Great Southern Bancorp, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Great Southern Bancorp, Inc. Third Quarter 2019 Earning Conference 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 will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Kelly Polonis. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Valerie. Good afternoon and welcome. This is Kelly Polonis with Investor Relations for Great Southern Bancorp. The purpose of our call today is to discuss the company's results for the quarter ending September 30th, 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 future 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 the forward-looking statements disclosure in our third quarter 2019 earnings release. 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.

All right. Thanks, Kelly, and good afternoon to everyone who's on the call. I want to thank you for joining us for our third quarter earnings call. As usual, I'll provide some introductory remarks, some high-level remarks, and then Rex, turn it over to Rex to talk a little bit more in detail about the income statement. Overall, our third quarter results were very good. Hopefully, you've had a chance to read the earnings release, and if you have, you've seen that we earned $1.38 a share, or $19.7 million. We saw good loan growth during the quarter, and we further improved our operational efficiency. While net income dollars did grow, we experienced some net interest margin compression during the quarter, and Rex will provide some color around that. Our performance metrics were all strong. Return on common equity, 13.46%. Return on assets, 161. Net interest margin was 395. I think 375 core and our efficiency ratio was 52.63%. Loan production during the third quarter was pretty solid. We had growth both in outstanding loans and our pipeline during the quarter both when compared to the end of the year and when compared to the linked quarter. The increase in our outstanding loans was primarily due to increases in commercial real estate, owner-occupied one-to-four family and multifamily loans. That was partially offset by decreases in the consumer auto loan portfolio, which we've talked to you guys about before. We do continue to believe that the market's flowing. We've seen lower deal flow, I think, and Typically, when rates start reducing, it's as a result of the economy slowing, and maybe lenders are getting scared, so you'll see increased credit spreads. Right now, we're seeing decreasing credit spreads, higher levels of competition for lower deal flow. I think it's a challenging environment from a loan growth perspective. You don't really see that coming through in our pipeline. Our pipeline is still strong, but I think maybe looking further out, the loan business does seem to be slowing from a production standpoint. Asset quality is probably as good as it's ever been at our bank, so that's certainly a positive thing. are classified assets to capital and reserves are 3%. And as I said, that's as good as it's ever been at our bank. We looked at a slide yesterday in our board meeting that compared, looked at that number over a long period of time. And even in other very benign credit environments, we've never been as low as we are now. Capital continues to be very strong. We've grown our capital. Since the end of the year, since the end of the second quarter, our tangible common equity to tangible assets is at 11.9% at the end of the third quarter. Our book value per share is almost $42. And we were pleased to increase our dividend during the third quarter to $0.34 a share. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Rex Copeland, our CFO.