Primis Financial Corp.

Good day and welcome to the Primus Financial Corporation first quarter earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal conference specialists 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 touchtone phone. And to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Matt Switzer, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Primus Financial Corp's 2022 first quarter webcast and conference call. Before we begin, please note that many of our comments during this call will be forward-looking statements which involve risk and uncertainty. There are many factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the anticipated results or other expectations expressed in the forward-looking statements. Factors include but are not limited to our ability to implement various strategic and growth initiatives, competitive pressures, economic and political conditions, interest rate fluctuations, regulatory changes, asset values, and other factors discussed in our recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our recently filed earnings release, which has been posted to the investor relations section of our corporate site, www.premisebank.com. We undertake no obligation and specifically disclaim any obligation to update or revise forward-looking statements to reflect change assumptions, the occurrence of unanticipated events, or changes to future operating results over time. In addition, some of the financial measures that we may discuss this morning are non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release. I will now turn the call over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Dennis Ember.

Thank you, Matt, and thank you to each of you that have dialed in this morning or later choose to listen to this on the replay. I'm very grateful for your interest in our company and what we're going to discuss today. There are several things I'd like to highlight today in our announcement and in our press release. The first is our mortgage announcement. We have not been too coy over the last couple years about the fact that we want to add a mortgage solution to our company to help boost operating returns and earnings growth. C-Trust was a great option for us for several reasons. Most importantly, the purchase price is small. The intangible associated with this is really almost negligible. The company, C-Trust, is operating at better than break-even with just $25 million of monthly volume, and their recruiting pipeline promises that we'll be able to ramp that production to the levels that we need. Our short-term goal with C-Trust, renamed Premise Mortgage, is to build production to a level that we can expect about a billion to a billion to in 2023, which we expect would add 20 basis points to our return on assets and about 25 cents to earnings per share. Secondly, we've had very strong growth in loans in the first quarter, which is normally a slow quarter for us. One of our bank's biggest overhangs over the last few years has been really slow to no growth in the balance sheet. And I believe we're just another quarter or two from putting that behind us for good. We've issued pretty strong guidance for what we expect on loan growth this year. And given the kind of start we had and our pipelines and momentum, I feel very good that we're going to impress our investors with what we accomplished this year and we're going to redefine ourselves as a growth company. Our growth in loans was across the board. Our lines of business are complementing the core bank very well. Panacea has built a real brand that is producing good deal flow and growth at the pace that we need to hit our targets. Right now we're tracking towards about a thousand doctor applications a month from all 50 states that we expect sometime in 2022. And with our new mortgage solution, I believe that's a real possibility. Most importantly, Panacea has turned profitable. even with the build in staff and marketing costs, and I think 2022 is going to end up being a great year for this division. The Life Premium Finance Group is just as impressive. They've onboarded dozens of insurance carriers and just as many top-tier brokers and agencies. Our turn times are hovering around 20 days with systems that are technology-oriented and digital. At the end of the quarter, we saw weekly applications more than triple what they were at the beginning of the quarter. And so we're expecting a really big second quarter and a strong second half of the year, really when the majority of insurance premium finance occurs. We're so close to being live to the public with our digital bank. And because of that, we've ramped up our efforts at finding ways to leverage that platform. Obviously, we intend to market the solution in our existing markets and more broadly. But the faster approach that we are chasing is to find other fintechs and financial concepts that need a progressive banking solution for their customers. We've got several of these concepts on the hook, and using our panacea blueprint, we believe we can be up and going quickly for these firms and then profitable for our shareholders very fast. We hope to have some good news on this soon, maybe by the end of the quarter. Lastly, a quick comment about our results before I turn it over to Matt about our operating ratios. I see our ROA and I see our efficiency ratio, and the only thing that keeps me cool and calm when I'm in Matt's office is knowing what we're building. The fact is we're a $3 billion bank. We're not $30 billion. At our size, anything more than a new branch in an obscure location in some tertiary market is going to be a noticeable drag on earnings. Our stock price just won't allow us to buy our way into profitability and EPS growth, so instead we've built some very impressive growth engines on our own. I fully expect that as we move forward, both of these lines of business and anything else we do is going to contribute significantly to earnings. And at maturity, these two lines of business should be operating in the high 30s, low 40s on efficiency ratios, and contributing about 50 cents per share annually to earnings. Of course, both of these lines of business produce superior asset classes that will change our credit risk profile materially. So I'm energized about what we're building and the future impact it should have on earnings and operating ratios. So with that, I'll turn it over to Matt for a discussion on our results.