Ameris Bancorp

Good day and welcome to the Ameris Bancorp first quarter 2020 financial results conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone at any time. To withdraw your question, Please note, today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Nicole Stokes, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you, Eric. And thank you to all who have joined our call today. During the call, we will be referencing the press release and the financial highlights that are available on the investor relations section of our website at amerisbank.com. I'm joined today by Palmer Proctor, our CEO, and John Edwards, our Chief Credit Officer. Palmer will begin with some opening general comments, and then I will discuss the details of our financial results before we open it up for Q&A. But before we begin, I'll remind you that our comments may include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risk and uncertainty. The actual results could vary materially. We list some of the factors that might cause results to differ in our press release and in our SEC filings, which are available on our website. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, early developments, or otherwise, except as required by law. Also during the call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures in reference to the company's performance. You can see our reconciliation of these measures and GAAP financial measures in the appendix to our presentation. And with that, I'll turn it over to Palmer for open comments.

Thank you, Nicole, and thank you to everyone who's joined our call today. Obviously, today's discussion is going to be a little bit different than prior quarters because these are unusual times and things are changing daily. As I said in the press release in the first quarter, this has been unprecedented this quarter given that we've had COVID, we've had CECL, the Fed cuts, and the stimulus package. But I wanted to start off by talking about COVID-19 and first and foremost thanking our frontline and all our teammates for their Herculean efforts to accommodate our customers and our communities. Certainly our investment in technology that we've made over the years has served us well. We've got about 75% of our teammates working remotely and more importantly they're working effectively including our call center in this environment. All of our drive-thru locations are open and we've been able to perform business through the drive-thru and our branch lobbies are obviously closed except for appointment only. I am pleased to say that we've experienced about a 23% increase in the growth of our number of mobile banking customers since the beginning of the pandemic and we've seen a lot of strong increases in the number of remote deposits taken through the mobile banking app as you would expect. We continue to see people opening up checking accounts via our online portal and then also using our drive-through facilities. And we believe that these are some of the positive impacts, quite frankly, that the pandemic may have created for us in terms of a future outlook, primarily in migrating a lot of the late adopters and holdouts of digital banking. So we are pleased with that. I'd say I'll just emphasize that through the pandemic, we continue to serve our customers and our communities. Beginning on March 11th, we enacted our DR program, which allows borrowers impacted by the COVID-19 the opportunity to extend their payments for 90 days. And this, quite frankly, is the same program we enacted after the hurricanes, more specifically Irma and Michael. So we've treated these extensions similar to those which adhere to the public's regulatory guidance. As of April the 15th, we provided payment relief to almost 5,400 customers, totaling $2.2 billion of outstanding loans across all types and all markets. This equates to about 17% of total loans as referenced on the slide deck on page 15 of the presentation. In addition, we've been an active participant in the Paycheck Protection Program. The amount of work that all the participating banks, quite frankly, have done to serve their customers during this time has been amazing. I've heard from many of the CEOs talking about how much time and energy it took to get this program up and going, and I certainly echo those statements. But if you ever want to see a team come together, this is a perfect example of that. We were successful during the first round, having about 3,200 loans approved for a total of $685 million. and then we expect to do about the same number of units during the second round and hopefully the President will sign that around lunchtime today and we'll get started on that. But as it pertains to capital, we have suspended our stock buyback program. We did purchase approximately $7 million earlier in the quarter before we suspended the program but our focus remains on capital preservation and growing tangible book value as we look forward. As it pertains to dividends, we are obviously very comfortable with where we are today, but we'll continue to monitor that with the economy and the environment. Please say John Edwards, our Chief Credit Officer, is with us today. He's available to take any questions after our prepared remarks, but I did want to hit a few main points in terms of credit before I turn it back over to Nicole for the financial performance. Our annualized net charge-off ratio was 14 basis points of total loans. are non-performing assets as a percentage of total assets increased slightly to 61 basis points, and that compares to 56 basis points last quarter. We have no exposure to oil and gas, and we've included additional details on our hotel and restaurant exposure in the slide deck of our investor presentation, as well as kind of showing you the diversification across all the loan types within our portfolio. I'll stop there and turn it over to Nicole now to discuss our financial results.