Veritex Holdings, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Veritex Holdings Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Please note this event is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Ms. Susan Cuddle, Investor Relations Officer and Secretary to the Board of Veritex Holdings.

Thank you. Before we get started, I would like to remind you that this presentation may include forward-looking statements, and those statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual and anticipated results to differ. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly revise any forward-looking statements. At this time, if you're logged into our webcast, please refer to our slide presentation including our safe harbor statement beginning on slide two. For those of you joining us by phone, please note that the safe harbor statement and presentation are available on our website, veritexbank.com. All comments made during today's call are subject to that safe harbor statement. Some of the financial metrics discussed will be on a non-GAAP basis, which our management believes better reflects the underlying core operating performance of the business. Please see the reconciliation of all discussed non-GAAP measures in our filed 8K earnings release. Joining me today are Malcolm Holland, our chairman and CEO, Terry Early, our chief financial officer, and Clay Reby, our chief credit officer. I will now turn the call over to Malcolm.

Good morning, everyone. It's been a very busy quarter for our team, which produced some very favorable results. For the quarter, we produced operating earnings of $0.70 a share, up from $0.60 the previous quarter, a 17% increase, while producing a pre-tax, pre-provision return of 1.85%. The third quarter was transformational for our company. We closed our 49% investment into Thrive Mortgage and realized a full quarter of our investment. We also announced our acquisition of North Avenue Capital, the nation's largest producer of USDA loans. We're scheduled to close this transaction next week on November 1st. Both of these opportunities led meaningfully to our non-interest income moving forward. Our loan growth continues to perform at a brisk pace. For the quarter, loans net of PPP and mortgage warehouse grew $344 million, or 22% annualized. This is the second straight quarter we have exceeded 20% loan growth. For the first nine months of the year, we are growing at 17%. If you peel back the onion a bit and really analyze our pipelines, it is clear that our investments in loan talent over the past 18 months are starting to produce the results that we had hoped for. But our timing on funding, closings, and payoffs have worked in our favor the last two quarters. As we look forward, we don't see loan growth continuing at these last two quarter levels. but still feel confident that our annual loan growth should hover in the low double digits for the remainder of 21 and also for 22. I'd like to speak a bit on the focused hiring we have done for the last 18 months. These new additions are a big part of our current growth and why we are so bullish on the future. Just this quarter, we added an additional 11 FTEs to our production teams and 25 year over year. These totals do not include the non-client-facing hires we've made in our operations, data analytics, credit, and risk areas, which candidly are best in class. The market disruption in several M&A deals in our state and the fact that prospective employees in our markets are taking note of our culture and growth profile are prompting these hiring opportunities. Our deposit growth continued during Q3, growing at just over 11% annualized, or $200 million. We continue to drive down our cost of total deposits, now at 20 bps, down from 23 in Q2. We are probably at the bottom right here. Credit quality continues its positive trend as we move further and further away from the pandemic crisis in our markets. NPAs decreased for the fourth quarter in a row and now sit at 0.77% of total assets, down 8 bps from the previous quarter. and over 30 percent year-over-year. We feel this ratio will continue to move down considering the resolutions we are currently working towards. Charge-offs were nine BIPs, all of which were fully accounted for in our reserves. I'll now turn the call over to Terry to discuss our detailed financial results.