Equity Bancshares, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by and welcome to the Q1 2021 Equity Bank Shares earnings call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star then 0. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Chris Navzarell. You may begin.

Good morning and thank you for joining Equity Bank Shares conference call, which will include discussion and presentation of our first quarter 2021 results. Presentation slides to accompany our call are available via PDF for download at investor.equitybank.com by clicking the presentation tab. You may also click the event icon for today's call posted at investor.equitybank.com to view the webcast player. If you are viewing this call on our webcast player, please note that slides will not automatically advance. Please reference slide one, including important information regarding forward-looking statements. From time to time, we may make forward-looking statements within today's call, and actual results may vary. Following the presentation, we will allow time for questions and further discussion. Thank you all for joining us. With that, I'd like to turn it over to our chairman and CEO, Brad Elliott.

Thank you, Chris, and good morning. Thank you for joining our call and your interest in equity bank shares. Joining me is Eric Newell, our CFO. Greg Cossover, our Chief Operating Officer, and our President, Craig Anderson. Coming into the new year, we remained focused, as always, on driving value for our customers, employees, and communities to enhance shareholder value. When we've been able to do this through prudent capital management, We are maintaining high credit quality standards while swimming upstream against less prudent competition. We're in the position of being a trusted advisor and experts to our customers. And I believe we have anchored that status even more so this year. We used our internal resources to improve and automate the PPP program, which was previously manual. and have dovetailed this into our processes today. This is what entrepreneurship is all about. We created positive operating leverage, allowing us to accept a larger number of applications without adding burden to our staff. Through last Friday, we have added 3,815 applications approved by the SBA, totaling $261 million of loans. When the national banks said they were done accepting applications, we announced through our social media distribution channels that we remained open and accepting applications. This has been a windfall of applications, but also has allowed us to now attract a greater number of these customers to our banking franchise. I am proud of the team's efforts in making this yet another successful product offering. Through our work as an advisor and expert to our existing and new customers, we have deepened our relationships with them, building value for our customers and in turn for our shareholders. Last night, we reported a big earnings quarter. Eric will go into more specifics, including how the results were positively influenced by many operating factors, increased fee income, and reversing of reserves for anticipated credit losses. We have focused the last year as an operating team on increasing efficiencies, growing our customer base, and attracting fee-based customers. We have done this through treasury management products, our commercial credit card, and our wealth management line, along with all of our core businesses. Julie Huber, Galen McGregor, and Glen Malan have done a great job with these initiatives. Our leaders are focused on growing customer relationships Our western Missouri market has excelled on growing all aspects of their business under Josh Means and Mark Parman has done a great job of leading our metro markets. We remain diligent through our credit management to quickly identify any issues that may pop up in our portfolio and work with our customers to resolve. rather than wait until we are forced into difficult workout situations. To date, our process has worked, as the number of credits and dollars coming into our non-performing assets remains very low. We understand there is lots of stimulus in the economy now, and it may be masking credit issues. But our teams are looking for those situations and working to get ahead of them with our customers. Our tangible book value per share was modestly impacted by the CECL adoption this quarter as we signaled earlier. We expect to continue growing book value as always. We remain committed to our organic and inquisitive growth efforts. This quarter we experienced non-PPP growth and our pipeline remained robust. Craig Anderson has worked at putting in place strong regional teams in each of our metro and community regions that sets us up nicely for continued organic growth. Merger activity in our footprint has picked up, and we have had several conversations with companies over the last several months. Equity is ready and willing to act as a partner to banks that fit and complement our organization. We have a set of specific financial requirements for potential merger transactions, and we will not stray away from those to ensure that our excellent merger track record continues. We will stay true to our requirements on earn back, cultural fit, and geographic strategic fit. I recently traveled to all the markets and I'm excited about what we have already achieved in 2021 and believe we are going to have a very robust year. While the operating environment is not easy, this is where our team can shine and show our customers our value proposition. Eric, let's take everyone through the quarter. Thank you, Brad, and good morning.