Great Southern Bancorp, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Great Southern Bancorp, Inc. Fourth Quarter 2021 Conference Call. At this time, our 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'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that this 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 host today, Kelly Polonis of Investor Relations.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. This is Kelly Polonis, Investor Relations for Great Southern Bancorp. The purpose of this call today is to discuss the company's results for the quarter ending December 31, 2021. 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. 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 disclosure in our earnings release and other public filings. President and CEO Joe Turner and Chief Financial Officer Rex Copeland are on the call with me today. We'll get started right now and I'll turn the call over to Joe.

All right. Thanks, Kelly. Good afternoon and thanks to all of you for joining us today. We ended 2021 in a strong financial position and have good momentum as we enter 2022. We're really pleased with our fourth quarter and full year earnings for 2021 and we believe they reflect our Associates ongoing commitment and resilience and taking care of our customers and each other during a challenging time. As is typical, I'll provide some brief remarks about our performance and then turn the call over to Rex who will get into more detail on our financial results. Then we'll open it up for questions. In the fourth quarter of 21, we earned $15.3 million or $1.14 per diluted share compared to $17.8 million or $1.28 a share during the same period in 2020. Hopefully, you've had a chance to look at our news release. We did highlight the fact that we had $5.3 million of unusual expenses, $4.1 million related to money that we paid a consultant who was engaged to assist us in evaluating core and ancillary software systems, and ultimately assisted us in negotiating pricing and contract terms for the contract that was ultimately signed at the end of 2021. The remaining $1.2 million was related to contract termination fee for our current core and ancillary system provider. We have some other significant income statement items that Rex will cover. Earnings performance ratios for the quarter were solid with return on assets of 1.13 and return on equity of 9.74. Obviously, those numbers, if not for those unusual expenses, would have been substantially higher, probably both at least 25% higher. For the year, our loan production activity for the year was quite brisk, but obviously our loan growth was challenged by the significant payoffs we saw during the year. Our multifamily portfolio alone was down $307 million. The loan originations were extremely strong during the year, excluding to-be-sold mortgages or mortgages to be sold in the secondary market. our originations were over $2 billion in 2021, and that is a very strong year of production for us. Our pipeline, and this portends good things for the future, our pipeline of commitments and unfunded loans also is extremely strong at this point. It grew $270 million during the fourth quarter and is up $409 million from the end of 2020. As we've told you on past conference calls, we are actively looking for two to three new loan production offices, and I would just say we believe our efforts are bearing fruit, and hopefully we'll have more to talk about in the coming months on that. As a status update with respect to Paycheck Protection Program, we did Obviously, the first round loans are all fully forgiven. Second round, we did 1,650 loans, $58 million in principal balance, and we have received forgiveness on all but $10 million of those, and we would expect to receive that forgiveness in the first quarter of 2022. With respect to CARES Act modifications, again, We have no remaining modifications to commercial loans, CARES Act modifications to commercial loans. We do have $1.2 million of CARES Act modifications on consumer and mortgage loans. Asset quality continues to be historically strong for us. In 21, we ended the year with $116,000 of net recoveries. And our levels of non-performing assets excluding FDIC assets are at $3.8 million, down $1.4 million from the end of the third quarter, including FDIC assets worth $6 million, which would yield a non-performing asset to period end asset ratio of 0.11%. Capital also continues to be very strong. From the end of 2020, our common stockholders' equity decreased by about $13 million and to $617 million. That was because of our adoption of CECL, the dividends we paid, and also we did repurchase a substantial amount of our common stock during the year. Of course, those decreases were offset by strong earnings during the year. Specifically, on the stock repurchase, We repurchased 266,000 shares of common stock at an average price of $57.72 during the fourth quarter. And for the full year, we repurchased 715,000 shares at an average price of $54.69. We currently have 1.2 million shares available in our stock repurchase authorization. That concludes my prepared remarks. I'll turn the call over to Rex at this time.