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Bank7 Corp.
1/29/2024
All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. Before we get started, I'd like to highlight the legal information and disclaimer on page 24 of the investor presentation. For those who do not have access to the presentation, management is going to discuss certain topics that contain forward-looking information which is based on management's beliefs as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to management. Although management believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, they can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Such statements are subject to certain risks, uncertainty, and assumptions, including, among other things, the direct and indirect effect of economic conditions on interest rates, credit quality, loan demand, liquidity, and monetary and supervisory policies of banking regulators. Should one or more of these risks materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, Actual results may vary materially from those expected. Also, please note that this conference call contains references to non-GAAP financial measures. You can find reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP financial measures in an 8K that was filed this morning by the company. Representing the company on today's call, we have Brad Haines, Chairman. Tom Travis, Vice Chairman and CEO. J.T. Phillips, Chief Operating Officer. Jason Estes, Chief Credit Officer. Kelly Harris, Chief Financial Officer. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Tom Travis. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's a beautiful day here in Oklahoma City. To those of you that are around the country, we've had a cold spell of weather that it's nice to be over with. As you can see, we had signaled in our last earnings call back in late October that we had subsequent events post the third quarter closing that were going to significantly affect the fourth quarter numbers. And as you can see, that in fact did happen. And so I suppose that it reminds me of a comment I've heard before, and I think everyone on the call has heard before, and that is except for the one event, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? And not to be morbid, but that's pretty much how we view our company today, because when you look at the totality of the fundamentals of the company for the year, but for that one event, it was a phenomenal year. And when you evaluate what we say is a phenomenal year, even with the large charge related to the one credit, we're still at almost 19.5% return on tangible common equity. Actually, that's average tangible common equity. And we did some analytics about three weeks ago, and we used the first nine months of the year And about 90% of the banks in the country did not make 19.5% return on average tangible common equity. So as you can see, and as we mentioned in the last earnings call, in a perverse way, the strength of the company is highlighted by the fact that we took this significantly one-off, out-of-character negative event and just kept right on moving forward. And so that's the way we view it. And we take comfort in that. If you look at the other components of the company and not just the earnings and the return on equity, you can see that the company's done an excellent job of managing its net interest margin. The historical averages of the net interest margin are pretty much where we are today. And we did that through a pretty difficult rate environment. But not for that one credit. The credit metrics are really strong and even better than they had been for the prior year or two. And so we feel really good about the book. The interest of the operating expenses for the company are very much intact as far as maintaining our efficiency ratio. The one comment I would make is that the company, as a part of that one credit, we acquired a couple of handfuls of oil and gas wells. We did not acquire a company. We acquired specific working interest in oil and gas wells. And as a result of that, you'll see a slightly inflated non-interest income number. You'll also see a slightly inflated non-interest expense number. And so if you remove those two items out of the income statement, you would have seen that the efficiency ratio would still be in that 33% to 34% range instead of a 39% range. And so when we look at the fundamentals of the company, we feel really good about it. I would say that with regard to the one particular one-off credit, we are in the seventh or eighth inning of the bankruptcy process and litigation. We have real strong clarity and good optics into where we think it's going to end up. We feel good about the amount of money that's been either expensed or set aside relative to some certainty. Clearly, we don't feel good about having to do it. However, we are confident that we've accounted for what we need to account for And with regard to that credit, with regard to the bankruptcy, with regard to the litigation, we're a very transparent company. We always answer every question we can. However, we cannot really speak much to it. And we need to be respectful of the fact that details and specifics are in the public realm here today. And so we're not really going to comment much beyond what's been said today. other than we feel like we've accounted for it properly. And so with all that being said, we feel really good about our company and we're excited to move forward into this new year. And with that, we'll open it up for questions.
We will now begin the question and answer session.
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