Great Southern Bancorp, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Great Southern Bancorp First Quarter 2019 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions will be given at that time. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, you may press star, then zero, on your touch-tone phone. As a reminder, this conference may be recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Kelly Polonis of Investor Relations. Please begin. Well, good afternoon and welcome.

This is Kelly Polonis, Investor Relations for Great Southern. The purpose of this call today is to discuss the company's results for the quarter ending March 31, 2019. Before we begin, I need to remind you that during the course of this call, we may make forward-looking statements about future events and financial performance. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date they are made. These statements are subject to a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results anticipated or projected. For a list of some of these factors, please see our earnings release dated the first quarter 2019. President and CEO Joe Turner and Chief Financial Officer Rex Copeland are here with me. I'll now turn the call over to Joe Turner.

Well, thanks, Kelly, and good afternoon to everybody on the call. Thanks for joining us today. As is typical, I'll provide some preliminary remarks and then turn the call over to Rex, who will go into a little bit more detail on the financial statements, particularly the income statement, and then we'll open it up for questions. Hopefully all of you have had a chance to review our earnings release. We're very excited about the results for the quarter, feel very positive about it. Our earnings were $1.23 a share. during the quarter, or $17.6 million. We did highlight a couple of things in the release. One was kind of a non-core unusual item, and then another was just a highlight. With respect to the non-core, non-operating item, we earned 3.6 cents as a result of sale of some assets that we acquired in FDIC acquisitions The assets were difficult to value and probably, and we concluded, were worth zero when we completed the acquisitions. And so we booked them at zero. And then over time, their value did increase. And we were able to sell them during this quarter for $677,000. The second item that we highlighted was a $513,000 increase to interest income. as a result of the balance sheet swap that we entered into in October of 2018. Rex and I have been talking about this. It's a core item. Our loans, in our mind, based on our asset liability analysis, were a little bit shorter than what we would have wanted, and so we used an interest rate swap to synthetically lengthen the duration on those So we may quit separately identifying that. That's just part, we believe, of our core interest income at this point. Our annualized return on equity was 13.12%. Annualized return on asset was 149. And our margin, stated margin, was 406. I think our core margin was 393 net of the extra accretion. Loan portfolio, things continue to be going well there. Our loans grew $61 million. Total growth, that's our funded loans. Our gross loans, which include unfunded amounts on our construction portfolio, were down slightly. But loan production continues to be good, strong, coming from all parts of the company and from all products as well. As we notified you earlier, we did completely exit the indirect business. This concluded that the returns weren't satisfactory in that business for us, and so we would expect our $180 million roughly of indirect portfolio to run off over the next two to four years. We saw, I think, $24 million in pay down on that portfolio in the first quarter. Asset quality, you know, we've said this the last several quarters, we can't imagine it getting much better, but it did actually get just a little bit better in the first quarter with non-performing assets down by $1.5 million. Our capital position continues to be strong. We did deploy some capital. In the first quarter, we bought a little bit of stock. We, you know, had the special dividend of 75 cents and paid our regular dividend as well. And even after all that, our capital ratios ended the first quarter at the same place that they ended the year. So we continue to have very strong capital, which gives us a lot of flexibility to consider additional share repurchases or additional dividends should our board deem that advisable. So at this time, I'll turn the call over to Rex, who will go, as I said, a little more into detail on the income statement, correct?