Great Southern Bancorp, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Great Southern Bank Corp, Inc. First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in 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 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, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Gigi. Good afternoon and welcome. The purpose of this call is to discuss the company's results for the quarter ending March 31st, 2021. Before we begin, I need to remind you that during 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. Please see our disclosure in our first quarter 2021 earnings release for more information. President and CEO Joe Turner and Chief Financial Officer Rex Copeland are on the call with me today. I'll now turn the call over to Joe.

Thanks, Kelly. Good afternoon, everybody. I also want to thank you for joining us today. I am pleased to report that we began 2021 with strong operating results in the first quarter. As is typical, I'll provide preliminary remarks about the company's performance and then turn it over to our CFO, Rex Copeland, who will go into more detail about our financial results. Hopefully, you've had a chance to at least glance at the earnings release. If you have, you've seen that we earned $18.9 million or $1.36 in the first quarter per share compared to $14.9 million or $1.04 for the same period a year ago. The primary drivers of our earnings increase this year were higher net gains on mortgage loan sales. Of course, that's the result of the very robust mortgage market we're in, lower credit cost provision, and generally well-contained expenses. That was partially offset by slightly lower net interest income that was really almost exclusively driven by lower levels of FDIC accretion income. I think our net interest income was down about $850,000 for the quarter, and our accretion income was down like $1.1 or $1.2 million for the quarter. So that's really the culprit there, but generally a pretty good level of net interest income. And then higher income tax rate, I think just as a result of higher levels of income result generally in a higher income tax rate for us because our tax credits have a lower impact on our ultimate tax expense. Our performance metrics for the quarter were good. Annualized return on common equity was 12.18% and that's return on robust levels of common equity, I think we ended the quarter at 10.8%. Our annualized return on average assets was 138. Our efficiency ratio was 56.33%. During the first quarter, we did adopt CECL, which resulted in an increase in our allowance for loan losses of 11.6 million. We also established an allowance for losses on unfunded commitments of $8.7 million. So essentially $20.3 million of additional allowance that we now have on our balance sheet. That resulted in a $14 million debit to retained earnings net of tax. As far as loans go, since the end of 2020, our loan growth has been relatively flat. We've had good levels of origination, but loan payoffs have been pretty robust as well. So our gross loan portfolio, including our levels of our unfunded loans, decreased by $2.7 million. Our net loans decreased by about $11.1 million. Both of those decreases from the end of 2020. As I said, origination activity continues to be strong. If you look at the pipeline chart and our earnings release, our pipeline continues to be relatively stable at $1.3 billion. A little bit of information about Paycheck Protection, the Paycheck Protection Program. We were pleased to again participate in that. Our loan officers are proud to be helping our commercial customers deal with the effects of the pandemic. In addition to originating second-round loans, we're also knee-deep in forgiveness on the first-round loans, and that's going extremely well. To refresh you, we originate 1,600 loans for $121 million about this time last year during the first round of PPP funding. Currently, we have received full forgiveness on more than 1,100 of those loans, totaling about $66 million, and we have more in the pipeline awaiting SBA approval. I think from our perspective, we would say that the process has gone well, and we've had not a ton of pushback from the SBA on our forgiveness applications. As far as the second round goes, we have received nearly 1,500 applications totaling $55 million. We funded about 1,400 of those applications totaling $53 million. Those have been roughly split 50-50 between customers who participated in the program before and those that were seeking a first draw under the program this time. I would remind you for more information about our loan portfolio, we did file our loan portfolio presentation last night. That should be on our website as well as the SEC's website. Asset quality continues to be extremely strong. At March 31, 2021, excluding FDIC acquired assets, non-performing assets for $6.7 million about a $2.9 million increase from the end of 2020. That's really just two loans, I think, customers that have been around the bank for quite some time, including FDIC-acquired assets, non-performing assets worth $10.9 million, resulting in a percentage of total assets, non-performing assets, the total assets of 0.19%. Our pandemic-related loan modifications dropped to $146 million at the end of March compared to $251 million at the end of December 2020. Of the remaining loan modifications, 19 loans totaling $141 million were commercial, and 93 loans totaling $5 million were in the consumer and mortgage categories. Our capital continues to be very strong. From the end of 2020, it did decrease by about $18 million to $611 million, principally as a result of the additional allowance that I spoke about before, which reduced capital by $14 million, and also the drop in the value of our available for sales securities portfolio. That concludes my prepared remarks. At this time, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Rex Copeland. Rex?