Esquire Financial Holdings, Inc. (ESQ) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello everyone, thank you for joining us and welcome to the Esquire Financial Holdings Q2 2026 Earnings Release Conference Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the conference over to Andrew Sagliocca, CEO, Vice Chairman and President. Andrew, please go ahead. Thank you, Paige. I want to let everyone know on the call that I'm joined in the room with Michael Lacapria, our SVP and Chief Financial Officer, as well as Eric Bader, our EVP and Chief Operating Officer. I'd like to start by thanking everybody and welcoming everybody to the investor call, including our current investors, analysts, board members, and employees. as well as our business partners and signature stakeholders, including their board employees and investors too. As Paige indicated, I'm going to kick off this call with some high-level thoughts and comments, then turn it over to Michael for a financial update, and then we can address any questions that any of the callers have. As highlighted in the earnings release, the signature merger is scheduled to close on August 1, 2026. The Chicago metro market represents one of the top three largest markets in the country, including New York City and Los Angeles, for both population and contingent fee law firms, which is our and many more. As we previously noted, we believe the signature merger will accelerate growth in the Chicago and Midwest markets in the future, where Esquire on a standalone basis currently underserves this very robust metro area. This is primarily because signature has a well-established and well-known Chicago-based management team and brand. And if we couple ...