Great Southern Bancorp, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Great Southern Bancorp, Inc. First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. To withdraw the question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Kelly Polonis from Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Carmen. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2023 earnings call. This is Kelly Polonis, Investor Relations for Great Southern. The purpose of this call is to discuss the company's results for the quarter ending March 31, 2023. 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. 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 first quarter earnings release or other public filings. President and CEO Joe Turner and Chief Financial Officer Rex Copeland are on the call with me. I'll now turn the meeting over to Joe.

All right. Thanks, Kelly. We appreciate everybody joining us today for our first quarter earnings call. Hopefully you've had a chance to review our earnings release, and if you did, you saw that we had a very solid quarter through a pretty tumultuous time in the banking industry, especially during the last month of the quarter. The bank failures that occurred on the east and west coast created lots of turmoil and understandably focused attention on certain operational situations at the banks that failed and others as well. During the intense media focus on these failures, we, our operating conditions here at Great Southern were very stable. And we believe that's true of most of the other banks in our market areas as well. The strength of our company's deposit base was underscored in terms of diversification by customer type and geography and the low level of uninsured deposits we have, which is currently about 14% of total deposits. From February 28, 2023 to March 31, 2023, our total deposits increased by nearly $75 million, primarily in retail time deposits and interest-bearing checking accounts. Rex will provide more detail on deposits as well as liquidity during his presentation. During the first quarter, we remained focused on taking care of our customers and worked diligently to fight the many headwinds of the current economic climate. I'm proud of the Great Southern team and appreciate their efforts, which resulted in our first quarter. It resulted in us earning $20.5 million during the first quarter, $1.67 per common share, compared to $17 million or $1.30 in the year-ago quarter. We did have one significant item, expense item in the quarter, the expenses related to our conversion to the FISER system. Our earnings performance ratios in the first quarter were, again, very strong with return on assets of 143 and return on equity of 1488. Our net interest income and net interest margin increased by $9.9 million to 53.2 and increased by 56 basis points over the year-ago quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2022, our margin was $54.6 million with a percentage margin of 3.99%. The two fewer calendar days in the first quarter really contributed to the reduction from the fourth quarter number. During the first quarter, new loan production and general activity was down compared to the 2022 quarter. Our net loans did increase by $62.5 million or 1.4%. Our pipeline of loan commitments decreased by $111 million, but still was pretty strong at $1.3 billion. For more information about our loan portfolio, I'll remind you of our quarterly loan portfolio presentation that was filed last night. and it's available on our investor relations site. We understand that there's a lot of industry or a lot of concern about the office sector right now, and so we did want to talk about our office sector just very briefly. For our company, the office sector represents about 5% of our total outstanding loan portfolio and about 15% of the CRE book, about 140 loans. Geographically, more than half of the portfolio is in Missouri, primarily in St. Louis and Springfield. Most of the remaining loans are in other places in our franchise footprint. The average rentable square footage is 47,500 square feet, and the median is 7,200 square feet. As of March, all the loans in our office portfolio were performing, supported by strong equity and strong guarantors. Our credit quality remains excellent or remained excellent during the first quarter. At March 31, 2023, our non-performing assets were $3 million or 0.05% of assets, and other loan delinquencies were at historically low levels as well. Our capital position remains extremely strong, and we continue to be substantially above regulatory well-capitalized thresholds. Our tangible common equity ratio was 9.5% at the end of the first quarter, which was an increase from 9.2% at the end of 2022. We will continue to judiciously manage our capital levels in light of the changing operating and economic circumstances. Our total stockholders' equity increased $22.4 million in the first quarter, with retained earnings increasing $10 million and our AOCI improving by almost $12 million. At March 31, 2023, our AOCI loss was about 6.9% of our total gross stockholders' equity. If the held to maturity unrealized losses were also included in stockholders' equity net of taxes, it would have decreased stockholders' equity by another $15.5 million. This amount was about 2.8% of our total stockholders' equity as of the end of the first quarter. In the first quarter, we declared a $0.40 per share dividend. In addition, in our effort to enhance long-term shareholder value, the company continued to repurchase shares of our common stock during the first quarter, buying back almost 100,000 shares at an average price of $55.70. At March 31, 2023, about 1.1 million shares remain available in our stock repurchase authorization. The combined stock repurchases and dividends reduce stockholders' equity by $10.5 million. That concludes my prepared remarks. Now I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Rex Copeland.