy and FP&A. Mr. Sealy, please go ahead.
Matthew Sealy
Thank you. Good morning, thank you all for joining. Yesterday afternoon, we issued our fourth quarter 2022 earnings press release, a copy of which is available on our website, along with the slide presentation that we will refer to during today's call.
Please refer to Slide 3 of our presentation, which includes our safe harbor statements regarding forward-looking statements, and use of non-GAAP financial measures. For those of you joining by phone, please note the slide presentation is available on our website at www.b1bank.com. Please also note that our safe harbor statements are available on Page 7 of our earnings press release that we have filed with the SEC yesterday. All comments made during today's call are subject to the safe harbor statements in our slide presentation and earnings release.
I'm joined this morning by Business First Bancshares President and CEO, Jude Melville, Chief Financial Officer, Greg Robertson and Chief Banking Officer, Philip Jordan. After the presentation, we'll be happy to address any questions you may have.
And with that, I’ll turn the call over to you Jude.
Jude Melville
Allright, thanks Matt. And thanks everybody for joining us this morning. We know you have choices about where to be, and we appreciate you deciding to prioritize being here with us. We'll, I'll keep the remarks kind of brief. So we can jump into questions, I do want to go over some of the notable trends from the quarter and then some four year highlights. And then we'll get into the Q&A.
Fourth quarter, successful fourth quarter we were pleased with, with where we ended the year of non-GAAP core net income of $16.4 and $0.66 per share available to common holders better than we expected and for good positive reasons. Primarily, primarily, we continue to have good strong loan growth and almost 16% annualized, and one of the things that I was excited about was to see if that was diversified. We had it across our regions. And then also a good balance between commercial and CRE credits as well.