Business First Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:BFST) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call October 26, 2023 5:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Matt Sealy - SVP and Director, Corporate Strategy

Jude Melville - President, CEO & Director

Greg Robertson - Executive VP, CFO & Treasurer

Conference Call Participants

Matt Olney - Stephens

Brett Rabatin - Hovde Group

Graham Dick - Piper Sandler

Kevin Fitzsimmons - D.A. Davidson

Feddie Strickland - Janney Montgomery Scott

Michael Rose - Raymond James

Operator

Hello. And welcome to the Business First Bancshares' Q3 2023 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now turn the conference over to Matt Sealy, Senior Vice President, Director of Corporate Strategy and FTNA. Please go ahead.

Matt Sealy

Good afternoon and thank you all for joining. Earlier today, we issued our third quarter 2023 earnings press release, a copy of which is available on our website, along with the slide presentation that we will reference during today's call.

Please refer to Slide 3 of our presentation, which includes our safe harbor disclosures regarding forward-looking statements and the 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 our safe harbor statements are available on Page 7 of our earnings press release that we filed with the SEC today. 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 afternoon by Business First Bancshares’ President and CEO, Jude Melville, Chief Financial Officer, Greg Robertson; Chief Banking Officer, Philip Jordan; and Chief Administrative Officer, Jerry Vascocu. 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

All right, thanks, Matt. And thanks, everybody, for joining us. I know it's a busy time and we certainly appreciate you prioritizing this conversation. During the third quarter, we continue to deliver solid fundamental shareholder or unit operating performance, generating a core ROAA of 1.1% by exercising discipline around expenses and maintaining good margin stability, even as we grew organic deposits. Including in our core operating results for several non-run rate items, which I'll let Greg expand on his section. However, even adjusting for these items, we still tag our run rate EPS, ROAA, and efficiency ratio at $0.67, 1.03%, and 62.4%, respectively.

Our third quarter was highlighted by balance sheet management, which yielded another quarter of solid capital accretion, strong deposit generation, margin stability, expense management, and continued healthy credit quality trends, all of which put us in position to be able to increase our dividend by $0.02 per share for the quarter, something we've been able to do for five years in a row now. I'd like to highlight a couple of specific accomplishments. First, we've been particularly focused over the past few quarters on managing growth within our capital structure, and I'm pleased to report that our results are again accretive to tangible, excuse me, to TRBC to TCE, and TBVPS, even factoring in the headwinds of additional AOCI. But not counting the impact of AOCI, we grew a tangible book value per share, $0.67, annualized rate of 20%.