South Plains Financial, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to South Plains Financial, Inc. First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be open for questions with instructions to follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Steve Crockett, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of South Plains Financial. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining our earnings conference call. With me here today are Curtis Griffith, our chairman and chief executive officer, Corey Newsom, our president, and Brent Bates, our chief credit officer. The related earnings press release and earnings presentation are available on the news and events section of our website, spfi.bank. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements and are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated future results. Please see our safe harbor statements in our earnings press release and in our earnings presentation. All comments made during today's call are subject to those safe harbor statements. Any forward-looking statements presented herein are made only as of today's date. and we do not undertake any duty to update such forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Additionally, during today's call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP measures, which we believe are useful in evaluating our performance. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures can also be found in our earnings release and in the earnings presentation. Curtis, let me hand it over to you.

Thank you, Steve, and good afternoon. On today's call, I will briefly review the highlights of our first quarter 2024 results, as well as spend some time on our business philosophy and initiatives to become our customers' primary banking relationship. Corey will discuss our loan portfolio as well as our initiatives to drive growth across the bank. Steve will then conclude with a more detailed review of our first quarter financial results. Starting on slide four of our earnings presentation, I'm pleased with our first quarter results, as we've started to see our net interest margins stabilize, driven by improved loan yields, including interest recoveries, combined with a slowing of the rate of deposit cost increases. Our loan production was strong through the first quarter, though it was largely offset by our typical seasonal agricultural pay downs, as well as the early payoffs of several loans that we've been working to move out of the bank. We continue to aggressively manage the credit quality of our loan portfolio as evidenced by our ratio of non-performing assets to total assets, which was only 10 basis points at the end of the first quarter. Additionally, our classified loans remain near the lowest level since the start of the pandemic. Lastly, while competition for deposits remains a challenge in the current banking environment, we delivered modest deposit growth as our community-based deposit franchise remains a competitive advantage and we believe provides adequate liquidity to fund loan growth as we move through the year. I am proud of our results, which are a testament to our employees, our culture, and how we do business. On these calls, we often discuss our focus on relationships, that we're looking for long-term customer relationships and not transactions. What we've not spent time talking about on our calls is the purpose behind that as well as our mission statement and values. At South Plains, our core purpose is to use the power of relationships to help people succeed and live better. For our customers, that means providing personalized advice and solutions to help them achieve their goals. Over the years, we've invested in our product and people to ensure that we can do this better than our peers. As a result, I believe that we can achieve significant organic growth over time by leveraging what we have in place today while also taking advantage of the dislocation that is occurring across our markets. This dislocation is creating customer dissatisfaction, which is providing our bankers with the opportunity to move relationships to South Plains. To further take advantage of this dislocation, we've been recruiting experienced treasury management executives to meet the customer demand that we see across our markets. We have also been refining our go-to-market strategy by focusing more on our customers' needs and challenges. By taking a solutions-based sales approach, we are first identifying our customers' needs and then providing the right product to meet those needs. That positions us to win their business and become their primary bank. We've already started to see the early signs of success as this approach is resonating with our customers. Additionally, we significantly exceed the minimum regulatory levels necessary for the company to be deemed well-capitalized, and we are focused on both growing the bank while also returning a steady stream of income to our shareholders through our quarterly dividend. This past week, our Board of Directors authorized a 14 cents per share quarterly dividend, which is an 8% increase over our prior dividend levels. This will be our 20th consecutive quarterly dividend, to be paid on May 13, 2024, for shareholders of record on April 29, 2024. Our Board of Directors also authorized a $10 million stock repurchase program in February, given our belief that our shares continue to trade at a discount to intrinsic value. Now, let me turn the call over to Corey.